Extra feathers part (or pas de) deux

As some of you know, when the Sand Warlock is not piloting the broomstick or magic carpet or selling sand to the Arabs, he sells extremely posh wine. My post from yesterday reminded him of an amusing tale relating to some wine that arrived in his store recently which shows that it is not just Islamic states that worry about public morals being corrupted by the flashing of a bit of flesh.

Quite a few of us here in the UAE roared with laughter when at cinema screenings, a statue's nude bottom was blurred out of Quentin Tarantino's characteristically violence and blood-splattered film Django Unchained, because it was considered too rude, when, meanwhile, viewers were treated to graphic scenes of a slave being savaged to death by dogs and another slave being beaten to death with a hammer for the amusement of Leonardo DiCaprio's character Calvin Candie. Horrific violence is fine, a nude porcelain bottom is not, it would appear.

It's not just in the Gulf where an artistically rendered nude is a problem, it seems. Mouton Rothschild has a label each year designed by an artist, with Bacon and Picasso being among the famous names who have had their work immortalised on a bottle. In 1993, an artist called Balthus stepped up to the mark and produced a charcoal reclining nude. It is artistic, it's a fairly vague drawing of a nude, it's on a bottle of wine which is, let's face it, only meant to be drunk by adults, so few are going to see it. Who could possibly have a problem with it? Step forward USA, where it was considered an "inappopriate" way to market alcohol. Could Mouton possibly come up with another label because it's just too naughty? The answer is, yes, they could, and here it is:

 
Those cheese-eating surrender monkeys seem to have done a rather comprehensive (**insert rude french word here***) vous to the Americans by simply producing a blank label for the Yanks, lest they be corrupted by the charcoal drawing on an exclusive bottle of wine. FYI, both versions of the bottle are available in the store. Presumably staff have to ask for passports and only sell the one featuring the reclining nude to non-Americans.

The story is disputed here, but whoever it was that originally made the fuss about the nudey naked lady, it just shows that certain people have a lot more in common than they may think.

I've chosen not to include the nudey naked lady picture, because, and I may be going slightly native here, I could get some bother for publishing a provocative picture on a blog that is partially intended for a UAE audience. If you want to see her, you will just have to visit the shop, won't you?  

Swan Lake with extra feathers

I realise that Dubai is in the news for somewhat more serious reasons today but I wanted to share this picture that I made him indoors take out of the car window on the way to work last week:

There's a similar poster on Sheikh Zayed Road, advertising Swan Lake, the ballet that's inspired generations of small girls to don white tutus and torture their feet in the hope of one day dancing the lead role.
You'll notice that there's something rather different about the picture above and the picture on my link. That's right, they've photoshopped t-shirts on to the ballerinas on the large billboard along Al Khail Road, ditto the poster on Sheikh Z.

As a resident of Dubai, you get used to this sort of thing - seeing a friend who was wearing a mildly revealing dress with a polo neck photoshopped on to them when their picture appears in one of the social pages of a local magazine, seeing written complaints in the newspapers from people who think pictures of various Hollywood stars were too provocative, reports that bikinis may or may not have been banned on public beaches in the Northern Emirate of Ras Al Khaimah (an hour or so's drive from Dubai).

But, it's a signifier of why you have to get used to thinking carefully, particularly in my line of work, about what you're printing and publishing, because, while generally speaking, you can go about your business as normal, there's always a possibility that you could offend someone. It's tempting to laugh at the slightly dodgy photoshopping, but it's a reminder that in the UAE, one person's ballerina is another's immoral imagery.

If you're fond of sand dunes...

If you're fond of sand dunes, as the song goes, you have come to the right place because sand is a thing we've got rather a lot of. That's why Beach Polo, a slightly smaller version of the game that's played on sand rather than grass, preferably by the sea, was invented in Dubai.

There has been a bit of a hiatus in recent years, as director Sam Katiela put it at the opening press conference, "a commercial break" because sponsors "hung up the phone" when you called them during the financial crisis that had a profound effect on Dubai. But the sport continued to grow while the polo fans of Dubai were on a break from it, and this year was the year when it returned to the Emirate, and was held at Mina A'Salam Hotel, right next to the Burj Al Arab and Jumeirah Beach Hotel.

We had a bit more interest in polo than usual as him indoors' shop, Le Clos, sponsored a team in the two-day tournament and also had a promotional stand giving out free samples, which it's safe to say were pretty well-received by the spectators.

Here's a pic of the Le Clos team in action:

In the number three shirt on the left for Le Clos is Argentine professional Lucas Labat, on the right with his mallet down having just hit the ball is Dr Thomas Rinderknecht, and at the back in the number one shirt for Le Clos, Patron Piero Dillier who is also a big cheese in European polo, including in the San Moritz Polo World Cup on Snow.

Le Clos was placed four out of four teams, with victory going to title sponsors Julius Baer, but it was by no means a poor performance. Coming last is pretty standard for first time sponsors and they took an early lead in their subsidiary final game against Aston Martin, only to be beaten 6-5 in the final chukka. Le Clos were the only team who did not have their own ponies to ride, having to borrow them from rival team members, so they were on unfamiliar mounts. The previous day, they were beaten 7-5, again, a pretty decent score, by eventual winners Julius Baer.

Here's another pic of them in action:

And a shot of Lionel Ritchie (on big screen because I was on the wrong side of the pitch to see him) throwing the ball in for the third chukka of the final between Julius Baer and Maradiva, with the Burj Al Arab in the background.

And here's a shot of the final game with Nacho Gonzales, in the number three shirt for Julius Baer, who was named Most Valuable Player:

That's the Jumeirah Beach Hotel and the Wild Wadi water park in the background.

It was stinking hot, as it tends to be in Dubai towards the end of April, but a grand day out. It's interesting, for someone like me, for whom polo has accidentally become rather a large part of their life, to see it played three-a-side on sand instead of four-a-side on grass. And with a large, orange, lightweight ball that is more visible and skips more easily over sand, instead of a small white ball. Most people don't believe me when I tell them that polo is an evolving sport. It's played traditionally on grass and on horses (called ponies for reasons I still haven't established) but it's played on camels in Dubai, on elephants in Nepal and Thailand, and, I learned recently, on tuk-tuks in Sri Lanka, and, I shudder to learn, Segueways elsewhere. And of course there's on sand in 30 cities in the form of beach polo, and on snow in Switzerland and more recently, China.
Putting on a beach polo tournament is no mean feat. It's not simply a case of putting some jumpers down for goalposts on the beach. We have, I am told, the wrong kind of sand in Dubai, it is too slippery, making it dangerous to the horses and the players, so truckloads of sweet sand had to be brought in, layered, watered and carefully ploughed to make a suitable surface. There's a joke in there about selling sand to the Arabs, I'm sure.

Bad blogger returns with Indian tales

I'm not even going to make crap excuses for why I haven't updated in ages. I suppose the novelty factor of being here has worn off a little and everything is less shiny and new and weird and I don't feel the need to regale you with my daily tales of amusing misunderstandings and befuddlement at Middle Eastern bureaucracy.

I'm just back from a jaunt to India. Delhi is a four hour flight from Dubai and then we spent three days there before we caught the Amritsar Express train to the spiritual and physical home of Sikhism, passing through miles of the flat, green Punjab that bears a remarkable resemblance to Kent, were it not for the occasional signs of unimaginable poverty - people living not just next to but on the railway line in tents and tiny lean-tos held up by little more than luck.

I'm not going to regale you with tales of Mughal architecture and Ghandi, Sikhism and the British Empire and the countless other gaps in my education that have been filled in a little by the trip because there are plenty of other places you can go to read far more eloquent accounts of those things. This is in no way meant as an insult to a place where I have spent a mere 10 days, but, and I say this with the proviso that I fully intend on going back some day, having been there, I can see why so many people of Indian origin choose not to live there, because quite frankly, it is chaos. Madness. The footage of insane traffic and filth and squalor in films like Slumdog Millionaire go some way to showing what parts of Delhi are like (yes I know that film is set in Mumbai) but, it's that and then some. Just walking down the street is a challenge and there are plenty of people who see you as a vulnerable foreigner whose cash reserves are there to be exploited. Why wouldn't they, after all, when in your home country, you would casually spend the equivalent of what a large proportion of their country earns in a day on a soft drink? Only careful reading of the guidebook and advice from a friend who was in Delhi a couple of months ago stopped us falling for a train ticket scam.

I went to Delhi with the horrific attack which happened there in December at the forefront of my mind with warnings from my brother who spent six months living in Mumbai to 'not go anywhere on your own' ringing in my ears. And I got there wondering if the effect of that incident would be obvious to someone who is new to the city. It is in the sense that three months on, it was still preoccupying the first four pages of the English language daily I picked up. A survey asked young men what they thought about women's rights, whether women should be allowed to go out on their own going "pubbing and clubbing", whether women should go to work, that sort of thing, and an opinion piece by a female academic pointed out that women in Delhi are constantly 'under watch', referring to the constant staring that women experience in the streets. And there were reports on a Government bill currently being debated which will tighten up laws on sexual assault and stalking. It is variously being watered down or beefed up depending on what day it is and whose hands it has fallen into.

It is true that the streets of Delhi are dominated by men. At any one time, I would say they outnumber women by at least 20 to one. This is not a new thing according to the Rough Guide but it's certainly true that as a woman walking the streets of the city, even accompanied by your husband, you're stared at. Not just sidelong glances, full on, insolent, in your face staring, daring you to look away first. This sounds aggressive but it doesn't feel that way. It is something that's relatively common in certain parts of Dubai so I wasn't particularly concerned by it and sure enough, it's the norm according to the newspaper articles I had read. There was a telling photograph illustrating the coverage I described above of a girl, aged perhaps 10 or 11, being watched by groups of men standing on the pavement as she walked down the street.

It's partly curiosity because although Delhi is an international city, white faces are relatively rare, and as women are an unusual site on the streets anyway, perhaps more so since the attack, that is likely to be the case. It is also true that wondering hands are the norm. I punched the roving hand of a tuk tuk driver that was heading for my right tit as I was walking down the street. I knew he was a tuk tuk driver from his uniform - they wear grey shirts and trousers. He was walking along with his two friends and in all likelihood had  had a couple of drinks and went in for a squeeze. It happened so quick and in the madness of the traffic I was 20 metres down the street before I told him indoors what had just happened. I surprised myself due to being  not that bothered by it because I had been expecting something like it to happen at some point from what my non-resident Indian friends had told me of living in the country. Knowing for a fact that if I walked into a police station to complain I would be met utter incomprehension made me take it in with my stride along with the guidebook's assurances that returning such behaviour with a quick slap or punch was expected.

This all makes the trip sound a little disastrous. It really wasn't. Without wishing to make those of you currently freezing your behinds off in the UK hate me, I can go on a beach holiday any time I want by driving across town and checking into a hotel, the point of the trip was to have an adventure and it was certainly that. I think I had naively thought, 'I have been to Sri Lanka and I have been to Nepal and spent a bit of time in Kathmandu, another bonkers capital city home to grinding poverty, I've read about the caste-system, the rampant corruption, the patriarchal society, so I am well prepared for what India is like'. I wasn't. It will also be a while before I will be able to even think about eating Indian food again without feeling slightly nauseous because we got sick despite doing everything you're meant to: Avoiding uncooked vegetables, drinking only bottled water, washing our hands every five minutes and using hand sanitiser, avoiding meat if you're not sure about how it's been stored or how it's been cooked. It's just the luck of the draw and doubtless if we had spent more time there, we would have developed immunity to some of the classic bugs that bother first time visitors.

Away from the insanity of Delhi, a different kind of eccentricity reigns in Amritsar. It's right on the border with Pakistan and we went and watched the peculiar border closing ceremony with ridiculously tall  guards marching in an extraordinarily camp fashion and kicking themselves in the face in time with their Pakistani counterparts on the other side of the gate. I'm not joking, they really do do that. We also saw the Golden Temple, the home of Sikhism, and across town, the site of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre where David Cameron managed to upset everyone recently. It's definitely the case that in Amritsar, there are fewer people who are interested in scamming you so it's slightly more relaxed, but, in the historic old town you walk next to open sewers and the streets are so narrow that you need to be constantly on your guard from being knocked into one of them by the rickshaws and tuk tuks. We found a municipal guide to take us on a walking tour, something well worth doing as we would definitely not have noticed some of the more interesting Hindu temples and a tree that is literally growing through buildings as it can't be cut as it is worshipped as a god, were it not for her pointing them out.

If you're the kind of person who is going to be put off a trip by a stomach bug and the thousands of scamsters in Delhi, India is not for you. But if you want an adventure and to experience something real, which living in Dubai, you really crave, then India is it. The success of Dubai can be attributed to oil wealth and a few decisions taken in the 1970s to grow and trade in a particular way and I could debate all day about whether or not that is a good thing. But, landing back here after being somewhere like India doesn't half make you appreciate its cleanliness, wide roads and consistency.

Worth driving safely for?

As I have oft-repeated on this blog, driving like a lunatic escaping from a volcanic eruption is standard behaviour in Dubai, even for someone like me who has been variously described as a 'slow' or even 'pootling' during my driving history. Something happens to you when you move here and start driving. You have a slightly higher-powered car than you can afford in the UK because you feel the need to be able to drive more defensively and get the hell out of the way of some of the utter madmen (and women) that fill the roads here, and, because cars are VAT free and petrol is cheap. Before you know it, reversing up hard shoulders because you've taken a wrong turn, crossing five lanes without indicating, whistling through amber lights with a millisecond to spare and exceeding the speed limit with gay abandon on roads where you know there are no cameras become par for the course.

You start with good intentions to carry on driving as safely as you would in the UK, but on the 100th time you are carved up by some death-wish Mitsubishi driver on a dual carriageway, you give up, and start to  think: "Can't beat 'em, might as well join them. Everyone else drives as if their driving instructor was a cast member of The Dukes of Hazzard, so why shouldn't I?"



The end of July and August is a blessedly peaceful time on the roads in Dubai, and then, September heralds the return of a lot of drivers and the dreaded back to school means that the roads are once again filled with people who drive like zombies.

So, what better time for Dubai Police to resurrect their plans to have White Points for drivers who do not contravene traffic laws? This initiative has been kicking around for a while and was widely sneered at among the ex-pats I know when it emerged the first time. According to 7Days, drivers will accrue one white point for each month they do not commit any motoring offence, including Salik (road toll) violations and violations in other emirates. Kudos on the retro "points mean prizes" headline, by the way, 7Days.  

The points can then be cashed in to wipe away black points, pay off traffic fines that have no black marks attached, or even get your car back if it has been seized.

Here's the best bit, those who go five years without any violations could win shopping vouchers or even a new car. That's the most lovable thing about Dubai, isn't it? Fines and potential prison sentences for poor driving are just not enough, we need to bribe our drivers with hold hard cash to not drive like lunatics.

I hate to say it, but I can't see it influencing the way people drive here. The offer of a new car sounds great in theory, but just one violation, going over the speed limit from an 80km per hour zone for example, wipes out your chances of getting it for five years, and more importantly, most people, the majority in Dubai are ex-pats, remember? They are more than likely to have left the country by the time their five years of clean driving anniversary comes around.

In fairness, the driving is so bad here, with car accidents the main cause of child death in the UAE, they have to try something. Maybe it will work. Maybe we will start to see people slowing the hell down, looking before they pull out of junctions, not jumping red lights or carving you up without looking up from their Blackberrys, let alone checking their mirrors, all the while gripping their steering wheels in a perpetual state of alert, dreaming of the shopping voucher or the new car, or, not having to shell out quite as many thousands of dirhams in speeding fines as they thought, but I doubt it.

What I did on my Summer Vacation

If you have any brains, you leave Dubai for at least a couple of weeks during the months of July and August to escape the worst of the heat. Him indoors and I have failed to do that in both 2011 and 2012 and therefore consider ourselves battle-hardened UAE summer veterans.

As a friend of the Sand Warlock's who has recently moved to Dubai pointed out recently: "People talk about the weather a lot here, don't they?" Er, yes. They do. Now that I've been here 18 months, I have thankfully stopped receiving what I refer to as 'the Inward Whistle of Summer'. The IWS is usually preceded by the following conversation:

THEM: How long have you been  in Dubai?

YOU: About three months (or period of time short enough to denote the fact that you have not yet experienced the summer heat yet).

THEM: So, you have not done a summer yet? *Inward Whistle of Summer*

This is followed by tales of how the cold water comes out of the taps hot, (true) the pavements melt (they don't) they know several people who spontaneously died of heatstroke when they stepped outside for more than two minutes, (doubtful) how the government lies and pretends the temperature has stayed below 50degrees when in fact it was, like, 55 man, (because they have to give the outside workers permission to stop working  when it goes above that temperature). You get the picture. I don't know why people feel the need to tell you about the heat. Everyone knows about it before they come here, and while it's true, you can't know what it is really like until you have experienced it, but here's a clue: Turn on oven, stand next to oven for about five minutes. Put face near lit light bulb. That's what it's like. I have promised myself that if I find myself giving the IWS to a new Dubai arrival, I shall give myself an inward slap.

So, no, we haven't managed to leave Dubai during the two hottest months, apart from one night in Ras Al Khaimah for my birthday. One of the reasons for this is that I am one of the few people in the UAE for whom the summer is actually quite a productive time. As anyone with a brain, including a lot of journalists, leaves for at least a couple of weeks, publications need freelancers to cover their work, so that's where I come in and that's why I haven't updated in a while.

Now, there's a protracted excuse for not updating, if ever I heard one. It's better than 'the dog ate it', but still.

What I have been doing in between assignments is playing with one of my birthday presents, a rather snazzy camera.

If you will excuse me banging on about the heat a little more, who knew that just as glasses steam up when you step out of the air conditioning into the heat, so too does a camera lens:

This photo looks like there's mist coming off the sea on to the palm trees outside the Hilton Ras Al Khaimah where we went for my birthday, but no, it's the condensation from the temperature variation of around 20 degrees from inside to out.

In other news, our transport to and from RAK was this car:

It's an Infiniti convertible which I can say with my new-found knowledge of car journalism is as nice to drive as any other Infiniti that I have driven and has the added bonus of having an amusing story involving a crushed suitcase attached to it.

The short version is: I have never driven a convertible before and did not know that it is ill-advised to leave luggage in the boot when you go about opening the roof. Thus, there was a sickening crunch as our suitcase had the life crushed out of it and some humiliating moments as the Sand Warlock, I, and several staff members from the hotel struggled to free it from the mechanism (in 49degree heat, remember, so that was sweaty) while panicking that we had knackered said roof. Luckily, it was not knackered, but goodness me, the sales guy who fixed the test drive for me didn't half go pale when I told him that anecdote. Still, no harm done and once I bashed the dent back out of the suitcase, it was as good as new.

We also had a brief visit from the Sand Warlock's cousin last month, and while I was being particularly snarky and moany about life in Dubai, as one is wont to do due to issues such is ridiculous cost of living, painful levels of bureaucracy, unbearable summer heat (sorry again) he pointed out that our life appears to be pretty nice, actually, particularly considering this is the view from our balcony:

The Burj Khalifa, at my favourite time of day, as the sun's setting. The lens is still a bit steamy in the first couple as I just noticed the sun was going down and I wanted to get a some pictures. It's more or less the view I have from my desk. It's probably responsible for about 40 per cent of my procrastinating, that which isn't taken up with Facebook, Twitter, reading the news online and wondering why no one has emailed me in the past five minutes, that is.

Another diversion in these past couple of weeks has been the Spider men, the dudes, that have been abseiling down the side of the building to clean the balcony glass. Here is one of them in action.

No, it's not a Ninja but a high-rise window cleaner. Our building is 35 floors high, we're on the 22nd floor, so rather him than me, and more so with these dudes, who you can just about see working on the Burj: *shudders*

Clue, they're just above the second balcony from the bottom on the left hand side.

Anyway, we have now officially broken the back of the summer heat. I know it's official because we are being promised rain, that's right rain! Well, I say we, not us at all, but Emirates to the north and east, according to Emirates 24/7, and according to 7Days, some cooler temperatures. And, I went for a run at about 6.15am some time last week, and, wait for it, the heat wasn't totally unbearable.

So, now that the schools are back, and most people are back in Dubai that are coming back, I can tell them that's What I did on my Summer Vacation.

Justice For Natalie

You hear about freak accidents from time to time but it's easy to forget that what takes most of us a few seconds to read about in the newspaper, raise our eyebrows at, and move on, can be something that has changed the course of someone's life forever.

This lady has been the subject of a four-year court battle after she was hit on the head by a falling beam at the Emirates Palace Hotel in 2008. What was meant to be a happy weekend celebrating her engagement has led to countless weeks in intensive care, thousands of dirhams of medical bills and an uncertain future.

The courts have found in her favour twice, but, the hotel group has appealed and the case is due back in court yet again next month. Meanwhile, Natalie has recently been in hospital in a medically induced coma and her need for specialist Neurological care becomes ever more urgent. She is now back at home but there is no knowing when she may become very ill again.

You can read about Natalie, here or watch this video about what happened to her.

There is also a petition you can sign.