Lachrymose

One does try not to be an 'it ain't like it used to be' bore, but the sad truth is that Dubai was a great deal more fun in the 1980s than it is now. Sorry, that's just the way it is.

I used to enjoy listening to the tales of older residents when we first got out here; people like Sue and Pete Ellis, Gill Hollis and Shirley Robinson and Dorothy 'Dotters' Miles used to liven things up no end with old stories and photos of the days before the days when the Sheikh Zayed Road was two lanes of unfenced blacktop to Abu Dhabi. The days when Gill drove a Range Rover from Coventry to Dubai overland (well, apart from a roof-warping dhow trip from Iran) , when Sean Connery and company used to drink at the Aladdin Hotel in Sharjah (now a roadside garden) and when Hatta was a real day's journey.

And so this website, posted up to the UAE Community Blog by Localexpat is a truly fantastic thing for me: a hint of the Dubai whose last days I arrived just in time to see, a fleeting glimpse of an altogether more adventurous and really rather quaint life at the genteel edge of the explored world.

Do have fun at Len Chapman's website. It's truly a wonderful place and a little slice of history that really does deserve its own place on t'Internet. I recommend a nice cup of tea or even a 'cold one' and a good hour just to fossick about there...

Book Post - A Truckle Of 'Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy' Trivia

For no particularly good reason, a handful of things you probably didn't know (or even want to know) about Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy. Which is a book I've written. Don't know if I mentioned that before or not...

The wooden Estonian orthodox church is real
Dennis Wye meets Jaan Kallas outside a wooden church with an ageing congregation. It's real, down near the port in Tallinn (just across the road, in fact, from the Museum Of Soviet Uselessness) and rather beautiful. It's one of few surviving churches in Tallinn - Estonia seems quite proud of being the most secular country in Europe and most churches have been deconsecrated and are being used as concert halls or Irish pubs. Hence the ageing congregation. The music in these churches, by the way, is beautiful and forms a connection to the Syrian Urfalee church.

So's the ice road
And you genuinely are told not to wear a seat belt and to travel within the minimum and maximum speed limit for fear of creating resonance and cracking the ice.

Marwan Nimr is back
He was inspired by a box of fruit. There's a company that airfreights fruit out of Lebanon called 'Marwan' and its logo is a little dakota-like aeroplane whizzing through the air. And so Marwan Nimr was born. He makes a cameo in Shemlan - having survived Beirut - and he's not best pleased with our Gerald.

Talking of cameos...
Lamiable extra brut champagne makes a brief appearance, following its excellent debut in Beirut. It's actually hard to make great extra brut champagne (with little or no added sugar, or 'dosage', it's easy to make sour extra brut, hard to make flinty, dry but rounded extra brut) The family that produces this exquisite single grower grand cru champagne appear to have forgiven me for using their delicious product to kill a chap in Beirut. I know they've read it because their UK importer sent them the relevant passage. Snitch.

The Puss In Boots
Marcelle's rather outré establishment in Monot, Le Chat Botté, is actually named after a Belgian hotel I stayed in as a kid. It just seemed like a good name and I've always liked that Marcelle insists on using its French name rather than the English version. How very Lebanese, darling!

Lance Browning
The nature of Lance Browning's fate and the fact he works for a certain bank are by no means intended to be some sort of revenge on my bank and certainly not written with ferocious relish. I can state that categorically.

The baddies are really bad...
The Ühiskassa, the umbrella organisation of the Estonian mafia is real, although apparently less active these days than in its heyday before Estonia's accession to the European Union.

The goodies are hardly better - and no, the whole CIA scheme in the book is by no means far fetched
In fact, the precise scheme they're up to in Shemlan is documented as having been seriously evaluated as an operation by the CIA. There are many recorded instances of US intelligence having become involved in the international arms and drugs trades, including the ill-fated Iran contra scandal, as well as money laundering drug related funds. So now you know...

You can buy the book here. 

There's also more stuff about the book and the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies there, too!

Will ENOC/EPPCO Stations Reopen In The Northern Emirates?

(Photo credit: Gerry Balding)

The news broke a few days ago. with news outlets all reporting ENOC was seeking 'alternative sources' for condensate to feed its 120,000 barrel-a-day refinery in Jebel Ali. Yesterday, late in the afternoon (too late, for instance, to give pesky local reporters a chance to ask questions) it issued a press release announcing it had closed a deal with Qatar's Tasweeq to secure a supply of 20,000 barrels per day of condensate.

This, according to ENOC, avoids having to import Iranian condensate. To quote the release:

ENOC diligently adheres to all prevailing laws and regulations to ensure that its business is conducted in line with applicable sanctions, and has been continually studying the sourcing of alternative economically viable condensate feedstocks for its refinery in Jebel Ali.  

As a result of various steps implemented by the management, ENOC has imported 20% less Iranian condensate in the second half of 2012 compared with the first six months of the year. One of the challenges in managing the crude imports was the availability of alternate grades in required volumes and prices. 

By exploring partnerships with new suppliers, ENOC is highlighting its commitment to continually optimise its refinery operations, adherence to the highest ethical standards in all operational aspects and creation of long-term value.

Some commentators have inferred this may lead to the shuttered ENOC/EPPCO petrol pumps in the Northern Emirates re-opening, but there's no evidence in here at all of that. ENOC's under pressure to reduce its loss-making refining operations - hence buying crude from Iran in the first place - but has now come under pressure to find alternative sources.

That's not about to make things any better 'oop North' and mean they can start selling profitable petrol from their forecourts. It's more likely to be a 'like for like' pricing deal - and it would have been interested to be a fly on the wall of some of those meetings to see quite who was pulling the strings around here.

Perhaps an answer to that comes in the shape of those recent ENOC comments about alternative sources of supply, which coincided with a visit to the U.A.E. from David Cohen, the U.S. Treasury Department's undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence...

Anyway, it doesn't really matter that much. Everyone's got used to there being no EPPCO stations and although the ADNOC stations are busy, the long and ironic queues from the original 'petrol shortage in oil producing country' glee are a thing of the past.

Wheels Within Wheels

Part of this week's rich debate around Twitter and social media has been about who you can trust online.

That's an interesting debate when you take the 'turn your Twitter avatar green' service that a number of Twittering types have started to use. The idea's nice and simple - a one-click process via the helpiranelection website will turn your avatar green so that you can demonstrate your support for Mousavi's backers in their call for a recount.

The chap behind helpiranelection is Arik Fraimovich. When he's not helping people to show solidarity with Iranian political movements, he's a software developer. I have to note that, while he is not now, he has previously worked for the Israeli Ministry of Defence. That doesn't mean to say he is aligned to the MoD or is in any way carrying out its will. But the fact that an Israeli with government links is behind a 'back Mousavi' Internet scheme will sit uncomfortably with many in the Arab World, let alone in Iran itself.

I am quite, quite sure that Arik's idea was well intentioned. But 'going green' is, I think, an Iranian choice to make.

Thanks to 'Party Boy'... :)

Ed-Dur and the Mysteries of the Ancient World

The site of Ed-Dur. Nothing to see here, folks. Move on, move on...

In the heady days of the building boom, back in the early 'noughties', Dubai property company Emaar started developing the coastal area north of Umm Al Quwain, flattening a great swathe of land and building a posh little sales centre on a curve in the road north to Ras Al Khaimah. It had magnificent views out over the mangroves. Across the road was a ramshackle cold store and a tiny mosque. The place is called Al Dour.

The scheme came to little in the end. The building boom turned into a bust and only a couple of hundred houses were actually constructed. They're still there today, a tiny gated community at the end of a wee drive from the main road, hoarding blocking the views either side of you (it always reminds me of the final scenes from Terry Gilliam's surreal and brilliant Brazil) until you emerge into a small carbon copy of Arabian Ranches.

Off the main road connecting these little beige 'dare to dream' wonders and the sales centre, to the right uphill just before you hit the curve as the road snakes past the mangroves to your left, you'll find a little brown sign to the 'Ed-Dur Archaeological Site'. If you drive on the sandy track up there, you'll find yourself looking at a expanse of shrubby desert fenced off from prying eyes and, behind the fence, a few clapboard buildings that look like a tatty little labour camp.

I'd not recommend this one as a day trip, because you'll see no more than I have just described.

And yet beyond that fence lies one of the most remarkable and mysterious sites in the UAE - an early Pre-Islamic city sprawled across some 800 hectares. Blossoming from the 3rd Century BCE onwards, Ed-Dur is closely linked with Mleiha inland - the two settlements are joined by the great wadi that snakes inland from here through the oasis towns of Falaj Al Mualla and Dhaid. Coins found here at Ed-Dur were minted using coin moulds found at Mleiha, animal burials at the two cities follow a similar rite - while human burials speak of rituals associated with Parthian northern Iraq.

Part of the excavated temple complex at Ed-Dur, slowly being washed away...

Ed-Dur was a significant city with links to India, Persia, Mesopotamia, the Levant and Yemen. It was home to a vast variety of mudbrick and other constructions, from fortifications to houses and temples. It is here that we see alabaster sheets used as glass in windows and it is here that we find ceramics from Mesopotamia, Iran and India as well as Roman glass, all dated to the 1st Century BCE. The temple complex unearthed here contained an Aramaic inscription, one of the earliest finds of writing we have from the area (the others are, of course, from Mleiha), thought to have been the name of an early sun god, Shams (Himyarite) or Shamash (Akkadian).

Ed-Dur has been put forward as Pliny’s Omana, ‘a harbour of great importance in Carmania’. Carmania was a Persian province under Alexander the Great which stretched along the coast from Bandar Lengeh to Bandar Jask. Alexander never quite managed to invade Arabia, despite having expressed a clear interest in doing just that - sending his Admiral, Nearchos, to explore the seas from India to Basra. Nearchos never made landfall on the Arabian side of the Gulf and Alexander died before he could add southeastern Arabia to his list of conquests.

Ed-Dur still has many secrets to tell us. Hellenistic era coins found here celebrate 'Abiel', although we have no idea who Abiel was - similar coins have been found in hoards in Bahrain but in a location dating them to some 300 years before the coins at Ed-Dur. These 'Tetra Drachma' were the coins minted at Mleiha - Abiel seems to have lived on in coinage for a great deal longer than in life.

Hellenistic Tetra Drachma found at Ed-Dur

Both Mleiha and Ed-Dur seem to have declined in the first two centuries of what we now call the 'Common Era' and then they likely fell to the invasion of the Sasanians. Ed-Dur was never to recover and provided archaeologists with a remarkable trove of finds (some of which you'll find on display at Umm Al Quwain's eclectic and pleasant little museum). Changes in sea levels and the silting of the coast here have meant that the maritime centre and former port of Ed-Dur is today a good few hundred metres from the sea it used to serve.

Today, the excavated temple and other buildings stand scandalously exposed to the elements, literally washing away with every rainy season that lashes the site. Unprotected and neglected, the entire area of Ed-Dur (imagine an archaeological centre like Mleiha established here - what a marvel!) is fenced off, a sad testament to the overlooked heritage of the Emirates.

So next time you're hoying off to the Barracuda, look out for the brown sign before the corner by the sales centre and spare a thought for the still-hidden mysteries of the ancient city of Ed-Dur...

Webcam

A Webcam over Gaza.

You can go here and get a tiny little idea of what it must to be like to sit in your building and look out over a city that is slowly being blown back to the dark ages.

A normal looking city. Pretty Jordanian, really, no?

Full of ordinary people. Families. Decent people. Good people. Bad people. Smart people. Dumb people.

You know, people.

They've been living in blockade for 18 months. A blockade, effectively sanctions, that has been more tightly applied than those of Iran or, back in the day, Iraq. A blockade that has been so absolute, it has even included banning media and cutting off supplies of fuel to the only power station. Food is scarce and fuel to cook it on even scarcer. Now the water shortage is starting to bite deep.

So they can only sit by (because there is no work) and watch the black plumes of smoke rising over the buildings, watch the occasional streak of silver in the sky, the rumble and the little puff before the sound wave of the explosion hits. And then watch as the puff turns into black, roiling clouds of smoke that will rise up into the dirty air and smear across the skyline.

Now you can join them. Leave the camera on in a tab so that you can listen to the traffic noise, the honks of lorries and then the crump of high explosive and the sirens that follow it.

Now you, too, can be in Gaza.