Wednesday night! We’re both off. Time to paint Abu Dhabi red. (And parts of it could use painting.)

Last week, bowling and the food court at the mall. How could we beat that?

An actual restaurant … and a movie, United Arab Emirates style.

This is a country with 6 million people, and about 2 million of them are from India.

So, if you have an Indian restaurant that is getting nice reviews in guidebooks … it just about has to be good, right?

We had seen several complimentary reviews of an Indian restaurant across Electra Street from where we’re staying. Nihal, it is called. We even had a menu. And since Leah likes almost anything Indian, and I generally like it too, if I don’t have an allergic reaction … well, there we were.

We strolled in about 7:30, and the place was almost empty. It’s a little early to be eating, apparently. But we had a movie to make, so … And they were selling lots of food; just that most of it was going out for delivery.  (One guide book suggests putting Nihal “on speed dial.”)

The menu is enormous, as it often is in Indian (and Chinese) restaurants.

Leah settled on lamb vindaloo. I had chicken masala.  The difference being the sort of curry that our meat came in. We each spent an extra 2 dirhams (55 cents or so, each) to get “boneless”meat. Tells you something about how dear cash is to some folks, if they offer meat with bones … so you can save 2 dirhams.

Leah had the foresight to order rice. To put the curried meat on. She also ordered naan bread (which is like tortillas except better) … and I had a bowl of lentil soup. Just because it sounded vegetable-y, and veggies are a bit hard to come by here.

The waiter was kind enough to offer degrees of heat in our curry. I went for mild. Leah went for medium. While waiting for our food, we got several big sheets of papadam with two types of dip — chutney and something that was a sort of mint cucumber. I’d never had chutney, but I liked it — both spicy and sweet at the same time. Jellied. Unique.

The portions of curry (with chunked meat in it) were fairly large. And the mound of rice was daunting.  So we did the best we could. We finished my chicken masala and got the rest of Leah’s lamb packed up, with the rice.

We took the leftovers back to the room, then went back down to the street to get a cab to the Abu Dhabi Mall to see the movie. We had decided on the Vince Vaughn movie. “Couples Retreat.” It hadn’t gotten good reviews, and if we had been in California we wouldn’t have seen it, but given the options (Bollywood and really bad U.S. movies) at the theater (which is next to Bowling City) … well, Vince Vaughn it is! (At some point he’ll talk really fast, and the words will pour out, and he won’t seem to breathe for about two minutes, and some of it has a chance of being funny. It’s what he does.)

The movie had moments. It also had moments that didn’t make it to the screen, in Abu Dhabi. I know this because the previews I saw in the States before we left included something from a yoga scene … in which the actress Malin Akerman announces “I don’t know that position” … with the clear hint that something obscene is going on.

Anyway, the whole scene … snipped. The actors are doing yoga, and they’ve just started … and the movie just jumped ahead … however long it took to finish that scene. We don’t do anything too suggestive in Abu Dhabi. I suppose the fact that most of the movie was shown, at all … is fairly liberal/progressive.

The theater was plush. The audience was eclectic: Asians, a half-dozen Emiratis, a few Euros. Most of them laughed at the same spots, which I found interesting.

Something else I noticed. When you’re in another country, you watch an American movie differently. You look for things that might offend the culture you’re living in. For instance, there was a “Couples Retreat” reference to some group “being like the Taliban except we let our women drive cars and go to school” … something like that … and the UAE, remember, is right next door to Saudi Arabia, where women are not allowed to drive cars. And I don’t know how long women have been going to school here, but I edited a story last week that had a stat in it about how something like 60 percent of Emirati women over the age of 40 are illiterate.

One of the movie previews was a cartoon movie in which the protagonist is an astronaut who carries a big American flag with him to plant when he lands … and I found myself sitting there wondering, “Do they ever get tired of American flags?”

Oh, we also had our first ice cream since we got here. Which seems like a long wait, right?  But the IC we’ve seen in stores looks as if it melted before it got into the freezer, and the Baskin Robbins stuff looked fresh.

So dinner, ice cream and a movie. We’re living hard now. And the entirety cost (let me do some addition) … 155 dirhams. Or about $42. Movie tickets were $8.10 (30 dirhams) each.

We will go back to the movies … if anything good makes its way over here.