Well said, Sir!

Congratulations

MacNabb has a wonderful post here giving some perspective on the accession of the Emirates to nationhood. 

Merhaba sag' i'

One of our local 'red-top' newspapers surprised me with the cover story a couple of days ago. The Abendzeitung went out of its way to extend a welcome to Arab visitors to Munich.

As well they might. This year from January through June there were 637 thousand visitors from the lands of Araby recorded, a rise of twenty percent over the same period last year. Even if we assume that fewer left home during Ramadan (although the heat in the Sandlandy may have been found by some inimical to fasting), the year could end with over a million having made their way to our city.

They are welcome because their stays are longer than those of tourists from other countries. They spend daily between EUR 500 and 1,000, which compares well with the measly average of EUR 192 for other visitors.

The newspapers notes that in 1997 only 8,000 visitors to Munich originated from Arab nations. How very few there must have been in the mid-eighties, when our home was in the district named Arabella Park. But even then there were enough hijabs and luxuriant beards to be seen in the area, noted for its big hotels and private clinics, that we joked about the tourists having mis-read the name of their local destination... Arab El Apark! 

Chapters end

 Indecision about whether the word 'chapter' should have an apostrophe or not! Chapters do end, hence I'll let the headline stand. Although the genitive would also be very apposite as the first half-year of 2013 recedes into the past. Google Reader is a chapter closing. My first RSS tool was Bloglines, but I very quickly switched to the Google service. At the end of 2006... as this post indicates... my morning perusal of the feeds was a precious routine as soon as I had checked the overnight emails at the office in Abu Dhabi. At one point I had about 140 subscriptions, although these have now been reduced to half that number.  

I felt that the combination of reading RSS feeds and writing this blog was perfectly adequate for my communication needs. Facebook never held any real appeal and since I am probably by nature anti-social, subsequent developments like Twitter were of little interest. When Google decides that Blogspot has had its day... and I am well aware that anything digital is by nature ephemeral... I dare say there will be alternative which will present themselves, much as Feedly will now be the means by which I shall satisfy my hunger for the latest news on the interwebs.

Back in May 2011 I wrote... "For my daughter and I have for many, many months been accustomed to having the Skype messaging window permanently open when we are both online. It is for us like sitting at opposite ends of a long, long desk stretching from Maastricht to Munich. The Long Desk is a comforting form of 'telepresence'..."

It was not only comforting but a pure joy! But that is another chapter now ending now that Jessi's three years at Maastricht University is over. The upside is that for the next few months she will be back here in Munich where her internship looks as if it could be very interesting. And when again there is a geographical hurdle to be overcome... if she takes up the internship she has been offered at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C... we'll extend the Long Desk across the ocean. 

For many, many years when I was working in the Sandlands and she was in school in Munich the ritual contact was a short telephone call to her before she left home in the mornings. It was at the time very important for both of us. But the 'always on' Skype window is incomparably better, enabling both of us to feel present during each others' daily lives.

Another chapter ends this weekend. For two and a half years I have been doing daily translations for the German automotive-themed media group Motorvision.But now they have decided that my services are no longer required. Admittedly I have found their international strategy to be somewhat inconsistent and so the termination of my contract came not so much as a surprise.

A shock, nevertheless, since now I must urgently seek a new source of income.

I wonder if this means that my professional activities will no longer revolve around automobiles? For the five year from 2005 to 2010 'the cars were the stars' of our GearOne television channel uploaded from Dubai Media City. Now in 2013 I can hardly imagine anyone who has never been in possession of a driver's license who is better informed about motoring matters than I am! Were a lottery win to enrich me I think I might go for a 2005 Ford Thunderbird 50th Anniversary Edition, a car so beautiful that I think I would have no difficulty finding willing drivers. 

Yes, chapters of all kinds come to an end, even if dreams persist. 

Amusing that this is Sandlander post number 2013!

Rocketboom does Dubai

I used to be a regular viewer of Rocketboom in the days when the Sandlands were my main home and Amanda Congdon was the presenter. And now they have devoted a monothematic show to Dubai. No startling revelations, but not a bad resumé of what's been going down.

Necrosis

I looked for an image to illustrate this post and came across the one above which shows a railway station in Chicago, abandoned, left to die, the victim of passing time and economic upheaval. In a way I think it echoes the profoundly disturbing story cited below, concerning which more detail is available on theDaijiWorld website here.

"It's the great escape by Indians who've hit the dead-end in Dubai. Local police have found at least 3,000 automobiles -- sedans, SUVs, regulars -- abandoned outside Dubai International Airport in the last four months. Police say most of the vehicles had keys in the ignition, a clear sign they were left behind by owners in a hurry to take flight.

The global economic crisis has brought Dubai's economic progress, mirrored by its soaring towers and luxurious resorts, to a stuttering halt. Several people have been laid off in the past months after the realty boom started unraveling."

Happy New Year!

It's midnight in the Sandlands... cue music!

(The recording features your fearless and shameless Sandlader, a choir of mixed ethnicity and sobriety and an excruciatingly pretty girl from Hamburg as cheerleader and who captured all this with my CyberShot three years ago in the bar of the Al Qasr Hotel at Mina Al Salaam in Dubai.)

Cheers!

National Day 2008

With a visual appropriated from the UAE Community Blog I send greetings to friends back in the Sandlands. It was a year ago that I started packing stuff I thought I would need for my mission to Munich, at the time confident that I would be returning to Abu Dhabi every couple of months for a fortnight. The idea was to continue to serve the people I'd been working for during the preceding six years on a consultancy basis.

Like so many Sandlands sagas it didn't go quite as I expected!

But, as somebody once said, I'll be back.

A portrayal of the Sandlands

"Young and Arab in Land of Mosques and Bars", that's the headline of a New York Times story which makes interesting reading.

Felix Bavaria

By the eighty-ninth minute I had come to the conclusion that I had seen more supreme mastery of footballing skills in matches in the Sandlands pitting Al Wahda against Al Ain.

This impression lingers, in spite of the last minute goal scored, like the previous two German goals, by a player from Bayern München.

It is estimated that the game was watched by about forty million viewers in Germany, 29.5 million via the ZDF channel (who tallied an incredible 85% viewership share), the rest being those attending 'public viewing' venues and the not inconsiderable audience served by satellite channels targeting the Turkish-speaking community here. Somehow amusing that one of the few broadcasters who did not expereince an interruption of transmission during the second half was Al Jazeera Sport.

Hah, success! I honestly thought I'd find nothing to say about the game at all!

Logic defied once again (or twice!)

Of late, there has been a lot of confusion regarding the issuance of residence visas linked to property ownership in Dubai. Different people are giving different versions, often contradictory, of how this visa scheme works, and this is fuelling speculation.

The above in today's GulfNews, following a bizarre piece in Monday's edition...

"There is no direct link between property ownership and residence visas. Developers should not lure investors to property sector with a promise of residence visa," Marwan Bin Galita, chief executive of Dubai's Real Estate Regulatory Agency (Rera) told Gulf News on Monday.

"...visas will be of many kinds. For example, it could be for two weeks for the person to come and collect the rent or it could be for another specific time to follow up the issue of the investment," he said.

How out of touch with reality are some of the people who could be expected to know better. A visa valid for two weeks, to permit an owner to collect rent... I laughed when I first read that. Then it crossed my mind that the poor chap is still thinking in terms of rents paid annually in advance, a system which is absolutely doomed in the medium term, so at odds is it with prevailing practice in other parts of the world.

Then I tried to imagine the owners who are going to buy flats in which they have no automatic right to reside. There may indeed be some so inclined, and there may be tenants to be accommodated (although with rental prices exploding, one wonders how many and for how long).

But basic logic forces me to conclude that if I cannot live within the four walls which are mine and mine alone... then there are going to be many ghost towers in the Sandlands long after the cranes have gone.

And what does the photo below have to do with this topic? Think about it!

From today's papers

Even during this time I am spending away from my home in the Sandlands I read daily the online news served by The National, Gulf News and Kipp Report. Today I find, on the one hand, this...

"There is a need to preserve UAE's national identity through enhancing national culture and changing the common understanding of the value of work," writes Dr Mohammad Al Asoomi, a UAE economic writer.

Two hugely important issues are raised in this single sentence. The whole culture and heritage discussion is in my view becoming increasingly distanced from any kind of reality. The culture and heritage of the UAE is a work-in-progress, I think, to be judged perhaps a couple of centuries from now when historians look back to see how successful efforts were to foster an environment in which a population consisting of 80% foreigners saw themselves as participants in a burgeoning and irrevocably multinational culture, stake-holders in a developing heritage. In this mix certainly vestiges of the Bedouin legacy, of the trading and pearl-diving traditions will have their place. But might not this place be as marginal as the lore and indeed the identity of the Native Americans when they became a minority on their own lands?

As a teenager, when we as a family emigrated from Scotland to the United States, I was often embarrassed by the American hunger for the kind of culture and heritage which pre-supposes centuries, if not millennia, of history. How they envied us Edinburgh Castle, where Bronze-Age man was living on that formidable rock as long ago as 850 BC! In Dallas, we learned, the oldest house dated from... 1844. And yet the Americans have no doubt that a unique culture and heritage is in the making, not in historicised stasis but dynamic, forward-thrusting, warts and all.

And this experience inclines me to suggest that in the UAE there should be some patience with regard to culture and heritage. With time this incredible nation will have one, and it could be one which the rest of the world will find fascinating and inspiring. The photo on the left is of the Al Hosn in 1959, then in splendid isolation in what would become the nation's capital. How Abu Dhabi has changed since then, and not just in terms of the city-scape. An authentic culture and heritage is developing on a daily basis. It should not be confused, however, with an unhelpful and anti-progressive nostalgia for the way things were.

Dr Al Asoomi also mentions the value of work, another tricky topic. The so-called Western work ethic is not the embodiment of an intrinsic moral virtue. Never in the course of history has the need to work in order to survive been anything but a heavy burden for the labouring masses. It was very clever to gradually persuade those condemned to a life of toil that their efforts were noble, praiseworthy and virtuous.

You work because you have to, in order to support yourself and your family. End of story. But in the UAE for many young Emiratis the concept of work, and therefore its value in the socio-cultural context, is not directly linked to any meaningful hardship which not working might precipitate. This is a real problem, as the following story illustrates:

Abu Dhabi’s taxi system is creaking under the demands of a rapidly growing population, with problems compounded by limited public transport and a shortage of drivers, an official said on Tuesday. Khaled Saleh Al-Rashedi said the lack of other transport solutions meant eight out of ten public transport users travelled by taxi in the capital, compared to one in ten in most other cities. This city's 9,000 taxis carry about one million passengers each day. The National reports that 2,000 shiny new taxis are stood idle because of failure to recruit and train enough drivers. The Centre for Regulation of Transport by Hire Cars (TransAD) is currently in Egypt looking for talent. Given the standard of Egyptian driving the training period could be lengthy, TransAd estimates three months. (per Kipp Report)

The idea that 2,000 Emiratis could fill the vacancies at TransAD is nowhere mooted. Dr Mohammad Al Asoomi's task is not light.

Car pooling madness

The optimal usage of every motor vehicle's carrying capacity is an obvious way of reducing overall traffic levels. With congestion on the city streets and highways of the Emirates it is not surprising that the topic of car pooling has been raised anew.

Hitherto, for some inexplicable reason, it has seemingly been illegal for Ali, the owner of a Toyota Corolla, to collect his colleagues Samir, Ehab and Rafi from their flats nearby and drive them to their common destination, their place of work. Don't ask me why, but I get the impression that this basic illegality is seriously aggravated if Ali should in a moment of weakness accept from his friends a contribution to the cost of petrol involved.

This the obvious answer for any authority desirous of taking a stand against congestion would be to do an about face and positively encourage the sharing of cars, both on a regular or ad hoc basis. The authority making this bold move would, nevertheless, introduce new rigour with regard to vehicle and driver insurance and the road worthiness of the automobiles on the roads, whether shared or not.

But such an authority we don't have. Instead we have the RTA. And their take on car pooling is described in this post on the UAE Community Blog.

One wonders whether to laugh or cry! If, as is possible, they have no idea what they're doing, then should they not, perhaps, look and see how other countries handle the issue of ride sharing and simply adopt whatever can be deemed best practice in this area. I'd bet that best practice is also least bureaucracy!

Come fly with me!

Spring seemed a distinct possibility last weekend in Munich. In the space of about a week bare trees became leafy, winter jackets were discarded, parks were suddenly peopled. While strolling through one of these I looked up and saw the new sightseeing Zeppelin curving through the blue sky, doubtless giving the dozen passengers a great view of the Olympic Park and the BMW complex.



Would this not be a huge success in the Sandlands? A circumnavigation of Abu Dhabi island at a low altitude and picture windows through which to contemplate the city below; I'd buy a ticket like a shot!

The Zeppelin in Munich was also a warm-and-fuzzy feel-good flying billboard for Deutsche Telekom. What a chance for Itisalot to do perceived in a positive light for once.

Now this is cool!

Harking back to my post earlier today, I'd like to suggest that with this car, the NmG (which stands for No More Gas) the Hamdaniyah-wearing extroverts could really stand out as bleeding-edge cool.

Item from Inhabitat

The design sits halfway between a car and a motorbike so the manufacturers prefer to call it a ‘Personal Electric Vehicle’, or PEV. And because the US Department of Transportation classifies the NmG as a motorcycle, it’s permitted to go on highways traveling to speeds around 75mph while other electric vehicles are legally limited to speeds of 35mph or less. A speedier drive is also likely because the NmG is allowed in many carpool lanes, due to being ‘fully occupied’ by the driver alone.

More information here at the manufacturer's website.

Are you sitting comfortably?

The word is that seats in this unusual configuration may soon be found in the Economy cabins of Emirates. The clever design took into account research which showed that passengers snoozed better when occupying the window seats, since they could use the cabin wall to lean against.

UAE drivers put lives at risk

Item from ArabianBusiness / photo from Flickr user Kobayashi

Over-tinted windows are the fourth biggest cause of road accidents in the UAE, with drivers continuing to flout legal limits, police said on Saturday. Motorists appeared to be undeterred by penalties of AED 10,000 ($2,700) fines and the threat of confiscation of their vehicles, and routinely ignored regulations that windows must not be more than 30% darker than a clear plane of glass, a traffic support manager told UAE daily The National.

According to Haji Al Bloushi from the Abu Dhabi Traffic and Patrol Department, perceived status is a major reason for motorists over-tinting windows, with some women drivers saying they prefer to drive vehicles which can not be seen into by men.

The perceived status issue is, I believe, a vitally important one. Presumably the guys in the photo believe themselves to be utterly cool, not tragically foolhardy. Tint your windows dark enough and people will think you live in a palace. Buy a single digit license plate, notwithstanding the fact that the proceeds go to worthy causes, and your status as mega-rich will be perceived even beyond the borders of the Sandlands.

But... I recall learning that the most assiduous status seekers are usually compensating for a deep-seated inferiority complex.

As for the women preferring to stay invisible... maybe they should be more concerned about just staying alive.

On this day...

Today we can see the results of the invitation which Fark extended to artists, to be inspired by the Burj Al Arab.



And the Guardian has generally kind things to sayhere about the new Abu Dhabi newspaper, The National.

National dress: fast-forward!

I have always had the greatest respect for National Dress. I found it no hardship when as a boy I had the option to wear the kilt as school uniform in Scotland.

I find Bavarian costume has a certain charm, even when it is bowdlerized to the extent that it becomes almost fetishistic.

That a leading Munich supplier of Alpine garb has added iPod controls to traditional Lederhosen is, I think, a delightfully ironic stunt. It certainly gives the notion of pressing all the right buttons new relevance.

So, come on you tailors in Abu Dhabi. Let's see an iPod interface in next season's dishdashas!

Hard Rock to be silenced.

Keefieboy puts it well:

What a shock! I remember when HRC was first built, and I thought 'what a crap location'. Now it's in the heart of New Dubai. I think I left Dubai at the right time: the powers that be have no idea how to build a city: they only know how to build buildings (well, some of them know how to build buildings). But cities are about much more than the buildings that they are made of: they're about soul and culture and character. Dammit.

It was only six years ago, the very first time I came to Dubai to attend the 2002 CabSat exhibition, that the sight of the Hard Rock Café in its then splendid isolation by the highway made me smile.

And think seriously about whether moving to the Sandlands for a while might be an interesting career move.

In a way I feel the Hard Rock is part of my biography, and not just because I spent the Swinging Sixties in London. In the middle of that decade one of the things some of us missed in the British metropolis was an authentic American Hamburger. An American expat on the fringe of the Victor Lownes clique (Victor was Hugh Heffner’s ambassador to the United Kingdom) found backers who enabled him to open The Great American Disaster, where absolutely brilliant burgers were served for a good few years on the Fulham Road. Memorabilia had their place, in the form of replica newspaper front pages reporting catastrophes such as the sinking of the Titanic.

It was, as I recall, the success Peter Morton had with this first venture which lead to the launch of the first Hard Rock Café. He had also seen a new kind of restaurant flourish not far from The Great American Disaster flourish, Parsons. The décor was retro, sort of Hard Rock without, as I remember, any memorabilia. An acquaintance of mine designed the furnishings of the booths installed at Parsons, wooden backed but with an ingenious leather-bordered upholstered seating surface. I guess it appealed to Peter who certainly checked out the local competition.

And I swear that even after thirty years there’s hardly a Hard Rock Café I’ve visited which does not to this day feature this design. I was amused to find it in Dubai, when I dived into the cool darkness after the glare of Sheikh Zayed Road.

For my second trip to Dubai I booked into the hotel next door to the Hard Rock, a modest two-story establishment which will undoubtedly also be doomed to vanish in the name of what passes in the Sandlands for progress. And later, when I’d already relocated to the Emirates, I booked family (including an infant grandson on one occasion) and friends into that same hotel, just to have the Hard Rock close to hand.

Only once was there a bad experience. For a while an abominable live band almost drove customers from the venue as soon as they went on stage. As a regular that season I learned to tolerate their dreary performances, but one night when I was in the company of a very successful and very sexy (German) pop star she found the music so abysmal that I found myself actually walking out.

There was one surprising high point which I’ll not easily forget. It was a week during which possibly the entire crew of the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, docked at Jebel Ali, were able to visit the Hard Rock at least once. Two memories; one, that many of them looked hardly old enough to drink, two, that they were so incredibly courteous. The hostilities in the Gulf had for me suddenly a human face, boys and girls of every imaginable ethnicity. And that face was so terribly young.

Another high point took place almost every weekend. I’m a sentimental old bugger, and I must admit that there was often a tear threatening when cute little kiddies, some visibly battling stage fright but determined to have their moment in the spotlight, joined the Hard Rock crew for their boisterously choreographed rendition of YMCA.

Eheu fugaces… Sic transit… And all that.