British Gulf Santa

The Christmas holiday season in the United Arab Emirates is a unique experience that I've now managed three times, though not without some disorientation and a few small emotional setbacks. And since I'm known in some circles to be an 'epic crybaby', the emotional challenges are to be expected.

For my first Arabic Chrismas in 2008, The Sharjah Co-op Supermarket was the site of my distress when the stock assistant could not decode my request for graham crackers. So be damned my holiday cheesecake, bring on the store-bought Lebanese pastry, but only after a bleary wander around with sunglass-covered eyes to regain my composure. Surely the piles of unwrapped gifts and the long days spent working and siteseeing with holiday visitors could be pointed to as triggers for my breakdown.

During my second holiday attempt, Christmas 2009, the fact of my working on Christmas Day put me in such a foul mood that I was in a constant state of budding migraine, while I still managed the holiday 'to do' list and prepared my students for final exams. Why, I thought to myself, did I ever decide to come to the Muslim world to work? Fortunately the kids' holiday pageant, with all its partridges and pear trees got me connected back to my roots, and a rousing round of 'O Christmas Tree' set me right. More or less.

And this year, though I thought I knew what to expect, I still was caught unawares when, as rumour has it, the library staff were asked to remove their Christmas decorations. And OK, I get it, this is a college for locals only, and to have a local passport means you are a Muslim, and well, in a Muslim institution we need to behave culturally appropriately. All fine. Yes. But when you drive down the Palm Jumeira, the palm-shaped island where every last tourist has to plant his foot, and you see giant inflatable Santas dangling from the balconies, and when Abu Dhabi is bragging over their world's-most-expensive Christmas tree, our college restrictions seem simply arcane.

Work environment aside, I still managed to have a lovely Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and I powered on with appropriate cheer. At a festive Christmas Eve party, I witnessed the funniest of characters. I can't explain how unnerving yet totally amusing it was for my American children, when the surprise Santa opened his mouth - and 'talked British'. This was followed by an at-home Christmas day, on which we cooked local goat with my Mom and brother from America, assembled toys and played host to our Muslim neighbor kids, all the while giving thanks for the goodies under the tree, delivered by the funny-talking British Gulf Santa.

Roughing Up the Muffins

I thought we were in good shape when I woke up this morning, for it's the week before Christmas, there are 9 or 10 gifts wrapped and under the tree, and I am fairly certain that Santa knows what to bring on the 24th. After a look at 8-year-old Liam's breakfast-table head however, on which I rushedly performed a haircut last night, I realized I am just barely faking it. Not wanting him to look like a Dickensian waif in the school pageant this evening, I somehow made him look like a worse and modern version, the neglected private-school child of socialite parents. I wish.

When 6-year-old Rosie, who is perpetually confused about what day it is, comes into my get-ready-for-work zone insisting that she have the Santa hat, I say, the Santa hat has not been purchased yet. That event (starring my other 2 neglected-socialite-kids) is after school, this evening, in fact it's over 12 hours from now, and so Rosie honey, we will get the Santa hat while you are at school, no problem. But no, she says, the show is TO-DAY, tonight is TO-DAY and the Santa hat is for TO-DAY not TO-NIGHT. I say well, look, here is a pair of sunglasses, you were meant to have a santa hat and sunglasses, right? You have half the get-up. This is good, No? But no indeed. Those are boy-colored sunglasses. Dark green. Oh please, Please Rosie, are you serious?

So as I rush through my morning make-up and add 'proper haircut' and 'girl-colored sunglasses' to my mental to-do list, Dickensian (or do you prefer Socialite) Waif number three son Brady, informs me that the lovely home-made muffins and oat-choco cookies I so lovingly baked up long after they all went to sleep, are not healthy enough for the grade five holiday picnic. What?! I mean seriously? So how about a little fruit salad mom? With some roasted sprinkled flax seeds and a drizzle of lemon for freshness. At that point I remember a fairly decent mommy-memoir, though please forgive my not remembering the author's name, where the opening scene is a frantic working mom, unpacking the store bought holiday pie and purposely roughing it up, putting it on her own dish, sprinkling some extra powdered sugar on top, and serving up as her home-made potluck contribution. And so perhaps I'll follow her example, and rough up my perfect and already truly home-made muffins, and tell Brady to explain that these are totally organic, old-fashioned roughed up working-mother muffins. With a sprinkle of flax.

That's Harrassment. H-A-R-R-A-S-S...

Imagine the only blonde in a room full of 17-year-old Arabic boys in a city auditorium in the Middle-East. Imagine the hormones and the stifled cat calls, in a room where the vast majority of pupils, 250 or so, do not have female high school teachers, have not personally met an American or any native-English speaker, and are not permitted by the culture or their families to co-mingle with girls. Then imagine that it's your job, that you have been specially elected, or selected, rather drafted, to sell the government college to these boys, with a microphone and a very big stage and snazzy projected video, not because you have a knack with youngsters, or because you are an exceptional educator, but because you are blonde, you wear the right make up and are perceived to have what it takes to 'attract'. Imagine all this and there you have it, a day in the life on the faculty of a government college in the United Arab Emirates.

A couple of months ago, my male supervisor, a tall and well-tanned Arizona Phd, stopped by my cubicle to tell me with a chuckle, that I'd made 'the list'. So right away I'm thinking, what ridiculous overtime course, or lesson committee, or chaperoning duty is being slung my way. But he went on to explain that it was far more fun and much less labor-intensive that what I had imagined. Or so he thought.

His visit to my cube was followed by this emailed missive from our Dean of English, a short, brusk, 50-something-deep-voiced make-you-cry Scottish woman who truly runs the show. It reads:


"You have been identified as the people most likely to attract new students to join the college system. The key to the ‘why me?’ answer is the word “attract” 

We need the male teachers to visit the girls presentations and the female teachers to visit the boys ( getting the picture now ? ) We have a ready prepared script for you to read. All we ask is that you come along looking happy, confident, and just super thrilled to be there.

If the whole idea of this just scares you to death....talk to me. But really, for you, it will be nothing more than a ten minute guest appearance on stage."


I seriously took the whole thing as a compliment at first. That is, until I heard that a lovely college librarian, also on 'the list', was refusing to participate, on principle. Gee, I thought, am I completely without principles? A mere sucker for a smile and casual smarmy quip? Or was this a well-intentioned college marketing scheme gone just a little sideways?

Long Summer's Gone

Been getting mini-bum saunas since returning to Dubai two weeks ago, at the ladies room at work. Water from the rooftop tank is so hot from the desert sun that as you sit your dainty derriere onto the commode, it's like trying to get into a bath that's still too hot. To be away from Dubai for two months, and then to come back during the holy month of Ramadan, when it's 115 degrees and humid, where you can't drink water in public during fasting hours until the holy month is over, can be a little shocking, if not draining.

We've lived here 2 years now and to certain things we've become accustomed, some of them shamefully so. Inexpensive help at home, for one. Having a smiley live-in nanny / cook / housekeeper (especially one that irons) is something I will never recover from once back on the normal part of the planet. Thank you Chamri! British English vernacular for another, as I sit here on a holiday recovering from 'the dreaded lurgy' I caught in Turkey, while my kids 'natter on' about the new neighbors. And then there are the gorgeous hotel bars on the Gulf, with their impeccably coiffed east-Asian staff, and cocktails stirred to perfection.

But despite soaking it up as expats in the Gulf, there is a nagging guilt sometimes that I might be helping to sustain a largely immigrant culture where the workers are often subtly oppressed and in many cases outright neglected and abused. A story in the paper this week revealed 75 stranded Pakistani and Indian laborers whose company closed up shop and left them on the un-airconditioned premises during desert summer, with no passports, money or food. The local mosque and Indian embassy came forward with aid, but only after these guys suffered several miserable days without safe drinking water or a cool place to rest.

And then there is the delicate issue of other nannies we know in the community, some of them working for families who delay and withhold their pay, keep their passports, work them night and day, and provide merely a cot in the pantry as accommodation. Is living in a country where these things are commonplace a tacit approval of the prevailing cultural norms? The shameful thing about it is that when these issues are right in front of my face, I have the mind to say to myself "What on Earth am I doing here?" But then my own reality takes over, and my gaze shifts over to my kids, their expensive school shoes, our next holiday plans, the working conditions at the women's college where I work, and all of the abuse, neglect and human rights issues recede into near non-existence.

An American Minority

Dubai holds up a fantastic reputation for its shopping, the outrageous theme-park-style malls, and for having more international brands represented than any other city in the world. But just try and find a simple America-themed t-shirt, and you start to wonder what all the fuss is about.

Over the last couple of weeks, we've been poorly parenting our children by schlepping them all over town to pubs and malls to view the World Cup games, at sometimes less than family-friendly hours of the day. But in our quest to get into the spirit, we've been disappointed in the shops, which offer almost every major and minor footballing country's colors and emblems on jerseys, hats, pins, flags, and even Crocs shoes, except for the United States. We've also been disappointed in our own wardrobes, which are surprisingly thin in patriotic wear, and so we've had to settle for blue OBAMA ball caps to make our American affiliation known, in a world of Brits, Continental Europeans, and large contingent of South Africans.

Our impression that Americans are underrepresented in this part of the world was confirmed last night, when the English and Americans were playing separate matches in the same time slot. We showed up at the Irish Village which promised to be airing both matches, and found that the England game was playing in the stadium tent on two back-to-back jumbo screens, while the American match was showing on a small screen that was basically holding the two jumbo England screens together. What can be said for the sparse group of Americans assembled in front of their modest screen, is that the vibe was far more civilized than the England section, with much less smoke and fewer falling-down fans. In the end, the Americans and Brits all ambled out, satisfied with wins and looking forward to the next round. Luckily, since we're departing tonight for summer break, we'll be in America by then, where we can watch the game, properly attired, in red and white and blue.

Gifts and Goodies of Another Sort

Laundry soap in 20-kilo bags, gallon-cans of milk powder, 10-Kilo bags of rice, 10-packs of Dove soap, chocolates, cookies, shampoo, conditioner, traditional Sri Lankan saris and six-dollar pairs of jeans, a brand new fridge, still-in-the-box IKEA computer desk, lofted bedframe, second hand queen mattress, and various baby supplies. Our nanny Chamri has been with us for almost two years now, and these are the items which, over that period, she has slowly beens stockpiling under her bed and in our various closets, in preparation for a major cargo shipment to support her family back home, in Colombo. By her estimate, she is sending enough milk powder to last her husband's extended family for an entire year. The fridge will be the family's first functional one in over four years, and the lofted bedframe is for a home-health worker she hopes to employ to take care of her aging grandma.


I only came to understand the extent of her project two nights ago, while we were having dinner, when a festival of Sri Lankan friends of Chamri's materialized in our front garden, with tape, giant rolls of plastic and other random salvaged packing materials, to help her get ready for the cargo guys who were due to pick up her shipment the next morning. Since it was still over a hundred degrees out there, it was a hot project, undertaken with the jovial industriousness that Santa in America might possess on Christmas Eve. While we worked through dinner, and offered help that was politely refused, "No, no Madum, we are not needing any help", Chamri went back and forth past the dining room carrying the vast stores of sundry goods out to her friends, who arranged and rearranged it, tied it, taped it and bundled it, into a huge mass of lumpy gray freight, with gifts and goodies of a very special sort.

Gifts and Goodies

The natives are getting restless. Students are emailing me, waiting for their grades to appear, and showing up at my desk with chocolates and picture frames, perfumes and fancy make up, hoping that their generosity (soft bribery) might soften up their serious English teacher. Some might call it grade grubbing. But seriously, I am a rule-following North American teacher who knows how to separate business from nonsense, and although I am a sucker for lovely gift baskets, and some ribbon tied around a bunch of flowers, or a neatly wrapped department-store gift, I do manage (I am pretty sure) to blindly apply the stringent criteria to their projects, papers and presentations. One of my most difficult groups of students, who had such a hard time getting their act together, came around to my desk with a little speech prepared: 'We know we made you very tired Miss, but we are happy for you helping us'. And that about sums it up.

Widening Horizons

Though I am often disgruntled about what is disallowed at the college, I was stunned this week by what was actually allowed. Ten male students from from our brother college were allowed to come to the auditorium on the women's campus and perform a charity concert. When it was first announced, I assumed it would be something traditional or somber. But as the event neared, the tickets sold out, and my students all informed me rather coyly that they would not be coming to my noon class on Thursday. I was then asked 'kindly', by management, to please attend the event as a chaperone, where a raucous event ensued. The music was booming, the boys were jamming out covers of Arabic pop tunes and even some original music. The girls were dancing in their seats, filming with their blackberries, screaming their applause, and despite being told constantly to 'SSSIT' by the various deans and department heads wandering the aisles, they had an awesome hour and a half of normal college debauchery.

Though it might sound completely normal to you, it is not normal in a place where the culture prohibits dancing, live music (except the singing of the Koran) and mixing of the sexes. Knowing all of this, the institution where I work continues to be a strange college-aged environment. The students at the college are day students, and their exit from the college each day is restricted by their 'out' passes. So if a student with a 2pm out-pass approaches the security gate at say, 1:45, she will be directly turned back into college grounds by an Indian security guard. Families who send their girls to our college, (women in most countries but still 'girls' in this one) are comforted by our closed-campus environment. Guardians of our students have full access to their student records, and they even get to sign off on permissions for field trips. Crazy you might think, since most 20 year old women in the US or Europe, Australia and China, and Japan too, enjoy full-blown adult status. In these countries, 20 year old women can get drivers licenses, enroll in college, visit their friends, and more or less come and go as they please, on their own.

But this is a newly opened culture, a culture where many women over 60 did not attend anything more than the mosque school. Advancements are on the horizon, but we, and they, must be patient, lest all of the rich culture that goes along with the restrictive tradition be washed away with modernization. But such patience does not come easy to this modern American faculty member, and so often still I am struck silent by a student who is not ashamed to say that her husband won't let her get a driving license, or her brother disallows her to attend musical events at the college. I should be grateful for the honesty I suppose, but I can't help but be shocked by the unabashed 'OK-ed-ness' with the day-to-day restrictions placed on them by the patriarchal family figures. Not stirring the pot does not come easily for me, but pot-stirrers in this culture do not last long in their jobs, and cultural craziness aside, I more or less like my job. So my tongue remains tied (most of the time), and I am grateful for the growing number of students from the more open families, who can comfortably attend live music at the college, and talk about their wishes openly to visit my country, or even get a job and a license to drive.

Full Cover or Full Disclosure?

You eventually start to feel as if you you more or less 'get the culture', but it takes time.

This was explained to me many months ago, after a frazzling day of sand clouds, traffic jams, and demanding privileged students. As time goes by, some things do indeed become clearer. Muslim modesty, for example, by way of covering your hair, is a great comfort to many of our students, who say that fretting over bed-head would surely make them late for college. And so when the female-only occasions arise, such as wedding parties, the doing of the hair and the choosing of the gown becomes a monumental event deserving of a whole week's planning and preparation. I was lucky enough to experience a local wedding, first hand, when my colleague was invited to one 'with guests'.

Here is what I knew to expect:

• The reception is a female-only event.
• Food will be extravagent and come in huge amounts.
• The guest list will be in the hundreds, if not thousands.
• Alcohol is not permitted.
• Gowns (fancy and in some cases very revealing) will be worn underneath the traditional black abayas.

But here is what I learned in person, at the actual event:

• Weddings are where you'll find the greatest collection and quantity of the world's gold.
• There will be loud, booming Arabic music.
• All wait-staff will be female.
• There will be no cameras.
• Dancing, all females of course, is encouraged.
• Dancing will be mostly of the belly-wiggling and hair-swinging variety.
• Dancing is done between the tables and on a cat-walk type of stage, and in a manner that would seem to most westerners as if you have a genuine romantic interest in the people around you, and mind you, all of the people around you are women.
• There might be an MC, in our case, a gorgeous Egyptian woman, to encourage above-mentioned dancing and hooting and hollaring.
• Large whole lamb bones are ceremoniously served up on top of heaps of gorgeous aromatic rice.
• The finest most delicious selection of hot beverages will be continously offered, including Arabic coffee, sweetened Turkish mint tea, Indian milk tea and green tea.
• Arabic appetizers are the best food feature of the evening, such as hummous, olives, dates, warm Arabic breads, eggplant and pomegranate salads with warm figs.
• The bride and groom only appear late into the evening.
• When the groom does arrive, the women wearing gorgeous evening gowns and letting down their hair, will hurriedly cover back up, out of cultural tradition and respect for the new bride and groom.
• Some women will remain as covered as they do on the street.
• Others will flaunt their typically voluptuous figures.
• Perfume servers will come round with Disney-like giant perfume bottles to help you freshen up.
• Strong Arabic incense will welcome you to the venue and continue to burn throughout the night.
• And foreigners will be warmly welcomed and kissed by the mothers of the bride and groom.

How honoured we were to be invited, and part of the 500-plus guest list! If any of you ever get the chance to attend an Arabic wedding, here is my advice: practice your belly dancing, starve yourself the day before, and see if you can borrow some gold.

Snakes are not Snacks, or are they?

Snakes are not snacks, right? And fuzzy / fizzy drinks?? Which is it?

Now that I've properly medicated my migraine, I'd like to put all the ridiculousness of my work day in order.

For starters, one of my 'to do' items was to get through the marking of 21 research papers on nutrition. Don't know how I expected to do this, with four hours of special event duty (involving a cute wallpapered MINI COOPER car, see below), one session professional training, and a test to finish preparing for teachers. But alas, the student writings are what provide the color and chuckle to my week, and I am grateful these reports on eating habits were there at my desk. As you might imagine, 'snack' and 'coke' are top ten words in the world of nutrition, fuzzy (fizzy) drinks and oh yes fatty asses, ooops, I mean fatty acids. When the first student said something like, 'my family has a bad habit of eating snakes in front of the TV', I was like, giggle giggle, funny little Microsoft typo, her family eats snakes, teehee. But as I went on to find fizzy spelled fuzzy, and acid spelled asses, and yep, coke spelled like this:: cock, I really started wondering where the paper dictionaries are, and the lined composition books, and spelling practice lists. Seriously, I am not making these up: 'family snaking is a big problem', 'our snake habit is harming our health', and 'sweet snakes are my weakness' were all among the neatly organized fairly well cited little research papers.

Between quick bouts of grading these gems, I had 'escort duty' at the business department mini-mall project, where local retailers, such as Mini Cooper, BMW, Body Shop and Sunglass Hut, set up stalls, to be run by students, for an exercise in retail management. Just as my monthly migraine was gearing up for a massive crescendo, I somehow got drafted to escort female students on Mini Cooper test drives, as it would be improper for the males running the MINI stall to be alone in the car with our female students. Yes, you are all thinking, come on Christina, how many of us get paid to sit in the passenger seat of a zippy car on a sunny day and let students drive us around with the sunroof open? Well, let me just share a few facts: Most of our students are not licensed drivers. Of those who are licensed, many simply have the license as a matter of their education, and do not actually get to practice real driving. In addition, as this was a marketing thing for MINI, I was told: let them enjoy the drive, read: let them blare Indian pop music with their friends in the back seat as you drive around nearly missing the light posts, curbs and security guards lining the route. And last facts: my migraine meds were simply not working and I am employed by an institution where calling in sick, or going home with a headache, is not an easily-done thing.

So it's no wonder that when I finally get home to my husband whose car had just been hit and run in front of the kids' school, after we just dented up the vehicle ourselves by backing into a local fisherman's well over the weekend, that I burst into hysterics. That's when I went into the house, found myself a snake, a fuzzy drink, and a bowlful of fatty asses.

Rainy Days

I've been here in the Middle-East for two glorious winters, so I can now pronounce that I am an expert on UAE climate, don't you think? Despite the horrid 120 degree summers, which do begin before teaching ends and we all go away for the worst of it, the UAE winters are gorgeous, cool, dry, sunny stretches of pleasant eat-outdoors weather. My husband Billy has been taking every opportunity to fire up the grill, not only for the perfectly grilled mini-chicken pieces (harder to find hormone-grown plump birds here), but for the actual warmth provided by the grill on the chilly desert-winter nights. We actually refuse to dine in restaurants without al fresco seating right now, and routinely have our moring coffee outside. Life is good.

But last week, for the second time this winter, the rain came. It was as it is in novels, people smelling the rain, watching the sky for the rain, and predicting the rain for a few long unusually cloudy days, until the storm finally came and dumped several inches onto us and the sand, literally at once. They say it comes down harder and in greater quantities than in the past, and even more often. Though it hardly seems possible, since for two years now, there has been a sum total of two rainy spells each winter. When the downpour started, I have to say I was confused because we live in the Dubai Airport flight pattern, and the rain came down with such force that at first I thought it was a low-flying plane. But when it didn't stop after a minute and a half, I got out of bed, looked out onto the pool where I could hardly see its outline. It was a downpour, a fierce, heavy, steady opening of the sky. It went on like this for around an hour, after which I gently settled back into sleep, with the satisfaction of the unusual smell of rain in the air. How absolutely lovely I thought. The smell of rain.

The next morning's reality though, was anything but lovely. Roads were clogged and closed and blocked and cars were upto the runnung boards in water, plodding through to work and school, where everyone was late and nothing got done. The roads here are built to some strange desert standards, which means they simply do not drain, until the sun comes out to dry it up, or the big orange sucker trucks come to drain the low-lying roads and cart the water out to the gulf. So after an evening of rain-smell bliss, we suffered through two days of awful traffic, cancelled classes, required meetings and near-miss collisions with clueless people in the pond-strewn roads. There you have it. True Emirati Living.

Elephants and Chai

If you've lived in the Gulf for a while, it's no big deal when your friends go off on a vacation to India. It's a normal thing, a 3-hour flight, like an extended weekend with the gals in Napa Valley. But to a lot of us, especially those from clean and remote North America, going to India is still exotic, a little scary, and well, a major undertaking. Or so I thought.

We decided to spend my two-week college break in India, largely because of the airfare (under $300 per ticket) and because our old pals from Colorado are now living in Bangalore and they extended an invitation to their home. We bought our tickets, borrowed a guide book, visited the pharmacist and off we were, two packs of malaria pills and one family-sized immodium pack later.

Our decision to stay in Southern India was made mostly with the kids in mind. India is big (who knew?) and road travel and day trips are slow. (...think 4 lanes of cars on two-lane roads, sharing with cows, cycles, monkeys, rickshaws and ladies carrying firewood on their heads..) We visited our friends in Bangalore for three days which included an all-day outing to Mysore. The palace there, where Indian royals still live, is well worth the potholed-three-hour treck from Bangalore, and the Hindu imagery painted and sculpted throughout the place is amazing. But poor 5-year-old Rosie, just when she was getting the hang of being a Christian in a Muslim country, we take her to a place where the gods have 12 arms and the heads of elephants. Surely, we tell ourselves, this confusion is really just a world-citizen in the making.

Our Banglore friends helped us arrange family-friendly lodging, first in Tea Country near Munnar, and then in the Backwaters, where the most popular activity is touring the canals via houseboat. Tea country is gorgeous and rugged, mile upon mile of nearly vertically planted groves of Tea, where every morning we looked out onto the green hills dotted with colorful and quiet tea workers picking the leaves by hand.

The best thing about hanging out in this part of India for me was the Masala Chai, a spicy Indian black tea served uniquely wherever you go. It's amazing with the caffeine that I got any sleep at all. The kids favorite part was surely the animals - the nature, the mango and papaya trees, cashew trees, vanilla beans, fields of lemon grass, cardamom, and coffee plantations, which all offered a natural background for outings, which was new and vibrant and funny, including a one-armed monkey eating coconuts and a guy chopping fruit with a giant cartoon-sized knife. We went on every India tourist's 'must-do' elephant ride where we fed the enormous laid-back animal whole pineapples onto the end of his curled trunk while sitting on his back. The boys absolutely loved the feeding part, and they were game to wait again in line, not for the ride, but to get the elephant to pluck food from their hands with his trunk. We also cruised the backwaters on a houseboat for a day, where we saw villagers doing their wash, rice workers out in their fields and Kingfishers diving for dinner. Billy enjoyed the bird viewing, which included cormorants, egrets, cranes, kingfishers and lots of other diving birds with funny names and beaks and bright green feet. But I'm sure he also agrees with me that the local fruit, chili omelets, and Indian sambar for breakfast made each day excellent before it even got started.

Burj Dubai, Oops, I Meant Burj Khalifa

The opening of the world's tallest tower, The Burj Dubai, happened last night. Because the entire tower premises was reserved for VIPs, getting close was not an option, but we were lucky enough to watch it from the rooftop of a freind's villa. The view was lovely, and the 75 degree temperature was perfect for an evening outdoors.

If you follow this link, you can get an idea of what we saw.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yuk8bU-B5y4

The Burj Dubai (now renamed the Burj Khalifa by the Sheikh) is impressive against the modern but not very tall skyline of Dubai. It's over 800 meters tall, contains more than 50 elevators, houses Armani's flagship hotel, as well as deluxe residential flats and the world's tallest open-air observation deck, where a mere 50 dollar fee gets you access on the 'fast' elevator. And yes, it is shamefully impressive when you realize that so much of country's development has resulted in a massive world-famous debt crisis.

But alas, I have a job, and friends with cozy rooftops as well as an excellent family to kick around town with, so the debt crisis is as unreal to me as it might be to those of you who've never set foot in the middle east. The only really noticeable debt-related issue for us right now is that brunch reservations are easy to come by and the beaches are delightfully under-crowded. And oh yes, Billy's job has painlessly come to an end.

So we carry on with visits to our favorite stomping ground, the one-year-old Dubai Mall, which sits at the base of the Burj, where we've been dining regularly, not only to check in on the progress of the giant tower, but to take in the tallest choreographed fountain show in the world.

Check it out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYeFFyFJxqk