Celebrating Amman

The most marvellous thing about Amman is the sunset. Like Bath, the city’s built out of a single type of light cream stone (‘Jordan stone’ is increasingly popular as a cladding material in the Emirates) and so, like Bath, it is transformed by the dying sun into a display of stunning colour and shade: sienna, umber, orange and red.

I’m staying, for a change, at The Kempinski Hotel in Amman – it’s a strange little place, although by no means unpleasant. It’s in the middle of Shmeisani, which is the central restaurant and general ‘things happening’ district of Amman: a version of Dubai’s Satwa, I guess. I’ve pretty much always stayed at the Grand Hyatt before, although I have occasionally infested the Four Seasons as well. And I’ve done a few stays at the Intercon. Once, in 1988, I stayed at the Marriott.

I’d recommend the Kempinski Amman in a mild sort of way if you’re looking for a reasonably priced short stay business hotel and you’re not too fussed about getting the Greatest Breakfast in the Middle East. As everyone in their right mind knows, this is only available at the Hatta Fort Hotel…

The Amman Kempinski gets a number of the little things right and the room rate’s pretty keen. The Grand Hyatt remains my favourite Amman hotel, though – and the new(ish) seafood restaurant there, 32 North, is stunning – if expensive. Just think landlocked Mediterranean desert country and airfreighted fresh Northern European seafood and you’ll reconcile the price gap, I’m sure.

As I’m in Amman, both literally and figuratively: some other Jordan recommendations. Eat with a noisy group of friends at Jordanian Sushi pioneer Vinaigrette, to be found at the Al Qasr Hotel (It was, until recently, the Howard Johnson Hotel – and is also home to the popular ‘Nai’ nightclub), known locally as ‘Vinny’ or experience the amazing Fakhreddine, one of the great Arab restaurants of the Levant in Amman’s romantic First Circle area of 1920s villas. If you want to get funky, do a smart-arty salad lunch at the Wild Café, the USAID sponsored joint that overlooks the archaeologically sculpted ages past of the central Citadel or even go for evening drinks at the Blue Fig in Abdoun, just because you want to get deep into Jordanian youth art culture. You could also indulge yourself in a vodka dry Martini at the Four Seasons’ wickedly expensive Square Bar which is, famously, ‘Alex’s treat’. In winter, do the same thing but do it sitting by the fireside in the downstairs lounge. The Patio, my favourite warm winter place in Amman, has sadly gone. But you can recreate its unique culinary ambience, if you like, by going here.

BTW: I always enjoy when the airport transfer driver asks the inevitable question: “Is this your first time in Amman, Seer?” Because I get to answer that no, it’s not. It’s my 58^th. Which, I suppose, means that I should try to get out more or something…

Summer Respite in Amman

The weather in Jordan is, as usual, lovely. My only regret is that I'm here to work, sans Sarah, and not indulging my favourite summer pastime driving together around the deep countryside and marvelling at the many things Jordan presents to delight the curious visitor off the beaten tourist trails.

It's busy: Petra making it to number two spot in the New Seven Wonders of the World list has apparently already had a positive impact on tourism. It's amazing how the Middle East can bounce back: less than two years ago I was here commiserating with friends and staying in an empty Grand Hyatt, its lobby boarded up after the bombings the week before. I had flown in principally because we were supporting an art exhibition, called 'Into The Light', an exhibition by a number of Jordanian artists protesting the bombing. Now the tourists are flocking to the Second Wonder of the World again.

Which is nice for people here - although visiting Petra when you have the place entirely to yourself, as we did during the US invasion of Iraq, is an amazing experience that the teeming hordes will miss...

Dubai Grumpy Surprises

How strange. This blog set out, at least in part, to be a good-natured celebration of the rich source of amusement to be derived from the quixotic and frequently barmy Emirates and as the summer gets truly underway it’s just becoming grumpy and generally arsey – the very thing I didn’t want it to be! Blame the weather. The car’s thermometer is reading anywhere from 40-48C in the sun, the humidity’s way up on the gloopy hot air scale, everyone seems to have gone home or be travelling the world except for a smattering of bachelors - and our own leave, booked around two long-anticipated weddings, is still almost a month away.

All you want to do is crawl away under a tree somewhere cool and green and read books or wander through soft, cool spring rain.

Rats.

It’s almost enough to make you complain about living in a tax-free, beach-infested sunny place with wall to wall five star hotels that’s one of the most secure places in the world, isn’t it?

Which reminds me of being at home a couple of years ago with Sarah, who was trying to explain to someone at a party or something that living in the Emirates isn't really all life in a bed of roses. For instance, you can’t just go to the restaurant down the road here and get a bottle of wine with your food, because only hotels can legally serve alcohol. “Look,” she said. “We can’t even buy a drink unless we’re in a five star hotel!”

Woopsie. That one came out wrong! They were crying for us, they really were…

Meanwhile, over 600 people have now discovered an outlet for those summer frustrations... >;0)

The Beckhams Move Out

Who on earth cares about that silly woman and her obvious publicity stunts? Is anyone in the world falling for it outside the ever-hungry British red tops and Sky (thank God we've found another filler to keep that 24 hour feed moving) TV?

I wonder what it costs to have 100+ shills turn up at LAX and behave like real paps?

If your husband was minted, and about to turn in $120 million for the coming five years' work, would you use your kids as a publicity prop, or bother tipping off the media so that you could milk the subsequent airport feeding frenzy?

What drives her? And please tell me I'm not the only person that finds naked ambition ugly when the only thing between you and ambition's all too obvious bone structure (and pouting temperament) is a couple of pounds of silicon...

There. That feels better already. How cathartic a blog can be!

LOLcats – Beware the Children of the Meme

Am I the only person in the world who thinks that the only thing less funny than the much discussed LOL Cats is being boiled to death in your own tears? I freely confess to failing to see the purpose or humour in this most pathetic of memes. Cutesy, dumbed down and with little originality or witticism, they synthesise the worst of ‘Ahhh, look at kitty!’ with a touch of ‘Who loves the naughty kitty then?’ It’s enough to make you puke.

The Web has spawned many a meme before: a meme is a shared item of cultural information, a fancy way of explaining an oft-repeated joke, catchphrase or other aphorism. Think, ‘I’m not bovvered, does my face look bovvered?’ or ‘No but yes but no but well Lara Hopkins was having it away with Dwayne Pipe behind the bikesheds and I said no way you fat slag when her sister asked if I had any blurkers cos Lara din’t have none and she wanted to go again wiv im.’

Although a number of the people that think it’s funny to do bad impersonations of Vicky Pollard usually stop at the ‘No but yes but no but’ bit, the people that like Internet memes will eternally invent new things to put on the back of ‘Yes but no but yes but’ that perpetuate the joke. Most people would get bored after three iterations of the same fundamental gag, but not the Children of the Meme. You know how there’s always some spotty little Herbert at parties that takes the joke too far? Some jerk that does the Parrot Sketch or bits out of Black Adder, then calls you Baldrick all night until you take ‘em outside and beat 'em until they stop twitching?

Well, they’re all on the Web and they’re all chuckling over the LOLcats.

The LOLcats started with a mildly amusing idea: combine a picture of a cat or two with a caption that has the cat talking like a gangster rappa. You know, picture of Ernst Stavro Blofeld’s cat with the caption: ‘Iz cuz I’m black, innit’

The gorilla of LOLcat meme stores is ‘I can haz Cheezburger’, but please don't blame me if you choose to follow the link...

Mild smile the first time, for sure. Well done, good gag, move on. But how many more variations of that gag can one put up with before involuntarily losing the contents of the upper stomach? In case you’re wondering, the answer is four. If you are a Child of the Meme, the answer is four million.

Other, I would submit marginally funnier, memes that the Web has spawned over the past few years include The Tourist of Death and All Your Base Are Belong To Us. I blame Gianni for introducing me to both of these. Thankfully, he didn't mention the LOLcats to me, otherwise I'd have deleted him from my contacts.

Meanwhile, although his relatively famous and celebrated guitar playing cats are funny, I guarantee that Joel Veitch’s Spong Monkeys will make you laugh. Joel is arguably not a well young man and needs to be sectioned under the Mental Health Act, but there are few things more absurd and wildly funny in the world than the Spong Monkeys' Moon Song. Perhaps the Middle East policy of the current US administration...

The Penultimate Campaigner

A somewhat diffident young Englishman called Richard Abbott is leaving the UAE. There are a number of reasons why this is significant news, not least of which is that Richard was the editor of the region’s most famous and celebrated non-magazine, Campaign Middle East.

He is also the natural winner of the UAE leg of the William Dalrymple Lookalike Contest, but that's something else entirely.

This move does not bode well for any future that the cheeky little Haymarket licensed magazine had. Richard and team, having transferred from ITP with the title, had kept the faith for months, waiting for Motivate to gain a license to publish the magazine acquired from ITP in such mysterious circumstances. Nothing has happened since and now Richard’s leaving, it looks increasingly certain that nothing, indeed, is going to happen.

I’ll miss Campaign ME, and not just because I used to write a column in it every week (and was scheduled, to the surprise of some apparently, to write one under Motivate's aegis as well). I’ll miss it because it was an intelligent and occasionally even incisive weekly magazine about the industry in which I work and because it provided a good counterpoint and foil to the excellent Communicate.

Drinks with Richard tonight will be invariably tinged with sadness. But drinks is drinks…

PS: Iain Akerman is still at Motivate and therefore is truly the Last of the Mohicans...

And on the Pedestal These Words Appear: 'Goodyear Inflate to 30psi'

Driving down a desert road the other day, deep into the dunes on a four-lane ribbon of blacktop snaking into the distance, I saw two men sitting by the roadside in the middle of absolutely nowhere. Between them, standing up on its tread, was a large truck tyre. All around, as Samuel Taylor tells us, the sands were boundless and bare. They weren't really lone and level, because it was dune country, but you get the picture.

I’d gone another 100 metres before I realised that I had witnessed a first grade incongruity. What the hell were they doing there? How did they get there? Where were they going? What was with the tyre? I don’t need to emphasise that there was no accompanying truck for miles either way along the roadside.

I started making up explanations for their seemingly inexplicable presence in the middle of nowhere, just to amuse myself.

• They were travelling to deliver a tyre. They were cousins, but being naturally argumentative people, had got into one of those interminable wrangles over something small and daft, like who had fancied the village beauty first. Finally, the driver had had enough of their constant bickering and had ditched them both, then and there.
  
• They’d gone to sleep and had woken up to find that they’d lost a truck. All they had left was the spare tyre. Knowing that they're in big trouble, they decided to wait for the thief to bring the truck back.
  
• They were with Al Qaeda and were waiting to blow something up. This was the best they could manage. All they need now is an air line.
  
• They were members of a strange Kashmiri cargo cult and had wheeled their prize from Sharjah in order to take part in a Gnostic desert tyre-worshipping ceremony. They were consequently trying to look innocent and inconspicuous until the rest of the tyre-worshippers turned up.
  

Whatever my craziest, desert-drive fuelled fantasy was, it probably wasn’t a patch on the truth. And that truth, dear reader, will never be known.

Salik and Thanks for all the Fish

Looking at visitors to this blog (thanks for dropping by: hope you had fun), it has to be said that many are people that have been searching Google for information related to Dubai's Salik toll gate system and have been ending up here instead. So I'd like to apologise.

Sorry.

I have frequently been frivolous and lobbed stones into the whole Salik debate but genuinely have little constructive to say. That's partly because there's so little to say that is constructive. I also have little useful to tell you other than that Dubai's Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) allegedly employs some 15 people in its public relations department and has apparently retained at least one, if not two or three PR agencies.

What they are all doing is a complete mystery to me. And no, it's not sour grapes because my agency’s not down home at the farm milking the RTA cash cow. The lack of information, engagement and transparency regarding the whole Salik congestion charge scheme has been remarkable by any standard.

Sure, the Salik system is working now. Sure, most of the major problems have been ironed out (well, apart from my registration SMS not appearing with my all-important account number without which I can't find out my balance or recharge my card, but we won't let that worry us, will we?). But it's the abiding sour taste that it's all left in people's mouths that I find interesting.

It honestly didn't have to be this way. A smarter, better planned and, above all, more transparent communications campaign could have resulted in a better informed public, more buy-in for the scheme (people tend to buy in to a well-put, sound argument that's been properly communicated) and less residual resentment. The investment, in care, time and money, was infinitesimal compared to the scale of the whole scheme.

I wonder if I’m the only person out there that thinks that the communications element of the whole Salik affair has been handled poorly? Somehow I don't think I am...

Laugh, and the World Punches You in the Face

You know you’re overdue leave when every small incident seems to bring that red mist down and you feel like you’re spending most of your day controlling your natural urge to strangle people. There are those among us for whom this is normal, everyday behaviour, of course. But for most of us, it comes in that last two or three weeks before flying off to pastures greener for a well-earned break being forced to eat stale Dundee cake by long-forgotten aunts.

Quick diversion to ask a perennial question. Why are you on duty when you go home, but they’re on holiday when they visit you out here?

So this time of year is a great time to catch one of those sights unique to the east-meets-west polyglot melting pot that is Dubai: that of a furious European shouting at an Indian guy who’s laughing at him.

It’s one of those facts of life here, where the world’s cultural tectonic plates rub, that different people react in different ways to different situations. The personal space of the average Brit is about three metres. For the average Malabari it’s about two millimetres. When Arab women see a cute baby, they like to fuss over it, squeeze its cheeks and give it sweets. Touch a European woman’s baby and she’ll mace you and leave you lying in the street in a heap, puking and crying. Northern Europeans queue. Nobody else bothers.

And many people from India, particularly the south it would seem, giggle when they’re nervous. It’s a natural reaction for them, particularly when people are so rude as to raise their voices. And there’s no better way to send an upset European’s temper into the stratosphere than to laugh at them when they’re shouting at you.

It always reminds me of that classic piece of that classic comedy, Fawlty Towers. O’Reilly the Irish builder has just screwed up the interior of the hotel and Basil’s fire-breathing wife Sybil is having a go at him. He laughs her off as Basil can be heard saying through gritted teeth, “Don’t laugh O’Reilly, oh please don’t laugh” and then, of course, she beats the crap out of him with an umbrella.

And so when the watchman in our building told a furious colleague that the basement parking would remain shut for another week (consigning us to another week circling the building trying to find non-existent parking spaces and then walking hundreds of yards in the sticky, hot humidity) and she started to shout, I found myself thinking of Basil Fawlty’s “Please don’t laugh!” But it was too late.

He giggled and it got twisted.

Talk to the Hand

What is it with pronunciation around here? My office is above Lal’s Supermarket. Try and tell that to anyone calling to ‘Ask your location’.

Lal's. No. Lalz. No. Laaaalssseee. No. Lalze. No. Lalllllsssss. No. Lalllllzzzzzeeeeeuuuughhhh. Not understanding.

It’s invariably a game played down to the final, desperate variation that sounds nothing like the original: “Lalluss!”

And then… Ohhhh! Lals! Why you not say Lals?

It’s also played in Arabic. Burghul. No. Burrrrgul. No. Buuuukhhuuullll. And so on.

But revenge is sweet. Good morning. Pardon? Good morniiing! Pardon?

As they say in Dubai English, I’m overdue to go on leave...