Musical Double-Bill Dubai style

Living in a town where we have to grab what cultural events we can get our hands on we sometimes end up with strange combinations. Welsh opera and 80's Rock, anyone?

Wales@Wafi was a little sales show to give us a taste of the attractions of 'Wales. World Nation'. An interactive stand to show to geography of the place and a duet of opera singers were presented to attract the attention of bored designer shoppers. Sweet, but selling a friendly, inoffensive place like Wales with a slightly country-bumpkin reputation to these jaded visitors to the glitziest and emptiest shopping place of them all is going to be an uphill struggle.

Tenor vs. Knopfler - It's Alien vs. Predator in the Musical Arena

In the evening there was Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits. A whole other thing. This guy can rock on down. All the Straits hits and a lot of his own new stuff (links require iTunes to be installed), which was a great showcase for his superb guitar skills. The venue was great, too: the outdoor amphitheatre at Media City has good acoustics and when you get bored you can watch the big cranes with their bright spotlights swing round the Marina building site across the way with its 24-hour, non-stop operation like giant storks. Or watch the late-night workers in the media offices behind the back of the stage lit up by their computer screens.

Winter Calm

You know how winter is supposed to be the quiet time of the year, where apart from Christmas nothing much happens? This winter has been the busiest, most hectic and complicated ever.

I have been to India, Egypt, the UK and France while Stuart has travelled to Paris and Brussels more times than seems feasible, as well as Hong Kong, Mumbai and Stockholm. We went on holiday to Egypt, then we had visitors. We went to Chennai, then had some more visitors. In between Dubai staged a film, a shopping and a jazz festival. Soon we're off to Zanzibar. And through most of it Anna has been keeping us company. We thought we weren't sociable, but I guess we are more people-friendly than I expected.

Bring on nice quiet uneventful summer.

Green Desert

Trips to Fossil Rock and Hatta Pools have become regular weekend features for us. But this week the desert was a quite different sight.

We have had a lot of rain this winter, much more than last year. Since Mark and Martina arrived it has rained three times, and when Naime and Thomas were here we faced the embarrassment of having to lend them jumpers since we had told them it was going to be warm and then turned out to be quite chilly.

As an introduction to the local countryside we took Mark and Martina to Fossil Rock, a short drive through the dunes from Al-Awir towards the mountains. But where normally there are just a few grey scrubs and some dead-looking branches sticking out of the ground this time the sand was covered in clumps of sharp green grasses, faint meadows of white and yellow flowers and bushes with red blooms. The camels were having a field day.

It was amazing to see how plants can grow in the fine sand as soon as there is some water. The leeside of dunes, where the shade keeps the rain water on the surface, were coloured a delicate pale green with soft growth. Digging just a few inches revealed the sand to be damp, soaked full with moisture.

Flowers in the Desert

Hatta, normally a forbidding reddish-grey mountain range, had taken on a faint blue-green shimmer in the crags and crevasses where the water collected. The normally rare pools on the wadi floor had spread, so that there were rivulets of water in most places, supporting frogs, dragon flies, spiders and fish in an inhospitable climate.

Desert Dwellers (frog and dragonfly © Mark Locker 2005)