Abu Dhabi Highlights and Insights

We had a great trip but of course there were highlights (in no particular order):

1) The Corniche

A few short years ago the Abu Dhabi beach front wasn't there.  Well of course it was there but it was apparently a shambled mess.  And then came the beautification that brought it to its present iconic state where it has become THE focal point of the city.  Everyone assembles there to ride bikes and other curious pedal vehicles, swim, drink and be.  That is everyone but the locals.  When we were there the Guggenheim Museum put on a show with searchlights that created a series of light patterns based on people's body rhythms.  A sensor was placed on the heart and its unique patterns, beats and waves were somehow translated into a series of flashing lights that differed from person to person.  You could also eat ice cream.

2) High Tea

It is often said that in England everything stops for tea... at 3 o'clock.  Well I do like a cuppa myself but not only at 3 o'clock.  And I do like what is known in swanky circles as High Tea.  I don't know why its called High Tea, after all its a bunch of sandwiches, scones and a nice piece of cake but if you put it in a smart hotel and wait staff with fancy uniforms, as far as I am concerned you can call it what you want.  I like it.  I like it a lot.  The first I had was at the Mandarin in Hong Kong.  The best was in the Peninsular also in Hong Kong.  The most recent was in the Emirates Palace Hotel in Abu Dhabi with its $3 billion cost, its gold bar ATM in the foyer, its cappucino with gold dust (doesn't taste llike gold at all, sort of a sweetish sugar).... The finger sandwiches were works of art, but very small, the scones also small but delicious as was the strawberry jam and clotted cream -- but if I was to be picky it wasn't Tiptree Little Scarlet. Mind you I still think the best cake was my Mum's chocolate cake with chocolate sugar cream glaze.  Now that WAS something.  I was eight at the time.  This one was pretty good though.

3) Lamb

After a night out at some part in your life, you've probably had a doner kebab.  With lettuce and tomato, possibly onions and definitely hot sauce all crammed into a pita, this is a great way to end an evening.  They should be called shawarma's.  They can be lamb, beef or chicken or a combination of any of them.  But that's not all about Arab food.  There are kofte's (minced lamb), kebabs (chunks of lamb) and lamb cutlets (lamb chops).  We ate local food as often as we could and it was always very, very good indeed.  Add freshly baked pita and combine with salad and probably one or more of the delicious mezzes (dips like humus, tabbouleh, etc) and that is a mouthful that sings.  We had dinner one night in the desert, in a Bedouin tent (as it was cold and windy), and it was lamb everything.  Just fantastic!  One thing does puzzle me is how lamb came to be such a meat staple in the UAE as there's no grass and therefore no grazing potential.  In the supermarkets the lamb all came from India, Australia or New Zealand.  So why lamb?  

4) Sand Dunes

I loved the Lawrence of Arabia film from the 1960's and the huge immensity of the deserts where they traveled and were portrayed.  Seeing as the British quit the UAE in 1968, much was probably filmed there.  Certainly when we stayed in the Anantara resort Qasr Al Sarab in the Liwa Oasis, the staff told us that there were film crews filming there all the time, the most recent being the latest Star Wars movie.  For sure the dunes are both massive and impressive.  No wonder it is called the Empty Quarter -- the biggest sand sea in the world.  Apparently it was the sea bed several million years ago and the sand is very fine indeed.  So fine that it gets everywhere.  On the first time we climbed the big dune outside our window, Viv emptied her shoes 3 times on the way up.  In places the water is only 3-5 metres below the surface so the cognoscenti here actually can find water even in this driest of dry places.  There's a plant that is of the onion family that has green leaves that are squishy and consequently much sought after by the desert animals of which there are many.  Driving through the desert is quite something too.  You have to be highly skilled drivers and let down the tyres to avoid flipping over which would not be good as there's nothing out there at all.  Really.  Nothing.  Oh yes and in the winter it gets really cold.  And the dunes do look all the same.

5) Pork Rooms

It is the Koran that sets out behavioural aspects of life in this part of the world.  A bit like the Talmud really as that book does the same for the Jews.  Included in both are many similarities one being the definition of pork as 'unclean' and therefore inedible.  I think this odd as not all pigs are unclean.  Maybe it's a hygiene thing related to how long meat lasted in the old days pre-fridges.  Perhaps there was greater chance of getting food poisoning from pork than say chicken.  Whatever the case may be, pork isn't to be found here other than by diligent search.  At the supermarket (and not all supermarkets either), you'll find pork in the Pork Room, a specially designated smallish room set away from the rest of the supermarket where all sorts of pork derivative products may be found: pork meat, sausages, hot dog, pork scratchings... and then other stuff like gelatin, some brands of jelly, etc.  Having porked up though, you still get to check out of the same counters as everyone else though.  

6) Planning for the Future
The population of the UAE is something north of 5 million of whom fewer than 1 million are emiratis.  2.5 million live in each of Dubai and Abu Dhabi with the remainder scattered around the other smaller emirates.  Pictures from the 1960's years ago show Abu Dhabi to have been the fort and a bunch of scattered tents and not much else.  Someone I know from Bermuda who lived there in the 1980's remembers quite a lot of newer buildings like the Sheraton on the 1/2 mile long Corniche.  Today the Corniche is miles and miles long and the 5-storey Sheraton about to be demolished and replaced by a gleaming 70-storey replacement.  As property on the main island itself can only be owned by emiratis by law, they have built or maybe just added to existing flat sand bar islands all along the coast upon which new developments are planned.  Miles upon miles upon miles of construction sites.  This is planning on steroids.  The ultimate field of dreams.  And Abu Dhabi is described as being less blingy than Dubai, that's one heck of a bar to beat.  Abu Dhabi is not that far behind though.  I'd say second place.  

The end of the Bridge to Nowhere... they just built it to a deserted island expecting it to be built upon at some point in the future.

7) Very Big Buildings
For such a small population, the buildings in Abu Dhabi are immense.  Not content with 20,30 or 40 storey buildings, double it seems to be the watch word when anything gets built.  Huge mosque, vast purpose built hotel (Emirates Palace), biggest shopping mall in the world (Yas Island), largest indoor theme park (Ferrari World -- yes, that's right.  Better sounding than Kia world isn't it?).  But then again there's lots of space and big ideas and lots and lots of money, so why not?  

8) Respect

Looking back through the history of Islam, one underlying current has been that of respect and tolerance for non-Muslims.  It hasn't been all milk and honey of course, but that was the idea anyway.  Abu Dhabi has it though but that tolerance comes with limits.  No overt displays of affection (i.e. holdng hands, kissing in public) is one.  Generally not pushing it is pretty much all the rest.  My brother-in-law had a book with an impressive number of do's and don'ts in it, most of which it seemed to me came down to using your common sense.  Being roaring drunk on a Saturday night may be de rigeur in South London clubs but here it could be enough to get you thrown out of the country, for example. Well it doesn't make sense in a non-drinking country to flaunt your drunkenness now, does it?  But it does happen.  When in Rome...

9) Humus
It's a bit difficult to identify specific cuisine for a specific country in this part of the world as all the mezzes (starters like humus, tabbouleh, fatoosh, etc.) are the same all the way until Greece.  That goes for many of the main courses too (lamb, kebabs, kofte) and the really sweet and sticky desserts all made with honey and pistachios (baklava and a whole host of others similar to that yummy sweet).  But we'd hoped to eat lots of humus and we sure did.  Everywhere does it slighlty differently thankfully so it was a gentle voyage of discovery through the chick pea and olive oil world.  What really made a difference was the monstrously light pita bread, some coming fresh from the oven like a blown up balloon.  Just fantastic.  We didn't manage to get sick of it in our near 3 weeks in the country either... mind you I'm not in a hurry to seek it out now I'm home yet!

10) Tea & Coffee

So if you can't drink alcohol and eat pork, what do you do?  Well, how about you smoke shishas and drink loads and loads of tea and coffee.  Fortunately I love tea and coffee (but I don't do shishas).  Mind you everybody else seems to do shishas and I have to say sharing a tea or coffee and a shisha and hanging out with a friend seems a pretty nice thing to do.  Everyone seems to do it.  Totally gender non-specific and at any time of day (and probably night too).  So what's your poison?  Well for teas, immediately forget English Breakfast and anything Chinese or Japanese.  How about a Moroccan Mint Tea?  Or a Pakistani herbal tea?  Or something Indian infused with a blend of spices (and not one of those trendy chai teas either)?  Yes please.  But if you fancy coffee, well now you're talking.  Arabs were the first people to actually use coffee as a beverage and they are very, very good at it.  In the nearby mall to where we were staying on the Corniche, there were 13 different coffee bars and other than Starbucks, they were all enormous.  How would you like your coffee?  Arab style -- weak looking but with cardamom to give it an other worldly taste?  Turkish -- so sweet and strong that it feels like you're drinking mud. Sweet mud, that is. Something else...?  Well its all here.  As for the shishas, most places that provide them have a couple of pages of options.  Who needs booze?

Great place.  Thanks for the memories!!

Retail Therapy

It had to happen.  The day dawned that we headed to one of the enormous malls with the intent to shop.  We chose the Al Marina Mall largely because it was the nearest and a nice walking distance from the apartment along the Corniche and across the bridge/causeway from the main island ... where only Emirati's may own property.

Al Marina Mall

The big thing was that the flag on the largest flagpole in the world was at half mast.  "Who's died?" we thought and then when we looked more closely we saw that the flag was actually being raised!  "Derr," we thought.  Obviously they raise it in the mornings.

Half Mast

However it turned out that the King of Saudi had died that morning so there was a reason for the flag to be at half mast after all.

The mall itself was enormous.  We'd arranged to head our separate ways for an hour but I hadn't even left the first floor before that time was up.  The blurb said the mall was 235,000 square metres in size -- times by 10 for square feet -- and it includes an ice skating rink and ski slope like the Emirates Mall in Dubai.  Apparently when it opened some leaks were discovered so rather than repair them, the operators simply left the slope as was.  So there it is now, dark and waiting for something.

Waiting, waiting...

And yes, every shop in the world appears to be there.  But its not the biggest mall in Abu Dhabi.  That is the Yas Mall which takes enormous to an all new level.

It was so intimidating that I couldn't bring myself to buy anything!

Well, apart from two or three coffees as there were 15 different coffee shops all packed to the gills with locals enjoying a coffee and sweet thing and perhaps a shisha.

Side by side coffee shops, both jammed

Coffee culture is alive and well in Abu Dhabi and the coffee shops on the whole do it very well indeed.

Call that a hotel? This is a hotel!

It only rains in Abu Dhabi on 2 or 3 days a year, tops, but on Monday it rained.  It actually rained on Tuesday as well, so that's it for the year then!  But we didn't go to the Emirates Palace Hotel on Tuesday, we went on Monday.

We would have done more but made it to Joe the Grocer's nearby for breakfast at which point it simply chucked it down with rain even more, so we couldn't leave and drank even more coffee.  Nice breakfast too but the coffees were the highlight.  Single bean, premium type coffee.  Viv's was from India, mine was from Rwanda.  Both firsts.  I bought some Indian to go with the Arabian coffee pot I'd bought the previous day as it was nice and mellow.

Artistic cappucino

We then walked to the Heritage Village at the end of the man made point facing the apartment, next to the world's largest free standing flagpole.

It was very small with a few wood faced stalls selling tourist stuff and a few archaeological artifacts together with some examples of typical Bedouin villages.  I expected more though.  Everything else seems to be big and well done, this was anything but.

The old with the new in the background.  I'd expected a bit more but perhaps that's all there is it to it.

This couldn't be said of the hotel though.  Wow!

Huge domed lobby area where a security guard told me that the dress code did not permit shorts of the length I was wearing -- namely Bermuda shorts.  But fortunately, he said, the concierge keeps loaners for dumbkopfs like me (he didn't say this but thought it).  So I traipsed back to the concierge who gave me a pitying smile and trundled off and brought back a perfectly ironed set of white trousers which I put on over the top of my shorts.

The dumpkopf's loaners, beautifully ironed.

So ready to go, we reproceeded through the lobby area and found THE only ATM in the world that dispenses gold bars.  It turns out that they weren't gold bars but tags that you put on a bracelet or use on a key chain.  I'd expected chunky bars but realistically gold is a heavy metal so it makes sense.

I spotted one of these at the airport too so its not the only one

Time for tea though.

I'd had my mind set on this since I'd read about it and it was the real thing.  Small perfectly crafted sandwiches with crusts cut off, small scones with strawberry jam and clotted cream (also lemon curd and rose petal jam for some reason, maybe its a local thing) and some fancy pastries, many chocolate.

Coffee with gold dust.  Whatever next?  Actually it tasted like sugar.

We both agreed we'd have preferred more sandwiches and no fancy cakes but still with a couple of glasses of champagne each it was a more than pleasant way to spend an afternoon.

Some hotel!!

Many Happy Returns

It has been a long trip, about 7 weeks in all, with highlights all along the way.  Here they are in no particular order:

Apple Turnover -- Texas Bakery, Galveston, Texas

Some days you really feel the need for something sweet early in the day.  The day we left Galveston was one such.  On the road our routine was to stop at a McDonald's drive thru for coffee, as it is always good and hot, but that day our sweet teeth were jangling.

Luckily we found the Texas Bakery on the main street out of Galveston called the Broadway.  The pastry was crisp and perfect whilst the filling unusually was not the gut wrenching sweetness that is often the case but actually tasted of apples.

Just perfect.

Chinese Hot Pot -- Uncle Dick's house, San Francisco, California

The final meal of our stay in SF was another home cooked meal, in fact it was a self-cooked meal, that included large numbers of extended family members called 'Da Binh Lo'.  This is a phonetic rendition on how it sounds to my non-Chinese ears.

Take a bubbling pot of broth, we had chicken and vegetable.  We also had 3 different pots, one just for the children.  Prepare endless thin cuts of meat, veggies, sea food of all sorts and leave on the side.  Connie did this and it took ages I imagine.

Seat everyone down in a mass and let them fondue style dip the meat, sea food, veggies, etc into the bubbling broth until cooked and then consume.  Dipping in sauce of varied types is optional.

As a family style event, this is about as good as it gets.  Because the ingredients are slight, it takes ages both to cook and to eat a sizeable amount so it really is difficult to eat too much.

But it is a fun way to get together with family.

Perry's Steakhouse, Austin, Texas

Possibly the best steak I have ever eaten or maybe just because it was a fantastic evening that was totally unplanned.

Viv and I had been to the Food & Wine Fair and were strolling around the downtown area fairly aimlessly until we saw a couple of young guys who were valet parking cars.  This usually means a restaurant so we paid attention and read the sign: Perry's Steakhouse.  In our experience steakhouses usually make good martini's which was just what we fancied at that moment so we went indoors and sat at the bar.

Very good the martini's were too.

Somewhere along the way at the Fair I'd picked up several beer glasses I had vague notions of bringing home and as we finished our first drink the barman asked if he could wash them for us.

How nice of him.  We had to have another drink!

When we ultimately reached a table to eat, we found an enormous, packed and elegant restaurant with yet another really pleasant and attentive waiter -- this has been widespread actually.

And the Porterhouse steak we shared… fabulous.

Wild Flowers -- Texas

The time of year was perfect for Texas wild flowers.  Springtime with plenty of sunshine.  They were everywhere.  Particularly at the side of the freeways we drove along.

The Dallas/Houston stretch was best as the grass in which the flowers were growing -- particularly the Blue Bonnets -- was so low.  By the following week, the grass had grown a bit more and concealed the flowers a bit more.

Just beautiful.

Redwoods -- Howland Hill Road, Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park, Crescent City, California

The redwoods everywhere were fabulous but this 10 mile drive through a first growth redwood forest along unpaved roads was the best.

Huge redwoods all along the road with walking trails spiralling out in all directions.

Breath taking.

Stockyards -- Fort Worth, Texas

Who doesn't like cowboys?  It was the stuff we were brought up on after all.  The Lone Ranger, Rawhide, Matt Dillon, Maverick … you name them.  Just brilliant.  And the Stockyards at Fort Worth tries to recreate it all.

The Stockyards Hotel was just about perfect too right down to the holes in the bedroom shutters I imagined were bullet holes from a shoot out.

The one thing I couldn't find was swinging doors in a saloon.  These days they are all air conditioned!  Aaagh.

Silvercar -- San Francisco and Dallas, Texas

I've droned on about how good this car rental experience was so won't carry on beyond repeating their own PR mantra -- "Finally a car rental company that doesn't suck".

It helps of course that everything is simple; the pick up, drop off and the car itself -- a fully loaded Audi A4.

I happen to like Audi A4's too so this is just about perfect for me!

Napa Valley -- Napa, California

We'd planned this ahead of time and rented a big car/wagon to take Viv and I along with Alex, Ali, Cat and Anna -- all our own family in fact.

The weather on the first day wasn't great but that didn't stop us having a terrific time.  Things cleared up the next day for our wine tasting series.  We had a lot of really nice wines too.

All in all just lovely.

Public Transport -- Miami, Florida

The day we caught the bus that first time in Miami to the tennis tournament on Key Biscayne set the standard for the trip as a whole and encouraged us to use public transport as and where we could.

It worked very well indeed.

"Houston, we have a problem" -- NASA Museum, Houston, Texas

Just brilliant.  All of it.  I pushed every button I could and imagined the launch of endless rockets to the Moon.

I was a teenager all over again!

Porterhouse Steak and Wine -- Deerfield Winery, Sonoma, California

We were staying at the Deerfield Winery as guests of our Bermuda friend John and had planned a wine tasting with our hosts, Robert and PJ, the managers and wine maker extraordinaire.  Unexpectedly we found a kitchen in the cottage we were in so bought in some local grass fed steak (we chose a huge Porterhouse) for dinner after that wine tasting.

We found an entire family already tasting wine with PJ so had to race to catch up (we didn't really have to) and by the time Robert arrived we were at the end of the tasting, the family had gone and PJ had opened yet another bottle.  This had gone after a while so Robert opened another …

The steak was fantastic too!

Espresso -- One Log House, Route 1, Northern California

Probably the best coffee of the entire trip was on Route 1 in northern California next to a tacky tourist attraction.

So good that I had to have another.

Honourable Mentions

Luckenbach, Texas

Barton Springs, Austin, Texas

Standard Pour Bar, Dallas, Texas