Myeloma Awareness Week

Myeloma Awareness Week starts today, Friday 21st June, and as some of you will know already, him indoors and I are raising money for Myeloma UK by running a half marathon in Dubai on 18th October.

Here is our running kit:

The reason we're doing it is because my mum has Myeloma. The chances are, you won't know what it is unless you know someone who has it, so click here for a short film by Myeloma UK that explains it a lot better than I can. If you want to sponsor us, you can click here for our fundraising page.

Running chat is tedious beyond belief for people who aren't into it, but for those of you who like to pound the pavements, in case you're wondering, yes, it is rather hot to be training for a half marathon here in Dubai at this time of year. We went out this morning, and were at Safa Park Running Track by 6.40am with a plan to try to do 9km (we need to be running a bare minimum of 13km per week at this stage to be ready on time for October 18th) but we managed two circuits rather than the three required for that distance because it got somewhat too hot (it was 30degrees when we left the house, about 40ish by the time we got back). Today was the longest day of the year, so in theory, the sun being less high in the sky from now on should mean it's a bit cooler in the mornings, but we suspect we're going to have to get up about 5.30am, possibly 5am, to get a decent run in first thing in future. This isn't as desperate as it sounds as the race itself starts at 6am so it's good to be used to it.

A bit more about why I, and indeed him indoors, who has been roped into doing it without a single protest, are doing it. Well, when Mum got diagnosed just before Christmas 2009, it was one of the few times in my life I've felt truly helpless. The 1,000pounds we hope to raise isn't much in the scheme of things, I know, but if one person from the family of every new Myeloma patient (that's 4,000 per year in the UK by the way) does the same thing, that's got to make a difference, hasn't it?

If that is not enough to convince you, if you donate, I will post delicious pictures of us in our screaming orange Myeloma UK running shirts some time soon. Who wouldn't want to see that?

A decade of DCO

There can't be many of you that are not by now aware that Dubai Chamber Orchestra is playing its 10th anniversary concert tonight at Saudi German Hospital, such has been my fanatical promotion on social media in recent weeks.

I hope you will forgive me for the wall to wall coverage, but I am sure you are aware how difficult it can be to attract a 21st century audience, (who, after all, have access to any kind of music they want at a touch of a button, usually free of charge), to come out and see an amateur orchestra play. But, for those of you who do make the trip to Tecom tonight, I promise you it will be worth it.

I'm experiencing one of my rare sincere moments today, so, make the most of it, but as amateur orchestras go, DCO is pretty special. It is a group of  musicians who turn up weekly to get together and play - that's not so unusual as amateur orchestras go - some of the players make their living from music in one way or another, through teaching combined with playing, while others only took up their instruments recently and played their first live performance with the orchestra, which takes quite a lot of guts.

The difference from places where there is a long-established classical music scenes, is that DCO is a "chameleon orchestra" because it is an ensemble that adapts. Under the direction of Barnaby Priest, our conductor, music is chosen depending on the availability of players. This can be difficult due to the transient nature of Dubai, which is a majority ex-pat population, as players leave the Emirate to go home or move on to the next posting.

An indication of the turnaround of players is that at present, we have three of the original members who formed the group in 2003 out of a total of around 40 players, and for others, tonight will be their last concert as they are moving on to pastures new. 10 years of continuous music making, playing three concerts per year, is something worth celebrating in these circumstances and that's why we're making a big fuss of our 10th anniversary and have stepped up efforts to bring our music to a new and larger audience.

It has certainly been a challenge in some respects, for example, finding a suitable venue that would not charge us an arm and a leg to perform in it, (none of us get paid to play and entrance to our concerts is free so we have to rely on goodwill) but once people started pitching in with company sponsorship of programmes, official photographs, recording, filming, a special 10th birthday surprise, and, an unusual but lovely concert venue, it was clear that all was going to fall into place.

Here are a few more of my favourite pictures taken by Carl Wiebe of Katarat Ebda'a at one of our rehearsals. The concert poster with details is at the bottom. Hope to see you there.

Petrolhead Paradise

The UAE's  fixation with the automobile is something that has come up from time to time on this blog and there are various explanations that I have come up with for quite why the car is so important.

Perhaps it is a combination of a deep-seated psychological need for status symbols, weather which means getting around any other way except in the air conditioned comfort of your car is pretty miserable for three to four months of the year and subsidised fuel prices which, for example, mean filling up Kevin the Toyota costs about 12quid whereas I suspect it would be closer to 50 in the UK.

There is fixation, however, and then there is fanatical obsession, and that is certainly what afflicts HH Sheikh Hamad bin Hamdan Al Nahyan, whose private collection makes up the Emirates National Auto Museum.

It is safe to say that this is a man of big gestures and ambition. Known as "the Rainbow Sheikh" (this is in reference to nothing at all, he just likes them) he was the Sheikh who, you may remember, carved his name into the desert so big it was visible from space. I believe his name is no longer there. I can't find a link to support that now, but you get the picture.

I'm not someone who is particularly keen on cars, but I was riveted by this collection. The quantity under one roof is mind boggling enough, and it goes from the sublime:

To the ridiculous:

To the slightly more ridiculous. No, I have no idea for what possible reason you would need to do this to a 4X4 either:

And on, to, I don't know, as him indoors suggested, a car specifically designed to transport the members of Abba between desert concerts on their world tour:

One of the very nice things about the museum is the presentation which is done with a sense of humour. The paths between cars are painted to look like little roads, and you are greeted by this from the road as you arrive:

You can't really see the scale here, but trust me, it's a giant Land Rover.

Then there is what I've come to regard as the UAE's endearing obsession with breaking world records, in this case, the world's largest caravan:

Although, it hasn't moved for a while if the tyres are anything to go by:

I'll let the pictures do the rest of the talking. But really, these just scratch the surface of what the place is like. It is more than worth the trip. To get there, details are on the website which is linked earlier in this blog, but basically, from Dubai, go to Abu Dhabi, go past, head towards Liwa and keep going. You'll see the signposts from the road and the giant Land Rover means you can't miss it. If you do go, take plenty of water and make sure you have breakdown insurance because it's quite remote. The ticket office takes cash only, but if you forget to take any, the worker's camp down the road has a cash machine.

This pic doesn't show it but yes, there is the same model in every colour of the rainbow.

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.