In a move to hopefully to improve Dubai cricket, the ICC Global Cricket Academy is reproducing a variety of pitch types from the UK, Asian sub-continent and Australia
albawaba.com middle east news information::ICC Global Cricket Academy Gets Australian Pitches (17 May 2009)
http://www.albawaba.com/en/countries/UAE/245929
Cricket is already the second National sport of the United Arab Emirates, but only due to the expats. It would be nice to see more interest from Nationals.
“Cricket should be introduced and encouraged in all schools of the UAE”
Kapil Dev goes out to bat for cricket at UAE schools – The National Newspaper (17 May 2009)
http://www.thenational.ae/article/20090517/NATIONAL/705169814/1100/SPORT
Another story on the excesses of the rich and famous. This one by Sheikh Mansoor Bin Zayed Al Nahyan from Abu Dhabi. It’s alleged he flew thirty riders and their horses to give a private performance.
Billionaire Sheikh Pays £250,000 For Household Cavalry To Fly To Abu Dhabi – Born Rich
“It looks like the horses are going to get better treatment than we will”
Yet another one.
A WIKIPEDIA hoax by a 22-year-old Dublin student resulted in a fake quote being published in newspaper obituaries around the world.
(19/06/2017 Addendum: It’s interesting to see these kind of posts, clearly before I began using Twitter to share tidbits of information I found interesting.)
Things had became quiet on the accommodation front, to the point where I was just about to contact them to confirm everything was alright.
The last I had heard, from someone inside the move, was that the date had moved out to maybe even July. It was disappointing, but we just accepted it as there’s nothing we could do about it.
However, imagine our surprise when we got advice a couple of days ago to say that we had been allocated an apartment, and we can actually move in around the last week of this month.
I recognise they may slip a little from this date they cite. But I’d expect that it should still happen in June if this is their current advice.
Interestingly, the apartment we’ve been offered is our current temporary apartment’s number with just a 1 in front of it. So we’re going up 10 storeys which my wife is already anxious about. A fear of heights was always going to be an issue living in an apartment. Out of 25 floors, 14 is not too bad though. I believe the view become unobstructed from about floor 10 – for the time being.
We’re certainly looking forward to it.
32 today, 32 today!
I experienced my first birthday in Dubai. I received some handy gifts. Of note was the remote control toy car Range Rover that Myles picked out. He slyly asked if he could use it some times. He’s dreamin’.
It’s different from having a birthday at home in a number ways. For one, the birthday boy or girl needs to bring in the cake, or sweets to work. So I made a dash to the Lebanese sweets shop around the corner and bought a kilo of mixed baclava on a tray. It turned out to be only just enough.
I sent an email out at work that it was my birthday and people were welcome to the sweets. So many people made the effort to respond or tell me best wishes for the day, it was lovely to see how sweet and sincere everyone was.
During the day I also found that they weren’t joking about me shouting lunch either. Fortunately a mate didn’t realise it was my birthday and suggested we go to the burger joint, so I got out of it very cheaply!
Tanzeem, Myles & I
I finished a little early to get prepared for the Twenty20 cricket match between Australia and Pakistan. It was a little bit worrying that the Australian embassy felt the need to provide a specific warning about this. It really only covered the behaviour you should follow in the UAE anyway.
Australian citizens planning to attend the Australia-Pakistan cricket matches to be played in Dubai and Abu Dhabi between 22 April and 7 May 2009 are reminded that local laws and penalties apply to you. It is important to remember that we are guests in the UAE, and that we must respect the UAE’s laws and customs.
Home – Australian Embassy (9 May 2009)
We left in plenty of time, as Thursday evenings are terrible for traffic even without the extra burden of a cricket crazy population getting to a local match. After a wrong turn which we couldn’t easily return from, we only just made it to Dubai Sports City in time. It was a little frustrating that we could then see the stadium, yet there was no way yet to get there directly, and there’s also no parking in sight. Not sure how this is possible in a desert with sand everywhere. Dubai Sport City is also a construction site so there is space everywhere.
We followed the already growing number of cars stuck in a line towards the designated parking areas. Eventually we found a park just over the road from the ICC headquarters.
Fortunately they had shuttle buses operating from the parking area from the car parks as we were probably 2 – 3 kms from the stadium.
The stadium looks like a giant marshmallow from the outside. It has giant sails at the top half, the rest of it is what you expect from a new world-class stadium.
There were so many people trying to sell us scalped tickets, or “black tickets” I had to check if it was illegal. It was. Just maybe not policed very well.
As we got into the final lines to get in we were frisked by beefy security. It was from there we saw a large shiny helicopter, so we figured His Highness Sheikh Mohammed was present.
Once inside the ground we were free to walk into any section we pleased, with the exception of the VIP areas. The VIP tickets were more than 12 times the price of our cheap seats in the atmosphere section. It made no difference however if you bought one of the many other ticket categories. They all just piled in together, and we weren’t allocated a seat.
I saw on the big screen a sign, “We’re eating kangaroo curry tonight”. Another one that got a laugh when it was displayed was “My wife thinks I’m at work”.
The match
I had never been to see a T20 match before, but they certainly look more exciting on TV. The organisers tried hard, including cheerleaders, but in keeping with the local sensitivities, they all had bright white tights beneath their short skirts.
Australia batted first, which usually means they’ll win. But not this time. The game started quite well for them with a good strike rate. But it didn’t last too long, with wicket after wicket.
When Andrew Symonds came out to bad, it was disappointing to hear a section behind us doing the controversial Monkey chant. Fortunately it didn’t last long as Symonds was out first ball. It was a new look Symonds, sporting a shaved head, perhaps this was a mistake as he suffered a similar fate to Samson without his locks.
The ease with which the Pakistanis were bowling us out made it look like they were throwing down a golf ball. Our final score was a mere 109. When Brett Lee was bowled out I thought he would have been licking his lips at the change to bowl on the wicket, but he didn’t make an impact. To cut a long story short, in comparison it seemed like we were bowling a soft ball to the Pakistanis as they smashed the ball around every which way.
Australia won the one-day series, but were extremely outplayed in this Twenty20. This was a good result for the crowd. The Australian fans were severely out-numbered. There was one section entirely made-up of Australian shirts, but they were all Indians. On closer inspection, the shirts were branded with Multiplex, so it seemed like they were only there as part of a work junket.
Some of the more vocal Pakistani fans pose with us
The row in front of us, the rest of the row behind us, and the row behind us were all very vocal Pakistani fans. My mate translated their chants which were entertaining. The most used was “PAKISTAN JITEGA” – ‘Pakistan will win’. Even before the end of the match, I was cheering it also. Another was asking where are the Australian fans, but they didn’t hear Myles and my screams.
Time to leave
The Sheikh’s helicopter had gone by the time we began piling out of the stadium. It was clear he knew something we didn’t, the means to leave the stadium was hopeless.
The shuttle bus service to get us back to the cars got terribly stuck in traffic, so we ended up walking the distance back to the car. Then once we got onto the road we didn’t move for around 20 minutes. We then noticed that our hold-up was just go get us to the u-turn point to join the other road that hadn’t moved for 20 minutes either. Eventually we ditched this, and followed the brake lights of some other cars that seemed to be moving. This was a winner.
It was a great evening. We eventually got home just before 2am.
Myles and I - in the minority - wearing plenty of Australia gear
I have come to the conclusion that the best way to tell if the toilet at work is occupied is not necessarily whether the latch indicator is red. The best sign is that I’ve become desperate to go – then it will surely be busy!
For my area, I share a single male toilet with maybe 50 guys. And lately with work I’ve often been holding on for some time, and when I finally find a 5 minute window to relieve myself, more often than not it seems I’ll need to wait for some time longer.
In fact some days the odds have fallen so badly, I’ve been convinced the same guy has been in the loo for 5 or more hours.
But I’ve come up with an ingenious idea, of changing the colours on the toilet door’s latch. So when it is free, the latch actually shows red and people are forced to make the 60 metre trek to the next one. I, however, will be in the know that it’s actually a sign it’s free. Maybe someone has done this before me.
I was forwarded this story via email. It follows a bit of a pattern. When someone does something you would not ordinarily worry too much about elsewhere, but when it happens in the UAE they have paid a terrible price. I’m not sure all of the others I’ve received are totally true, this one on the other hand looks authentic.
“I didn’t think the consequences of telling the truth would be so harsh,” Darren said. “I’d like other people to be very careful. You’re in a different country and the laws are not always the same.”
The humble car horn is not the perfect substitute for giving the finger, but it sure beats going to jail. It’s interesting how the two things don’t nearly have the same effect here. In Brisbane I’d consider using the horn and giving the finger exactly the same except one is louder. I guess Australians generally use the horn as a swear word. Here it’s really more of a conversation. And it’s a bit of a worry, but sometimes it’s even a two-way conversation.
Addendum
The story’s been confirmed in the Australian press:
Aussie jailed for flipping the bird at driver in Dubai | The Courier-Mail (2 May 2009)
http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,25412733-953,00.html
Last weekend we had half a plan to visit Abu Dhabi. After seeing my photos, Elle is very keen to see the Grand Mosque for herself. However I only remembered in the morning when it was too late that there were specific opening times. We would miss the tour by the time we would get there, so we needed another plan.
A colleague mentioned Al Ain is also worth a visit, so I started Googleing to see what was available. Once again I come across the limitations of the UAE’s web presence. Compared to what I’m used to in Australia and elsewhere, there is very little online information available here about pretty fundamental things people would want to find. And the information that does get returned is invariably unreliable. I was reminded of the night I tried researching how to catch a bus from Dubai to Abu Dhabi. This would ordinarily be a very straight-forward web search which would give me the official site for Road Transport Authority, where I could download the timetable and station maps. But no, I got everything except this kind of info. It didn’t matter what combination of terms, or even synonyms or different spellings I used, nothing much came up. The best I got was one bus watcher’s personal site where he had detailed all of the bus models he has seen in the UAE, including where and when they were manufactured. Riveting, but totally unhelpful for me.
To find out what was best to see in Al Ain I found the personal travel blogs to be almost the best source of information. The Al Ain Palace Museum was a winner, the other possibles at the time seemed to be the National Museum, and the Al Ain Zoo. I confirmed the GPS had these locations listed otherwise I’d have to allow an extra three or four days travel time before setting off.
While the GPS’s satellites were still kicking-in I made my way over the creek which turned out to be a mistake. There is so much road work going on, the directions we were supplied were terrible. We kept getting informed to enter roundabouts that no longer exist. Then we were swept away into one way streets in the wrong direction. All of these tacks left and right with plenty of U-turns were happening every 100 metres or so. So it was quite surprising when the advice changed to “Drive straight for 100 kilometres”. The drive wasn’t too exciting with sand, sand, and more sand – only interrupted now and again by the odd camel or a dozen. It was nice nonetheless.
We made one stop on the way at a service station to eat, drink and stretch our legs. As I got Myles out we heard a loud, high-pitched “Hello, how are you?” from some distance away. A guy in a mechanic’s uniform was sitting 30 metres away in the shade waving. It was clear he was talking to Myles, so I said he could go over if he liked. Myles went and offered the guy some of his chips, and the two of them seemed to be getting on well. I went over to see if everything was fine and the guy asked how I was, and asked where we were from. I asked where he was from and he said Iran, then I asked him if it was this hot in Iran and he started to look confused. I broke it down into smaller words, and started the non-verbal hand movements, but then he came clean. He said, “I only know ‘Hello’, ‘Goodbye’, ‘how are you?’, ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘where are you from?’, ‘change tyre’, ‘air in tyre’.” It all became clear, I was trying to go beyond his English abilities. We continued to have a basic conversation with him by going through his reportoire a few more times before it was time to return to the car. Definitely an interesting pit-stop.
Although we didn’t have a big look-around, it was obvious Al Ain is a very different place to Dubai, and even the rest of Abu Dhabi. I’d describe it as a sleepy town compared to the rest of UAE I’ve seen. Sleepy such as Toowoomba compared to Brisbane, which sort of fits as Al Ain happens to also be known as the Garden City of the Emirates. Having said that, it still had more than its fair share of cars on the road. It seemed there are many less Westerners around Al Ain. A lot more shops had signs in Arabic only. Al Ain, Abu Dhabi and Dubai are each around 120 kms from each other forming a triangle. So you probably wouldn’t want to see them all in one day, although you could.
It was pretty close to lunch time, and Lewis had been upset for some time – he’s still getting over his flu – so we sought out the first familiar takeaway logo we could find and grabbed a bite to eat. It turned out to be KFC, which is quite nice when you haven’t eaten it in years.
First stop after this was the Al Ain Palace Museum. This is where one of Shaikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan’s wives, Sheikha Fatuma lived. It was nice to see for its wondrous lack of extravagance. I was expecting gold bathroom fittings, massive chandeliers, and plenty of marble throughout. But the whole compound was beautifully simple. There were generous rooms for many guests, yet the Sheikh’s actual bedroom was quite modest to say the least. The kitchen was probably three times larger.
From there we went off to the Al Ain Zoo. I must say I was a little concerned agreeing to go to this, given some of the feedback I’ve heard about Dubai Zoo. The Al Ain Zoo has no issues in that respect. The temperature was just over 40 degrees so we were struggling. It was interesting when we were at the meercats. We were contemplating how they keep any of the animals cool, when suddenly a powerful mist of water began spraying from the ceilings above us. It was great for Myles and Lewis particularly. I looked to see if the meercats were enjoying the cool down, but they had all vanished amongst the mist – if only there were gorillas in there.
Actually the zoo could have had gorillas, we were forced to cut our tour short at around the half way mark. It was either that, or die from heat (and it’s not even Summer).
At the equivalent of $12 AUS for all four of us I figure there’s no issue going back. To visit the late Steve Irwin’s Australia Zoo you’d have to add a zero to the price we paid in Al Ain, and then some. Interestingly some of the enclosures were quite similar to the setup in Australia.
The zoo also had a train operating, which we promised Myles we would ride next time.
We’ve also added the following things to the agenda for when we’re in the neighbourhood again:
Since seeing the movie, my son has become a big fan of the Titanic. So last night when we heard the theme song, “My Heart Will Go On” by Celine Dion we asked if he recognised where the song was from. Maybe it was the noise of the restaurant, but he didn’t recognise it so Elle said it was from the Titanic. He listened again intently, then a sudden look of realisation took over his face as he told us, “Yeah, it’s when they were dying”.