Month: July 2011

The Grand Mosque, part 2

I’m going to show you all these pictures, but just know everything was way bigger and more beautiful in person. You’ll have to go someday and see for yourself. Just be prepared to wear an abaya if you’re in the child-bearing half of our species. 
In the “foyer.” The huge flowers in here are made from colored marble applied to the walls. They are morning glories, although Ali had another name for them as well . . . of course I can’t remember it now. 
Each individual flower was about the size of my hand. 
We learned all sorts of things about the design decisions for this mosque. All the surfaces in the mosque are beautifully decorated, except the walls that people face to pray. Those walls are either plain (in the women’s room — the women’s praying room, not the bathroom) or inscribed with the 99 names of God. That keeps people from wondering, “how many pieces of mother of pearl are in that enormous red flower?” when they’re supposed to be thinking reverent thoughts about God. 
I loved this blue and gold flower chandelier.
These 6ft diameter flower patterns are carved in the ceiling of the women’s prayer room and they exactly mirror the colorful flowers woven into the carpet below (that I don’t seem to have a picture of).
They maximized the amount of windows in this mosque to minimize the need for interior lighting. There are only 7 lights in the mosque — one for each of the 7 Emirates. 
The back wall of the women’s prayer room is made entirely of glass with glass mosaic flowers and looks out on the main courtyard. I’d be distracted too if I had this view during prayer time. 
When your lamps are this big and this elaborate, you only need seven of them. 
 
The red and green glass globes that hang down from the bottom are a little over the top for my taste, but the rest of it sparkled and shimmered and looked like something from Cinderella’s castle.
The “happy” non-Arab family. Carter was going to take a picture of us so I stood next to Josh and started to put my arm around him and a security guard came over and said, “No touching!” (yes, just like on Arrested Development) and this is the resulting, “I can’t believe I’m standing here in this robe and I’m not allowed to have any physical contact with my own husband in public” look. 
  
 
The “approved” photo. No touching, several inches of space between us, and hands behind our backs. All these interior pillars have mother of pearl inlay. It was amazing and I guess pretty impossible to do on a curved surface like a pillar. The carpet in here is the largest handwoven carpet in the world. Ali told us all the stats, but I’m going to have to refer to wikipedia to refresh my memory: It took 1200 people over 2 years to make it and it originally weighed 46 tons, but now weighs 35 tons. Ali made us guess where all the weight went and we guessed on people’s feet as they walked around on it, but it was more than that. Part of the weight loss was due to the cutouts for the pillars, but a bigger part was because the carpet was shaved three times. They shaved large straight swaths of the carpet, leaving small raised lines behind. The lines mark where people are to stand to pray, kind of like the lines in a parking lot. You can’t see them until you get up close. It’s a really ingenious way of organizing a large group of people into orderly lines. 
 
At the end of our tour. Time to find our shoes and return my invisibility cloak. 

still here

The past few days every single minute of my internet time (and there have been a lot of them) have been spent trying to plan our trip to Turkey. We leave 3 weeks from today and are trying to book hotels, plane tickets, and a rental car for various legs of our trip. All was going smoothly (well, smoothish) until we tried to book hotel rooms in Istanbul.

It turns out that most of the hotels downtown are in historic buildings and historic buildings have very small rooms with a maximum occupancy of 3 people. Since Josh’s parents are meeting us in Istanbul we need 3 rooms to house us and our brood of children. And who knew Turkey was so expensive? $200/night for something that a traveler on TripAdvisor described as “grotty.” Hmm. Since we’ll be there for a week, we need to choose wisely.

Surprise! It turns out that Turkey is the hot spot for vacation travel this summer because it’s one of the few countries in the area that isn’t experiencing much political unrest. (Although now that we’ve scheduled a trip there who knows what will happen? See Tunisia uprising/Egypt revolution)  So even though we found a couple of nice looking, well reviewed, reasonably priced hotels in the right area, when we went to book rooms, they couldn’t accommodate us (See 3 room problem).

There are hundreds of places to stay in Istanbul, but most of these historic buildings only turn into small, boutique hotels with 10 to 15 rooms. I saw a great place that was the right price, but it only had 5 rooms so I didn’t even bother to email them (see 3 room problem/hot travel destination problem) since even the big hotels were advertising “only two rooms left!”

Of course if we were willing to pay we could have stayed in any number of places (see traveling on a budget problem) or we could have booked rooms in less expensive areas that were further away (see getting around the city with a large group problem), but Josh and I scoured maps and TripAdvisor (love that website — it has never steered me wrong) and found a place with larger rooms, so we can put 2 adults and 2 kids in each room, in the exact location we wanted, for the right price (see Mission Accomplished).

lets go to the mall

I’m not a big shopper, but I love going to the mall in the Middle East. For starters it’s a great place to people watch. We’re always on the lookout for different styles of dress, especially trends in head coverings, abayas, and dishdashas. For example, we suspected a particular family was from Egypt because the mom was wearing a tight fitting long sleeved shirt, with a fitted short sleeved shirt on top paired with jeans, cute flips, and a brightly patterned hijab. We saw women dressed like that every day in Cairo. When we heard them speaking to each other and detected the hard ‘g’ sound, “ga” instead of ‘juh,’ we gave each other a congratulatory smile. Yes, we’re people watching nerds.

It’s interesting how the various Muslim countries have different standards for dress. In Abu Dhabi I saw a lot more women with veils (both with eyes showing and not showing) and we even saw a girl Caleb’s age in an abaya and hijab (usually girls don’t have to cover until they are teenagers). The Abu Dhabi women were  rhinestoned and studded out like the Omani women, but Egyptian women only wear plain abayas. My favorite sighting was a woman who was wearing large stylish sunglasses under a full veil. You could tell she was dressed to the nines underneath her abaya from the way she was strutting, the large poof of hair under her veil, and her expensive heels. She was plenty covered, but not exactly modest.

One evening we went to the mall for dinner and people watching. For some unknown reason, this mall had several animatronic dinosaurs on display. Camille wasn’t so sure about them, but the boys thought they were hilarious, especially when they figured out that they all had working “back doors” that would open and close. I assume the purpose of that was to release an egg, but there were no eggs to be seen.

All the kids in the mall were putting their hands on the dinosaurs. The daring ones were trying to touch their teeth before the jaws snapped closed.

After dinosaurs, we went to Fuddrucker’s for dinner. It’s amazing how many American restaurants have made it over here. Normally we would want to eat someplace “authentic” or “local,” but the American branded restaurants are always crowded (meaning good food turnover) and it was hard to bypass the amazing smell. We made up for it the next evening when we ate at a Lebanese restaurant that was equally as good. And now I can say I’ve eaten pigeon.
  
Dinner was a bargain. We figured out it cost about $8 each, including drinks (see the local bottled water?) for everyone. Abu Dhabi is an expensive city, but we were able to find affordable places to eat. Especially because we weren’t limited to restaurants at the resort, like when we stayed at Atlantis.

After eating, we wandered around, popped in some stores, bought a rugby ball and just enjoyed the scenery. One of the shops was advertising a “Grab and Go Sale” and we wondered what would happen if someone took the sign literally.

I love being able to wear her when we walk around. It’s easy on my back and I don’t have to maneuver a stroller in the crowds. No one wears their babies here. They all have strollers or carry them in their arms. Everyone looks at us when I’m wearing her, but she attracts attention whether I’m wearing her or not. I love walking behind Josh and people watching when he’s wearing her. Groups of women will nudge each other and point and smile. Especially when she’s hanging out on his back.

There was a huge line to play tennis on these indoor “grass” courts.

She finally fell asleep when we stopped at Starbucks to get a coffee and pick up a United Arab Emirates mug. Adding to our collection, one country at a time.

It was after 10 and we were all tired so it was time to head home. On our way out we stopped at the grocery store to pick up yogurt for breakfast and I saw this sign. Hmm. I’ll let you make your own jokes.

the freaks come out at night

When it’s over 100 degrees in the desert, the only time to play is after the sun goes down. We saw beautiful parks all over Abu Dhabi, but they were deserted. Until dark. We went down by the waterfront for dinner and let the boys play on the playground. It was 9:30 at night and the place was packed with kids of all ages. 

The climbing structure was in the shape of a traditional dhow (fishing boat). It was a beautiful, clean, and well maintained play place.


The entire playground was covered in padded mats so Camille was able to crawl around. I just had to make sure she didn’t get trampled by all the kids who were thrilled to be running and climbing, including my own.

In fact, Calvin was so excited that he hurdled the chain that fenced in the park, caught his back foot, and would have hit the ground face first if he hadn’t tucked his shoulder and rolled.

And yes, I took a picture (once I knew he was ok), but we were all laughing so hard that it came out blurry. It was especially funny since this is not the first time that he has injured himself due to clumsiness on this trip, but that story is in another post.

Something we’ve been missing since living in Muscat is doing things that local people do. We’ve realized that we need to shift our schedules and live like the Omanis who bring their babies and little kids to the mall at 10 pm and shop and eat at the food court as if it were 3 in the afternoon. We might as well, since our baby is awake anyway and ready to play.

 
After the park we walked over to ColdStone and then drove by the Grand Mosque on our way back to the hotel. It changes color depending on the phase of the moon. At a full moon it is bright white and gradually changes to a dark blue when there is no moon.

This night there was a very thin crescent moon so the mosque looked blue.
Around here, it pays to come out at night. 

*The title of this post comes from THIS 80s classic. At least it was a classic for those of us living in Oakland.

what the pork?

In case you missed my post on facebook, one afternoon Josh and I were watching MasterChef: Australia on the tv in our hotel room while we were getting ready to go out to dinner. The challenge was to recreate a dish without being given the recipe. Two of the chefs incorrectly chose veal as their cut of meat and one chef used pork for his cutlets. I couldn’t figure out what swear word everyone kept repeating until I realized that the Arabic tv censors were bleeping out the word “pork.” It felt just like watching the American version with Gordon Ramsey, except he uses a lot of actual swear words and doesn’t get censored nearly as much. One of the chef judges went on a rant that sounded like this: “I can’t believe he tasted the bleep cutlets and didn’t know they were bleep. How can you be a chef if you can’t tell the difference between veal and bleep? Bleep is white, veal is red. Bleep has a nice layer of fat, so it’s richer. Veal is much leaner. What a donkey!” *The judge didn’t actually call him a donkey, but Gordon Ramsey would have. Today our boxes that have been in transit for over 1/2 a year arrived. It would have been lovely except that they also came with an extra large helping of rat droppings. Between the rodent poop and the fact that I opened one of the kitchen boxes to find that the movers packed open packages of food (including open chocolate that turned to soup), candles, and even an open sterno can (that melted everywhere) I felt like saying a lot worse than “pork!” All is good. Only a few things were broken and I didn’t notice anything missing. Another good move completed. (That makes nine, not counting our temporary move back to the states). Hopefully I can get the house cleaned up and back in order tomorrow and then I’ll have time for more Abu Dhabi stories.