Tiger Beer!

Just got home after a few tiger beers and a nice piece of "steak" said with a Jude Law (from my Blueberry Nights)accent...Badger Bazrett knows what I mean...Jude Law does not do a northern accent very well!

We ate and drank at Loca, which was formally known as "El Paso" formally "The Alamo," a bastion for western expats in Dubai, now all rather modern and trendy and very pleasant for a chilled out beer or two. My house mate's German colleges were in town drinking with us and I got out before it got messy and they took "prisoners", so to speak! Plus the fact that its a school night and one more day of work beckons before proper end of week drinks commence in less than 24 hours. Thank you to my friend's company for the free beer and food, its nice to know that expense accounts are still abused from time to time...prost!

Wonder Years...

So anyways, its the middle of the working week and the weekend won’t come quick enough and when it does it won’t hang around long enough. I shouldn’t be wishing time away as it goes fast enough already and I’m gonna be 40 next year...shit now I’m depressed!

I left school over 20 years ago, where has the time gone? People say the best years of your life are the ones spent at school. I don’t totally agree with that concept, I had a good time when I was a kid, then a teenager, but school was never that exciting for me except when we had school holidays. For the majority of us its a shame that when we grow up we can’t have or afford the same amount of holidays we got when we were at school.

Since leaving school its difficult to determine what “lessons in life” I’ve learnt and when. However one thing I can benchmark my understanding of “life” would be the movies I have watched, but specifically the movies I have watched more than once. The best example of this that springs to mind would be the Ron Reiner classic “When Harry Met Sally”, I saw this when I was 17, with my best mate, when it was released in 1989. We all remember the “orgasm” scene that the trailers and advertising for the movie used this to great effect. But I remember very clearly leaving the cinema not really understanding this romantic comedy and feeling somewhat disappointed. Four years later, with my girlfriend at the time, I watched it a second time, and it all (well nearly all) made sense! I laughed throughout the entire picture and after wondered what I’d missed the first time around....”life” was the logical answer, I’d experienced a bit of life as a grown up! Since then I must have watched “When Harry Met Sally” a dozen times or more and every time there is always a part which strikes a chord with me, serious or funny....but sadly I still haven’t made a woman “meow!”

Dubai through an SLR Lens

My brother visited the UAE at Christmas and took a lot of pictures check out the results here http://www.vimeo.com/8690605 please give it a thumbs up on vimeo!

Thanks Badger Bazrett!

Thanks for the blog profile picture over there on the right! Be sure to read her blog www.alf13b.wordpress.com :-)

Same Same Shit Different Day!

Today is Monday (again), after the UAE weekend shot past and Sunday went by in the blink of an eye, we are rapidly approaching the middle of the working week (Tuesday lunchtime), once that has passed we’ll be thankful for the start of another short weekend.

Time seems to go much quicker here in the Middle East something I have never managed to control since arriving from the UK in April 2006. I have developed a theory of why time seems faster for me, which put simply, is because Dubai is nearer to the equator than my home town in the UK. This means we actually travel further (around the earth’s rotational axis) in a 24 hour period in the UAE than we do in the UK....Agreed? So my theory is this, if we travel further in one day we actually have to travel faster, which means time goes quicker....sounds plausible right? Well it’s the only thing that keeps me sane at times....

On the subject of sanity it becomes more and more apparent every day I continue to exist in this sun blessed country that you have to be mad to live here, if for no other reason other than to avoid losing your rag. Jeez, if only people would listen and understand what is asked of them we would all be in a better place. I know I am asking too much and in danger of falling into the “same same” scenario but I try very hard to fight it every day. Vicki Pollard from “Little Britain” summed it up, “Yeah but no but yeah!” How he western expats living out here for 20 years or more have kept their sanity is beyond me some times, or maybe they just pretend!

Dubai has been good to me without doubt I have achieved some things which would not have been possible if I remained in the UK. Life here when it come to friends and socialising is not much different, from back home but I wonder what I am missing out on by not being at home with my old mates, but I realise that when I go home that things are not much different from when I left and while its great to see everybody, I find myself looking forward to getting back to the time warp of Dubai and the pending bullshit!

The Burj Khalifa

Spent the afternoon yesterday taking photographs around the world’s tallest building, now officially open, albeit possibly the “softest opening” a development or building has ever had, its presence in the “Downtown” area of the city is truly overwhelming. Nothing around it comes close in height and while there is still plenty of construction work around the foot of the building, this gleaming, alien entity has the effect of reducing the neighbouring buildings to toy town proportions.

Having been in Dubai for nearly 4 years I have, like many other people, watched the building grow from its infancy as a short ugly stump of construction of 40 storeys, to its fully grown height of 828m (confirmed apparently) encompassing 165 levels of “structural engineering perfection.” This giant way-finding compass point looms out at the inhabitants of Dubai from every angle.

Rumours in the past suggested the project was sinking by an inch every week and the structure required some revisiting when someone changed the specification halfway up, but as I said these were “just rumours.”

Wandering around on a very warm winter’s day, I felt somewhat humbled in the presence of the “Burj Khalifa” and noted how much of an attention grabber it has become, and not just in the headlines, everyone wants to be photographed in front of it. Most notably a Scottish holidaymaker who was barking orders at his family to position themselves accordingly in front of the tower while he insisted on lying on his back, camera pointing up at the building’s peak. All this excitement reminded me of my trip to Japan last year (not the Scotsman), where everyone seems to have a camera surgically attached to their person and are taking a photograph of someone standing in front of something important, insignificant, small or large.

When standing within 200m of the foot of the Burj Khalifa you have to adjust your stance when you look right up to the pinnacle to avoid straining your neck, its’ “that tall”, it just keeps going and going and going.

Even though there is plenty of building work to be completed across the whole of the Dubai “Downtown” development, the public keep flocking in with their main focus on the Dubai Mall (currently the biggest in the world) and its new shiny tall neighbour, I shall never get over just how many people come and go every day from this central hub, oblivious to the fact that the buildings around the Burj all look somewhat disheveled already and some of them have been open barely 2 years.

We investigated the possibility of an ascent to the viewing platform at the 124th floor, but found there were no available slots for the rest of the day, or the day after, or the day after that. “We’ll come back when the interest dies down,” I said...but I think it will be a very long time before that day arrives.

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