Taipei Sand Witch

I've been on a bit of a jolly trip to Taiwan covering a healthcare trade show in which various manufacturers tried to convince me of the merits of their prosthetic legs, facial-muscle controlled wheelchairs, pill boxes and such like. It was an interesting experience not just because I found out about how wireless technology is being applied to healthcare but also because Taiwan isn't somewhere I would have thought about visiting had I not gone there for work. Having gone there, I would like to go back one day and go outside the city to visit the Sun Moon Lake and check out the beaches.

It's a melting pot mixture of indigenous people, Chinese and Japanese.  I had a little bit of time for sightseeing in the evenings. I steered clear of the art galleries and museums and instead went down to the night markets which are packed with stalls selling incredibly cheap snacks such as fish dumplings, fried chicken, chicken feet, Chinese stews with rice, shellfish, water melon juice, tea and tons of other stuff.

The Taiwanese people are incredibly friendly and kind.  My map reading skills are not legendary and I found myself in an interesting situation when I hadn't learnt the Chinese words for the name of my hotel and had forgotten to bring the piece of paper with it in Chinese characters that one of the trade show press officers had carefully written out for me.  The idea being that I could show it to taxi drivers.  The Metro signs are in English as well as Chinese so I managed to get within half an hour's walk of my hotel but unfortunately the street sign system is laid out in a way that's confusing to a European.  Luckily, as I was standing on the corner of various streets clutching my Rough Guide and looking bewildered, people stopped and helped me find the way. 

It may have been due to the fact that they wanted a favourable write up for their trade show, but I had to just express the slightest interest in something, ie some Taiwanese wine to take home for the Sand Warlock to try, and it would turn up gift wrapped.   

He carried a water melon

Other things I learned about Taiwan include:

1. Taxi drivers and professional drivers love instrumental versions of soft rock and easy listening.

2.  No one has told the Taiwanese that things like God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman and The Little Drummer Boy are generally played in the run up to Christmas rather than in June.

3.  If you order "field chicken" you will be eating frog.

4.  Taiwanese people voluntarily eat pies filled with minced pig eyes.

5.  When Taiwanese people refer to China, they will point upwards and say "PRC".

6.  Taiwanese people, in common with Chinese people, will choose an English name if they are going to be in regular contact with English speakers.  I met one software engineer who told me his name was Mr Lu because he didn't have an English name and he thought I wouldn't be able to say his first name.

7.  Taiwanese manufacturers are very worried about being undercut by cheap Chinese products.

Wouldn't it be Terryble if he had been arrested for inappropriate PDA

Oh, how I don't miss the days when it was my job to at least give the pretence of caring about the sexual habits of that revolting squit, John Terry, and his desperado of a cuckold wife, Toni.

The Sand Warlock came in the other day and told me me that he had seen in the local press that the loathsome pair were holidaying in Abu Dhabi and I rather grumpily told him that I didn't care because I wasn't a tabloid staffer or agency journalist and I was glad that I didn't have to care any more.  Then, rumblings appeared in the local papers that people were less than impressed with Toni's revolting arse flossing swimming costume and their hideously staged display of affection which said to anyone with half a brain cell:  "We know that John's football career is finite so we're indulging in a crappy publicity stunt for a quick payday, even though we're wadded, we can't have enough money, you know, and we think you lot are stupid enough to believe that even though John is widely acknowledged to have the sexual appetite of an adolescent terrier on Viagra, we are in fact dead happily married, like, yeah, and John deserves a reputation as a dedicated family man and a highly paid career as a tedious git of a pundit, no really, he does, so this is our attempt to convince you that that's what he should have."

Anyway.  The point where it occurred to me for a milisecond that the Terrys might actually get in trouble for their antics was when I became interested.  I had a brief chat with a fellow hack still toiling at the coal face back home who said that it's not really a story for UK papers as the complaints about Terrys were confined to Twitter rather than to the police or authorities.  But, as my hack friend said: "Of course, it would break my heart if John Terry ended up rotting in a hellhole Abu Dhabi jail."

Unfortunately for us nasty newspaper types, the Terrys carried out their entirely unconvincing hormone fest in the "privacy" (with the exception of invited pap photographers) of their hotel beach and pool so their public display of affection (PDA) was not illegal, nor indeed was that strange mankini donned by the ever faithful Toni.  For it is indeed true that thongs are none too kindly looked upon by the authorities here, what with it being technically (that word again) a conservative, Islamic country.

The Sand Warlock, brother of Sand Witch and I were at Aquaventure, the ginormous water park at the Atlantis Hotel on the bonkers Palm Jumeirah at the weekend, and I happened to notice a sign saying: "No thongs", by which they mean the pants part of bikinis/mankinis, before any of you Australians start going on about flipflops.  "Phew," I thought, "luckily I didn't wear my Brazilian style glittery thong today or I might have been in trouble." Swimming costumes and bikinis are OK as long as you confine them to the beaches and the pools and don't wonder the streets in them like a Brit on holiday in Magaluf.  But thongs are a no no.  I'm kind of in agreement with them to be honest as the problem with things like thongs is that I'm sure they're theoretically fine on lissome, young ladies and very, very carefully waxed young men, but there's always someone who really shouldn't who decides they're the way forward. Who knows? Maybe it's nothing to to do with the conservative society and they've banned them on grounds of good taste.

Of course, there's always a way around any ban.  The lissome young ladies at Aquaventure have a delightful habit of rolling up their pants and tucking them into their arse cracks.  I know tan lines are unattractive, but is it really worth giving yourself a permanent wedgy to avoid them?  Apparently the answer to that question for some is a resounding "yes".

Generally speaking, people abide by the rules in the UAE, ie, they don't snog in public or dress too outrageously. And people tend not to be seen in public falling down drunk as that, too, can lead to criminal charges.  The Terrys' behaviour quite neatly sums up the fact that you can get away with a lot of things in the UAE providing you a) don't do it in "public" or b) are very rich.  In my largely uneducated opinion, if they had had their collars felt for their behaviour, it would potentially put a lot of other rich idiots off holidaying in the UAE and be bad for the economy.  That's why they're free to behave as they choose, conservative, Islamic society or not.

Taxi driver

Civil disobedience happens rarely here because it's effectively outlawed, but I came across this story in my morning trawl down the back of the Middle East news sofa.  It's fair to say that taxi drivers in the UAE have some of the worst working conditions, apart from construction workers. For the taxi drivers it's 12-hour days seven days a week.  They do at least get time off each year to go and see their families but from what I can tell, they don't get to choose when they get to go. 

You do get dodgy ones, of course, and they can be pretty grumpy, although, to be fair, I think I would be grumpy if I spent 12 hours driving around in boiling heat. Often, you'll find, as I once did, that they're educated men from poor backgrounds who've been forced to abandon a potentially interesting career for the sake of supporting family.  I was driven by the same taxi driver twice in the space of a few weeks once and we discussed democracy, Marxism, Communism and other jolly things like that.  He had given up his university place in Pakistan to come to Dubai and drive because his parents had died and he had a large family of younger siblings to support.  So, he told me, he spent his days trying to engage customers in intelligent conversation to keep his brain going. 

Another time, I sat in the front seat of a cab and the driver pulled away before I had chance to fasten my seatbelt causing the seatbelt alarm to go off.  The Bangladeshi driver said:  "The car is crying, please fasten your seatbelt," which made me giggle a bit so we had a chat about life, the universe and everything.  He had a two-year-old daughter back home in Bangladesh who had not seen since just after she was born.

These drivers launched a protest about the brutal murder of one of their colleagues.  It's not the poor pay, long hours or lack of freedom and sometimes dangerous conditions of their jobs, it's being made to wear a tie that seems to have been the breaking point because it's the first thing people grab when they attack them.  In this poor driver's case, it was used to bind his hands while he was stabbed.

If you give it the tinest bit of thought, the tie, although it looks smart, is really rather a ridiculous and pointless garment, particularly when you're being forced to wear it in 40-50degree temperatures. You can't even really loosen your collar a bit in the heat of the day for fear that someone will report you to your firm for not looking smart.  For the drivers, I can see how it would be a symbol of everything that is repressive and restrictive about their job.  Not only are they working punishing hours but more often than not, it's part of their contract that they live in driver accomodation so they mix with no one but other drivers in what's effectively a ghetto. Being told to wear a completely unnecessary garment in those conditions which can then be used against you in confrontations must be the last straw. 

So, the earlier post was a bit highbrow

So I had to lower the tone with this link to a Gulf News article about kebabs.  It appears to have been beyond the photographer, subs and web editor to notice that the kebabs in the picture look like actual shiny turds. But, it gives annoying people with too much time on their hands a chance to have a good giggle.  Enjoy.

Old Dubai

If you read scathing articles about Dubai by the likes of A A Gill and Johann Hari, you would think that us ex-pats go out of our way to avoid mixing with the locals.  That's certainly not the case in the Sand household, but it does happen to be the case that we don't come across Emiratis very often.

This can be attributed to a number of reasons.  Firstly, there simply aren't that many of them.  I've seen estimates ranging from the Dubai population being as high as 20 per cent Emirati and as low as 10 per cent in a population of 1.87million (estimated in 2010 which means that could be radically wrong as there have been one or two changes since then).  Second, although the Sand Warlock meets people of every nationality every working day, he doesn't meet many locals as they're not supposed to drink.  Thirdly, the best local spotting pursuit is walking the malls on a Thursday or Friday night when they tend to go out and about with their families shopping, going to the cinema or enjoying the deliciously random activities on offer in malls here: Iceskating, skiing, going to an Aquarium, playing arcade games, buying gold nuggets, going to KidZania, the place where kids can try out various careers including brain surgery (!) or Emirates air steward, etc.

It's true that this is the time when you would see locals out and about, but, they're with their families.  It's not exactly an opportune moment to pop over and say: "Salaamaleikum, kayfalal (Hello, how are you) alhamdulelah (I'm fine thanks to God).  An a Sand Witch, An a min London, fi Ingeldra (I am the Sand Witch from London, England).  Please, tell me about your culture."  Frankly, they would probably think you were mad, which would be fair enough.

The more time you spend here, though, the more likely you are to meet the locals and learn a bit more about their lives now and BO (I've just invented that for Before Oil).

Take one of my bosses who is a longstanding English ex-pat who told me this rather tragic tale about an Emirati she knows who can well remember what life was like before Dubai became a boom town. 

The chap, who is probably in his 60s, he's not really sure as he doesn't know when he was born, so, like many of the older Emiratis, he simply picked a birthday.  He can remember as a child making the journey from Abu Dhabi to Dubai by camel as one did during the days before the roads were built and when the Bedouin were the primary population.  One moved around according to the seasons in search of water.  This journey, which now takes an hour or so by car, took three days by camel.  Now, you know, I love camels, but I think would have fallen out of love with them after three days of sitting on one in 45degree heat.

Part way through this burning hot journey through the desert, members of his family realised his baby sister, who was being carried in a camel pannier, was missing as she had fallen out on to the ground.  It was a while before anyone noticed, probably because they were all comatose with boredom watching the perpetually shifting sands and suffering in the heat. And, because the baby herself would probably have been too dehydrated and subdued by the heat to cry out.  By the time they realised and got back to the spot she had fallen, she had died, either of injuries from falling from the camel, or a heat-related sickness, be it dehydration or some form of shock. 

It makes you think, doesn't it?  There is a tendency here among some ex-pat circles to dismiss the locals as spoilt and lazy because of the generous benefits endowed upon them by the Government and the preferential working conditions they enjoy.  But the fact that many of them endured or have parents or grandparents who endured, Medieval living conditions casts them in a rather different light. I think if I was an Emirati who could remember times before air con in cars and in buildings and sitting on a camel for several days just to find enough food and water to stop me from starving to death, I'd probably want every possible indulgence I could get my hands on.   

Where on earth is the petrol?

Here's one answer to the question of how the hell the UAE has a fuel shortage in The National. It would seem that subsidised petrol prices are causing suppliers problems. I don't think people will be terribly amused if prices go up, but then, their patience with fuel shortages will only last so long. 

The love affair with the car in the UAE is not just about laziness, it's about necessity.  It's already too hot to walk anything but the tiniest of distances and there's no way the public transport system will be able to pick up the slack if people have to leave their cars at home.

Well I never

Justice can be pretty swift here thanks to the lack of juries and the like.  The "fashion gang" I posted about yesterday turn out to be from Saudi Arabia.  Their sentencing is reported here

What it's all about is anybody's guess.  Can't imagine that the haute couture handbags, shoes, perfume and clothes they stole aren't available in Saudi Arabia.  What can it all mean? 

Under Your Abaya

I remember watching a comedy show when I was a kid which featured a sketch where a woman had a fake pregnancy bump under her dress which opened up and became a receptacle for shoplifted goods.  I can't remember which show it was but it was at the Russ Abbot or Little and Large level of sophistication.  The joke was that she was above suspicion because surely no one would have the audacity to carry out such a sneaky method of theft.

I started thinking about that long-forgotten sketch thanks to this case reported widely in the local newspapers today.  I can almost hear the heads of those in the Dubai authorities spinning while they wonder what they are going to do about these woman who sneaked out of a series of designer stores with thousands of dirhams worth of shoes and handbags stuffed into their robes.  Despite its Vegas-style reputation, Dubai is still a conservative Muslim Emirate where the wearing of the Abaya is not necessarily encouraged but merely accepted as the done thing among locals and those from other Gulf states.  Having it abused in this way must be a big, big deal for them.  They can't demand to search the robes of women shoppers because they would take huge offence at it, in part due to the conservative codes about physical contact and in part at the suggestion that anyone from such a wealthy community would steal.   

In 7Days coverage of the incident, they are described as "Arab" which can be a shorthand for "Arab but not Emirati".  I think it's fair to say that if they turn out to be from a traditionally non Abaya-wearing culture, the authorities will probably be extremely tough on them for abusing the national dress. 

This lunatic woman I know

So, yeah, this lunatic woman I know who is, like, totally obsessed with camels has had a full page feature published in today's Khaleej Times about Dubai Camel Hospital.

Now she just needs to find a home for her feature on the Camelicious camel mik farm as the features ed at the KT literally said: "Er, no thanks, no more camels".  Any suggestions, let me know, peeps, and I'll pass them on to, er, my split personality.

You can't see the pics online so here's some camel photos that were taken on the day just to keep you/me happy.

Oh Boyah

Thanks very much to my chum at 7Days newspaper for helping clarify what the crackdown on "boyat" will mean in Dubai.  You can read the paper's informative article here

Bad PR move, authority chaps. One of the ways Dubai attracts incomers from all over the world is by painting itself as a tolerant society compared with others in the region.  It can't really call itself that if women who like to dress a bit blokily risk being taken off by the cops for a good telling off and then being jailed if they fail to reform.

Mind you, it seems that this is largely aimed at young women, ie students, and young, Emirati women at that.  As I've said before, if you're a reasonably affluent ex-pat, you can do what you like within reason as long as you do it within the privacy of your own home or don't annoy a local person or someone in authority by doing it. There's also a perception that locals that get in trouble with the law are likely to face a less harsh punishment than ex-pats and poor migrant workers, but I suspect that may not be the case in these circumstances.  

The police officer quoted in 7Days implies that boyat are sexually attracted to other girls.  Obviously in a more tolerant society, he would know that girls who dress a bit blokily, don't always necessarily like other girls, some just like to dress blokily.  Being gay is illegal in Dubai, though, so, it would appear that this is a crude attempt to stamp out lesbian tendancies among the Emirati youth which makes it rather more than a bad PR move.

Mad about the boyat

The more time you spend in a place, the more you start to peel away the layers to find out about the usual and the unusual things that make somewhere both unique and simultaneously akin to countries all over the world.

Proof that there is nothing new under the fierce sun danced in front of my eyes this morning when I saw this article on cross dressers in Dubai.

Cross dressing women targeted in Dubai campaign

Well gosh oh crikes a blimey.  That is really not something I expected when I came here. 

What I didn't expect was this counterculture-style movement of "boyat" - women who dress like tomboys and have short hair under their abayas and head coverings. It's reassuring that even in a restrictive society, not everyone conforms, they find ways to step outside the perceived norm.

I don't know why I didn't expect it.  It's human nature that if rules are enforced, some will rebel against them, no matter what the consequences might be.
The boyah quoted in the National's article said something in her childhood home life led her to become one. I can only speculate on what they might be but I can see the attraction of saying "no" to femininity.  I think it's fair to say that the teenaged me would have spied the beautifully but heavily made up ladies in six-inch heels prowling the malls and wanted to rebel and do something totally different rather than resign myself to four hours doing my hair and makeup before leaving the house. 

I am not sure exactly what the authorities mean by "targeting" them.  It sounds rather sinister to say the least. According to a three-year-old article I found from the Economist, boyat is a phenomenon that spread throughout the Gulf region.  I don't know if it's an example of women in a patriarchal society leaning towards the masculine as an attempt to assert power.  Maybe it's a rebellion against the expectation that they will marry and start breeding new Gulf residents when they are barely out of their teens.

I wonder if the authorities will now lean towards "treatment" of a so-called gender identity disorder, consider banning boyat or continue a previous attempt to educate these young women about the virtues of femininity.