Death

Sharjah's Al Wahda Street. It used to be where Dubai came for the night out, you know. Honestly. It was a really kickin’ place by night – even today, its cellars can tell some stories from back then. After the big change in Sharjah, Al Wahda Street had to fall back on its other trade – being a second Beirut. During the civil war, so many families made their homes in Sharjah and Al Wahda Street was where they loved to live, eat and shop. There were classics: Red Shoe, Old Shoe, Bird, Valencia, Penguin – mad shoe shops, sharp suit shops: tailors that called you ‘Seer’ and knew what they were doing and more slicked back hair and Lebanese shop assistant attitude than you could shake a stick at. Everyone used to ‘do’ Al Wahda Street for clothes and stuff. It was just class – Al Aroubah Street was always Indian, all saris and souks, but Al Wahda was where you’d do the maddest Mediterranean magnificence.

At one stage in the '80s, some wag produced a spoof UAE job application form. It was one of those things that plays on the various nationalities that make up the 'entrepot' that everyone used to go on about so much. You had to tick your nationality and give your address. If you ticked Lebanese, it directed you to the question, "Where on Al Wahda Street do you live?"
It was funny because it rang true - Al Wahda Street was always a Little Lebanon. And that's what made it wonderful.

Shopping on Al Wahda Street was just a total pleasure; it always rewarded an evening’s wander, dipping into the stores, dropping by at Al Mallah for a shawarma or fatayeh and maybe a jooce cocktail. It was always part discovery, part entertainment – flashing neon lights and amazing, flashy fashions. And during the very height of the civil war, it was a place where a community in diaspora still lived as if nothing was happening, as if their families weren’t sitting in the cellars listening to the crack and thud of gunfire above and living off cream crackers or whatever else they could get their hands on that day. Somehow, Al Wahda Street's zeitgeist was to escape the civil war but was of it. It’s sort of complicated.

And now it’s gone. Dead. A few sad, gasping vestiges of what was life and drama, laughter and celebration still remain, but they won’t outlast the roadworks. The traffic problems and then the sliproad started the rot, the parking metres confirmed it as a rot. Now the Wahda Street Masterplan Phase Four or whatever they’re calling it has really screwed things. Wahda Street is dead, extinguished by a strange and cack-handed attempt to do something, anything, with Sharjah’s traffic.

In the meantime, possibly the strangest and most dangerous diversion in the country now takes traffic from Dubaiwards up through the backroads between Al Wahda Street and the Industrial Estate: the mad two and three and two lane route snakes past shops and workshops, godowns and sideroads. Men on bicycles career around the corners, cycling against the traffic and groups of shalwar khameeses scurry across the road as the cars try and work out what they’re supposed to do in the face of a total lack of road markings and signage, let alone lighting. There are few barriers and those that are there have come askew. It’s a Wacky Races alleyway of death through the backstreets and someone’s going to get hurt pretty soon.

Is this really the best thing to have done? Is this really the apogee of urban planning? I really do wonder...

Where In The World Is Barnaby Bear?

You know all that fuss about Gillian Gibbons, the teacher whose class named a bear Mohammed in the Sudan? An interesting (or perhaps not, you be the judge) footnote to the whole mad incident, which incidentally left many Muslim friends and colleagues frustrated and irritated by the behaviour of the Sudanese, is that the bear's real name is likely to be Barnaby.

How do we know this? Because Gillian's a British teacher, she's likely to have been teaching Key Stage 1 of the British National Curriculum to her kids (it was a Year Two class, I believe) - and the geography curriculum involves a bear (rather a celebrated bear, Barnaby is a registered trademark of the Geographical Association and even has his own website). There are a number of ways of using Barnaby to teach young children geography - one common geographical activity involves using Barnaby Bear, who is taken home by the children in turn at the weekends - they then 'write up' where in the world Barnaby Bear went over the weekend. Fun, no?

This particular Barnaby, believed to still be in custody in the Sudan, is likely to have had a slightly more interesting diary than most...

Dubai Summer Surprises - Lift Surprises

I am daily reminded of the joys of unfettered multiculturalism. I’m not sure if there are many places on earth that are quite so polyglot as Dubai, the city that, more than any other, sits on the cultural tectonic between East and West. It is here that cheap sub-continental and Asian labour rubs shoulders with Western White Collars, where retail staff earning $200 a month serve shoppers earning $200,000 a year and more and where Indian labourers working for Irish contractors build Australian designed towers for Arab companies to sell to Indian investors.

And, let us forget the important stuff that is the lifeblood of this odd multinational mixture, we’re all of us better off for being here. Tens of nationalities co-exist here, at times uncomfortably but at least in broad consensus. The oddities and differences, however, can provide fascinating anthropological material.

Take lifts. In this part of the world, lifts often have mirrored back panels. This can provide much amusement for the amusedly inclined.

If you are ever moved to touch a Balinese person on the head, restrain yourself. It’s the worst insult and you’ll end up, if you’re lucky, with a black eye. If you’re Dutch, you’ll likely end up with a rice sickle buried in your chest. A strong veneration for the head appears to be core to Bali’s animistic Hinduism, as well as forming something of a preoccupation for Hindus in general.

So, when in Dubai, do expect Indian chaps entering a lift to notice the mirror, admire themselves fleetingly and then whip out a comb and start to re-shape the super-cranial keratin (hair). Perhaps amusingly, this ritual grooming invariably takes precedence over selecting a destination floor, leaving one’s fleeting travelling companion impeccably groomed but unfloored.

For some reason, many people from the East see the process of calling a lift differently from Europeans. In Europe, and many parts of East Asia, one presses the ‘up’ button if one wishes to go up and the ‘down’ button if one wishes to go down. In Asia, particularly India, it seems that one presses the ‘up’ button to summon a lift up and the ‘down’ button to summon a lift down.

So, if on the ground floor of a 10 story building, many people in Dubai press the down button to call the lift down to them. If you’re on the 8^th story of a 10 story building and aiming to go down, the best thing to do is call the ‘up’ button on the grounds that the lifts are more likely to be below you than above. Often people press both ‘up’ and ‘down’ buttons as this increases the statistical likelihood of the lift coming more quickly. Because this is at odds with the way lifts are programmed, this results in many people being transported in the contrary vertical direction to that desired.

All of which explains why, occasionally, I call the lift from our basement carparking to find it already filled with people grinning out at me as I gape at them. Then the doors close again and they are taken away from me. Which, as summer has arrived and the humidity has rendered the air moist, thick and soupy (I swear I saw a wadi fish swimming past my head the other day), is lucky because people can become subject to violent irritability in these conditions.

Incidentally, I declare Summer upon us with some trepidation as Gulf News has not marked its official advent with a picture of a pigeon drinking from a standpipe or labourers resting in the shade. But I do feel I'm on the right lines and offical confirmation should come soon...