Once we climbed down out of the bus, we crossed the street to the spice souk. As you can see, the students dressed all in black look very similar, so I made a point of noticing what the handbag of my assigned guide looked like, so I wouldn’t get lost.
The seller was happy to show us his wares. The smell was heavenly. Wish I could capture that digitally for you.
Not all the shops have spices. The wares vary. This is a textile shop with lovely fabric and clothes. From here we proceeded to the gold souk, so that will be in the next post.
Archive for the ‘Dubai’ Category
Dubai Tour 2
November 27, 2009Dubai Tour 1
November 26, 2009Last Monday evening we went on a tour of Dubai that was organized and conducted by some of the college students for the “newbie” staff. Not all the newbies opted to go, so there were openings for others and we jumped at the chance. Our first stop was along the Creek. A crowd of 14 Emirati women and about that many staff members drew a bit of attention. These boatmen were staring at us, so I figured I could take a picture of them. So there!
In The News Again, Again
November 22, 2009Posted by DaddyBird
Our friends at Wild Peeta Fusion Shawarma Restaurant are helping to promote men’s health and fight prostate cancer by participating in the annual “Movember” event. They started a team called “Bu Shanab”, which basically means “the daddy of all mustaches”. They arranged for an interview about the subject with one of the local newspaper, so we went to lend our support. (I’m glad we did, especially since not a lot of other members of the team could make it that evening.)
As usual we had a great time at Wild Peeta with Mohammad and Peyman, the brothers who founded it, and several other friends on the team, all of whom we’ve met through Twitter.
There are other Movember teams and activities going on in Dubai this month, both for raising awareness as well as funds. As the article states, unfortunately there aren’t any men’s health organizations here in the UAE, so the funds raised will have to go to groups that support the cause elsewhere.
Read the article from the Gulf News here:
http://gulfnews.com/news/gulf/uae/general/tache-the-way-to-highlight-causes-1.530166
Find out more about the Movember event here: http://www.movember.com/
Stationery
November 18, 2009
Near our apartment there is a stationery store. There, unfortunately, aren’t any lovely little sets of paper designed for writing letters with matching envelopes. There are however, scads of blank books. This entire aisle is nothing but blank books AND there is another aisle next to it full of blank books. These books seem to be used heavily in schools. I rarely see the loose leaf, three ring binder paper that is used in American schools.
Anyway, these blank books call to me and I want to buy them, but I know that my brain will draw a blank about what to write in them. I am not driven to write and am not a poet. The fact that I’ve written as much as I have on this blog is astonishing, because I have never been a diary keeping type of person or driven to publicize my life.
If only I could buy a blank book and write the great American novel.
Oliver, the Bread Thief
November 18, 2009Posted by DaddyBird
The other day, while out and about in our area of town, Deira, I passed a small bakery. This was an old style bakery that produces large flatbreads, the bakers sitting on top of the tile-covered oven that took up the front room of the bakery and reaching down into the oven through a round hole in the top to place the pads of dough and remove the finished pieces of bread. You can buy large rounds of bread that have literally come ‘straight out of the oven’ right there from the bakers for 1 dirham each. They smell and taste wonderful, of course. (There are few of these bakeries around. I’ll try to do a blog post about them soon.)
I bought several pieces and headed home to include them in that night’s dinner. They were so hot that I thought that they might melt the plastic bag that they were put in before they were handed to me. Even after walking the several blocks back to our apartment the bread was still very warm and fragrant. I set it on the counter while I quickly cooked some mildly spiced chicken to pair with it.
Our cats, Oliver and Bert, lingered in the kitchen while I worked, which was not at all unusual. They like to be close and watch what I’m up to most of the time anyway, but food preparation is even more interesting than average, of course, especially when chicken is involved. So their intense interest in the process was no surprise. A surprise was still in store for me though.
I had turned away from my task for a few moment to do something else, when there was a noise from the cooking area. This wasn’t overly unusual either, as the cats- Oliver in particular- will sometimes try go where they are not allowed if left unsupervised. I turned back just in time to see Oliver making his escape, not with a piece of chicken, but with a whole flatbread dangling from his mouth. He had managed to grab it in the middle so it folded in half, which was lucky for him as it would otherwise have been to large for him to not end up stepping on as he retreated.
He bolted into the other room and promptly dropped the bread on the floor and started tearing off little pieces of it to eat. And to play with as well, of course. Children may be told not to play with their food, but there’s certainly no telling that to a cat with any result. I’m sure that food must taste better to a cat after it’s been properly subdued.
The bread was a bit too soiled by this point to consider repossessing, and the incident was so humorous that I thought Oliver deserved his ill-gotten gain, so I left it to him. Bert seemed to be enjoying it as well, so it was bread for the whole family that night. It was much too large for a cat, or even two, to eat all of, so it remained on object of both play and snacking for the rest of the evening. Later on I got some video of this, which is cute enough to share.
So, even Oliver agrees: that is some great bread!
Just another day in Dubai
November 7, 2009
Just another day in Dubai – a guy pushing a cart down a major thoroughfare and jay walkers to boot. (We had just jay walked ourselves on our way to the wrestling.)
Still alive
October 12, 2009We are still alive. Our home Internet connection has been out of commission. I’m currently at the Middle East International Film Festival, so will post about it soon. Hang in there.
In the news again…
September 17, 2009If you look quickly enough, you can see glimpses of Kanga and I in the linked newscast. We were attending the Dubai Twestival charity event for the Dubai Autism Center the other night. I didn’t realized that there was a television news crew there amongst all the press. Many of the people in the crowd are dear friends of ours here, and they got statements from some especially nice folks. It was a really fun time for a good cause, and another indicator of how blessed we are to get to know so many wonderful people in this city.
Also, earlier in this same newscast is a segment about the newly opened Dubai Metro, featuring an interview with an acquaintance of ours, Peyman Parham, who is Director of Communications for the Regional Transit Authority. It’s worth watching the segment about the Metro, especially for his part.
Peyman and his brother Mohamed are soon to open a new restaurant here called Wild Peeta. We’re really looking forward to it and will have a blog entry on it soon! Mohamed is interviewed about Twitter in the Twestival segment, and that’s one of the parts with a glimpse of us, along with our friend Mali.
There we are lurking in the background, while Mohamed of @wildpeeta explains Twitter.
Peyman Parham discussing the first weekend of the Dubai Metro
The video can be found here:
http://vode.dmi.ae/video/18A2A86DA6/emirates-news-13-9-2009
The segment about the Metro is at the beginning of the newscast, and the segment about the Twestival event starts at a about 13:49 minutes in.
This page has the webcasts of the Dubai 1 nightly news broadcasts, so it’s a good site to check back on if you’re interested in what’s going on here in Dubai.
Metro
September 13, 2009The Red Line of the Dubai Metro opened this last week on 09/09/09. It is not the line that passes in front of our apartment. That line isn’t scheduled to open until March 2010. However, the central station where the two lines intersect is within walking distance of our apartment, so we will take a ride soon and let you know how it is. We were going to do it this last weekend, but everyone else had the same idea (over 110,000 riders in two days) and we had a lot of mundane things like house cleaning, laundry, and grocery shopping to do, so our ride has been delayed.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8245408.stm
http://archive.gulfnews.com/articles/09/09/12/10348257.html
http://www.arabianbusiness.com/567523-110000-ride-dubai-metro-in-the-first-two-days
Voice of Reason
September 6, 2009Over the last year there have been some infuriating “news” articles written about Dubai, mostly by British journalists (and I use that term loosely). I purposely did not mention them here, although I wanted to rant about them and set the record straight on the gross inaccuracies in the articles. I did not want to bring them any more attention than they already had. The articles went on about how Dubai was a ghost town hit hard by the economic crisis with the attitude that the “great” deserved to “fall” hard. The articles demonized the U.A.E. with twisted truths and flat out lies.
The truth is that the U.A.E., including Dubai, is positioned to weather the crisis better than most, if not, all other countries. Some construction projects have been put on hold, while others are proceeding. We were happy to see the progress in the metro/street construction accomplished while we were gone for the summer. Rent costs are going down and considering that they were inflated 25% each year for three years before the crisis, this is a very good thing. With regard to real estate, sanity is being re-established. This is a good thing for now and the future.
Just last week we had a chatty taxi driver who told us he had been in Dubai for 3 months. He is an Indian who previously was a massage therapist in Singapore and came here to drive taxi because of the economic crisis. When the crisis is over, he’ll probably go back to therapy. This is still the land of opportunity. Driving taxi may not be a promotion or upward career move, but it beats being unemployed.
Anyway, I say all this because, finally, there is an article that speaks with the voice of reason and I am glad to point you to it. http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/2009/09/guest_post_by_j_12/
Living the Travel Channel 