Hmm. Three Easters, now, spent in the UAE, an overwhelmingly Muslim country. And I have done the same thing three years running. I suppose that makes it a tradition.

I again walked over to St. Andrews, the Anglican church near where I live, for the Maundy Thursday service, and by searching the word “Maundy” (which doesn’t get much use, does it, outside Easter week) on this site I came up with my 2010 entry and my 2011 entry.

We have a pattern here, ladies and gentlemen.

Do I have anything new to report?

Maybe it’s more a confirmation of observations.

The congregation continues to be mostly Asians from the subcontinent. Indians mostly, I believe, families of them. A few East Asians, and a smattering of Europeans, nearly all of them English, from what I can deduce.

(I find it interesting that British colonialism seemed to penetrate the lives of the colonized in close-to-home ways. Like religion. But also in sports, like cricket, and even the rhythms of the day, like tea time. American “imperialism” is much more a pop-culture thing: movies, television and music. The American Century didn’t seem to win many hearts. Minds, yes. But not hearts. Large chunks of people all over the world — well, in the former British colonies, anyway, and thinking India in particular — still like to act what they think Britons act like.)

So. Perhaps 100 people for a 6:30 p.m. service, with more than half arriving after the start, probably because they were hung up at work or slowed by traffic.

(Thursday night, remember, is Friday night, USA style, in the Muslim world, with the same sort of end-of-the-work-week moving and traffic.)

I still find the feet-washing thing, at the Anglican Maundy Thursday service, to be odd. I find the organization of the service to be familiar, however. And I continue to be astonished that apparently the whole of the Anglican hymn book is unfamiliar to me, even their versions of what I call “camp fire” songs. They have their own set. Entirely. Just as they have their own set of traditional hymns.

(I am reminded of the comedian Steve Martin’s faux-exasperated criticism of the French. “They have a different word for everything.”)

I continue to be impressed by how many other Christian groups use the St. Andrews grounds. At least two other services were going on at the same time in an area not all that big, including what may have been a Greek Orthodox mass (and a well-attended one) out in the patio.

St. Andrews is on a plot that seems to be no bigger than an acre, and probably less, and that includes the footprint for the church and the parish hall and offices. But they somehow cram in there Maronites and Copts and all sorts of other folks.

The three church buildings in town, which I believe are the only churches in Abu Dhabi City, are distinct by being in the same small geographical patch. The “Christian ghetto,” if you will.

The churches are the Evangelical (generally American pentecostal) church, the Anglican church and the Roman Catholic church, which has even more people going through it, mostly Filipinos, who are by far the largest mostly-Christian group in the UAE (about 500,000 of them in an overall population of 7 million).

It makes for a very crowded neighborhood, on the major Christian holidays. Parking at a premium, taxis disgorging passengers, streets clogged. I wonder what the Muslim neighbors make of it all.

(Though there is a history of Islamic governments allowing Christians to practice their religion inside their territories.)

I have mentioned before that I like Maundy Thursday. It’s rather like Christmas Eve (which I like, too), in that it seems to set up the actual holiday (Easter, Christmas; and now that I think of it, Halloween is the night before what was once a major Christian holiday, All Saints Day.). The services also are at night, which has always been easier for me to attend, as a journalist who has worked 99 percent of all Sundays in his adult life and has rarely been out of bed before 9 a.m.

In a country with a mosque every few hundred yards, and with broadcast calls to prayer going off fives times a day, it can be easy for much of the church calendar to pass you by. Not Christmas, so much, because some of the businesses here actually are on board with the commercial aspects of it, and the Emiratis have an almost pathetic interest in snow and fake snow and the concept of snow and real winter. Since they have none here.

Easter, however, can pass you right by, in the Gulf, with zero outward signs of it. In Abu Dhabi, you need to get inside this one specific neighborhood, and know what you’re looking for, and then you find the Christians.

And I believe I will stick with the Anglicans, thank you. The hymns are weird, and some of their choices seem odd, but in terms of doctrine (and all Lutherans are brought up on doctrine), I deem them closer to what I do and know than the other two.

So, yes, it does feel a bit like Easter. Not from seeing it or hearing about it, outside this one-hour service. But from sitting in a room with nothing but Christians. Which basically never happens here, otherwise.