When a visitor arrives in the UAE, you pretty much have to take that person to a Dubai mall. Or two. Dubai is about shopping and malls even more than it is about top-end hotels and tall buildings. Dubai’s motto: “I shop, therefore I am.” The plan was to go to one mall, but Dubai […]

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And this does not involve soccer. I never thought I would encounter, in the UAE, anything even vaguely similar to the “prep football Friday nights” all sports journalists in the States know. For one, “football” here involves a round ball and, two, American football is rarely played here. As of about three years ago, it […]

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Another strange story. The world’s most popular and financially successful cricket competition, the Indian Premier League, will play the first two weeks of its season in the UAE. (A story The National’s Osman Samiuddin was all over today.) How weird is that? Imagine the NFL playings its first month of games in Canada. That’s how […]

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I have seen this too many times now to dismiss it as isolated incidents. Remember the New York Cosmos? The soccer team from the old North American Soccer League? Pele played for them. Franz Beckenbauer did. Giorgio Chinaglia. They were a thing for a few years, in an era when North America wasn’t actually ready […]

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The biggest, fastest, most expensive … that’s Dubai. It is a way of life there, at the metropolis an hour up the road from Abu Dhabi. A mindset. And the latest? The fastest police boat in the Gulf!

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Some of us are getting old waiting for Roger Federer to live up to our declarations of his imminent tennis demise. The man will be 33 in August, which (historically) has been too old to accomplish much, in tennis. And since the days of his absolute domination of the men’s game in the middle of […]

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Two weeks ago, the Dubai Duty Free Tennis Championships, women’s version, looked like what the Brits would call “a damp squib”. A dud, that is. (A squib being a firecracker. Yes, they have a different word for everything.) The tournament was hanging its hat on Agnieszka Radwanska, the world No. 3, but not exactly a […]

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First class is a way of life, in the UAE. For the Emirati citizens, certainly, but also for a significant chunk of western expats who eagerly join in to the notion of “only the best”. Today, one of the business reporters at The National did a piece about flying first class with Emirates, the Dubai-based […]

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Big stir here, over the new soccer stadium in Al Ain. A three-day festival, a lot of pomp and ceremony, lots of conversation about how spectacular the Hazza bin Zayed Stadium is. And it is. It’s quite nice. Fairly striking, from the outside (artist’s rendering, above), when it is lit up with Al Ain’s predominant […]

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A few of these surprised me. Starting with No. 1. Other surprises came from the cities not on the list. These are the 10 most heavily traveled routes, leaving from Abu Dhabi, per Etihad Airways, the government-owned, Abu Dhabi-based carrier — which just had a record year, as this National story notes, by number of […]

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