Utterly random anecdote.

UCLA was playing DePaul in the NCAA basketball West Regionals in, oh, 1979. The game was being played at BYU, and at halftime BYU sent out a batch of dancers, and the show ran long, and the Bruins came onto the court and started warming up, shooting around … while the hometown dancers were still doing their thing.

Instantly, a neutral crowd turned against UCLA. DePaul became the de facto home team, and Ray Meyer‘s guys, led by Mark Aguirre, went on to knock out the Bruins of David Greenwood, Roy Hamilton and Brad Holland, 95-91.

Afterwards, we were talking to DePaul players, and asking about how the crowd had gotten behind them, and one of DePaul’s guys said: “It was like a bunch of blimps came over at halftime and dropped in a whole new crowd.”

Or something silly and fun like that.

And for reasons not entirely clear to me, either, I thought of that quote in the week since we have returned to Abu Dhabi.

Because it’s like a bunch of blimps came over while we were gone and dropped in thousands of extra people.

Abu Dhabi empties out in the summer, and August is when you really notice it. You can cross the island in minutes. No lines at grocery checkout. We know it won’t last but, without thinking, we come to consider it the new reality.

Then comes September … and the blimps arrive.

Everyone is back. All the Brits who went home to their soggy islands for a month or three, the Emiratis who spent August in London or Munich, other expats who want to escape at leat part of the brutal UAE summer … they materialize anew.

Every trip takes half again as long. A quick trip to the supermarket becomes impossible. Parking spots become even more dear.

The Zeppelins have filled up the city again.