After leaving the U.S. for Abu Dhabi, in 2009, my interest in college basketball waned. As I noted in blog posts from recent years, while living in the UAE, it requires work to follow the college game from the other side of the world. Too many teams, too many games, too big a time gap […]

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Curiously, for the first 44 years of its history, the United Arab Emirates outsourced the making of its money. As in, printing bank notes and minting coins. I know the UAE dirham notes well, having carried them around in my pocket for the six-plus years I lived in the country. I had no idea, however, […]

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Great story out of Italy. FC Crotone, a small club from the deep south of the country, qualified to play in the top-flight Seria A this season — a first for the club from an ancient city in the deep south of the country. As one might imagine, the local fans of calcio were quite […]

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I like to attend Christmas Eve services. Preferably of the “candlelight” variety. I have attended one every December 24 since I was 13 — aside from one year in Long Beach when we got the starting time of a service wrong and arrived just as everyone was leaving. Options for church-going in this part of […]

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For the past seven years, I dreaded the winter solstice. Now, however, I am happy to see it, considering what it represents.

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We left Abu Dhabi a year ago today, and it seems more distant in time than that. Adapting to the south of France, buying a house, getting key renovations made, moving in … that seems like the effort of more than a year. Meantime, lots of things were going on back in the UAE, a […]

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Another Christmas season overseas, another British-themed Christmas service, my seventh in eight years. We have done enough of these now that I even know the music to “Once in Royal David’s City”, which apparently starts every British Christmas service — at least among Protestants. In Abu Dhabi, the Anglican events tended to follow the regular […]

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I feel confident in saying I am as big a soccer fan as anyone in my age cohort who was born and raised in the United States. Came to the game late, got involved as a self-taught AYSO coach, volunteered to cover the U.S. national team, saw Paul Caligiuri’s Shot Heard Round the World, went […]

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His given name was Luiz Carlos Saroli, but he was known by the informal Caio Junior, going back to his playing days in Portugal and his native Brazil. And that is how we referred to him in the pages of The National while he coached in the UAE. He died in a plane crash tonight, […]

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We now have added the Languedoc to places in the world where we have had Thanksgiving dinner. That ends a period of five years out of seven when we celebrated Thanksgiving in Abu Dhabi. The exceptions were … when we spent it in Paris (inviting some people over to where we were staying) and when […]

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