Oktoberfest im Dubai, ach ja!

It was another weird and wonderful evening in Dubai. This is a different genre of fun from the "total immersion" experience; this one I like to put in the category "Multi-Cultural Surrealist Masterpieces."

In a tent on the grounds of the Grand Hyatt, you can buy a bucket-sized glass of weissebeer and listen to real live oompa band, complete with a mountain-sized yodelling man. The beer is German, the music is German, the crowd is... well, at least partly German and definitely mostly European...


And then you have the Indian waiters in leiderhosen.

And the Phillipina waitresses in serving wench outfits.











All in all, a brillian rendition of Oktoberfest for our fair sandy city. My only complaint was that, if you get hungry and order a plate of sausages, you receive what is clearly a hot dog. But perhaps that was a blessing in disguise for me. I saw someone eating a chilli dog on tv last week and I literally cried out with longing. A chilli dog, a chilli dog, my kingdom for a 5 minutes in Yocco's...

US Healthcare Reform Debate for Dummies

I'm a bit ashamed by my cluelessness regarding the healthcare debate raging in the states these past few months. I know there IS a debate. I know it is quite heated and involves a lot of "town hall" meetings around the country. But given the lack of coverage in regional publications here, I don't really know what they're arguing about.

I suspect that they don't either; the few excerpts I have heard about the debate go something like this:
One guy says "we have the worst healthcare system in the world in terms of value for money and we need to fix it."
Then another guy says "this reform means we'll have SOCIALIZED medicine!" and the crowd gasps.
Then some loony in the back of the room screams "Obama is a gay terrorist muslim socialist who is going to kill your grandparents!"

And this is about as deep as the public debate seems to go. I find this a little frustrating, especially that critique of the reforms is often limited to the word "socialist" which is generally bandied about as if it is synonymous with "apocalyptic." It's not actually a bad word. It's just a system of political organization like any other, with pros and cons that can be debated like any other. If you put it in a sentence, you don't automatically win the debate! This is similar to Rule #1 of debates about ethics: If you attempt to invoke Nazism as your trump card, you lose and you need to go home.

Anyway, despite my raging against ignorant debaters, the fact is that I can scarcely say more myself because I don't know anything about the proposed reforms. I sheepishly admitted as much to a girl I met in August, who happens to work in DC as a healthcare policy researcher and I asked her if she could recommend any good summaries online to bring me up to speed. Surprisingly, she had trouble thinking of any source that is both smart and easy to digest.

Hence my excitement when I recently discovered just such a source! The ever-brilliant HowStuffWorks podcast (which you can download for free from iTunes) did a four-part series on the healthcare debates and it is interesting, funny, informative, and easy to listen to. They cover:
1) How Healthcare in the United States works Right Now
2) President Obama's Healthcare Plan: Soup to Nuts
3) Rumors, Myths and Truths Behind Obam's Healthcare Plan
4) Healthcare systems Around the World

The first episode is a little slow, but I found the others genuinely informative. So, if you're as clueless as I am (or the great majority of my enormous countrymen are), then give it a listen...

Two Brief Observations on a Drive to Oman

1) Driving through mountains makes one's heart scream WHOOOPPEEEE!

I have discovered that this is true even when the mountains are kind of scrawny and brown. I have also discovered that the WHOOOOPPEEEE in one's heart is much louder when in the driver's seat. Lastly, I discovered that Fats Waller makes a great soundtrack to the mountains of Oman. He might not have been aware of that, but it is nevertheless true.


2) I saw a driver's ed car out near Hatta.

Hatta, for those of you who don't know, is a solid hour and a half away from Dubai, from whence the car originated. Usually you see these cars within a 5 minute radius of the driving school, crawling along at half the speed limit, signaling turns 200 meters away, and cringing into the gutter everytime another assh*le Dubai driver screams up behind them with high beams on. But not this guy! He was on the road to Oman at a respectable 120 km, with his giant "learner" sign flapping in the wind. I like to imagine that he got fed up with the driving instructor's directions and just decided to floor it onto the highway, exam results be damned! Or maybe he and his driving instructor suddenly fell madly in love and are making a dash to the border to be married upon a dhow on the Indian Ocean. Ah... we can dream, can we not?

Et voilà! Veritas Films!

Behold the Veritas Films website: http://www.veritasfilms.ae. It’s finally done and we’re so very proud of it! It’s loaded with film clips of our work and info about the company and the type of work we love to do. My favorite thing about it is the rotating background which features some stunning stills from our projects.

It was quite a journey to get here – well over half a year since we started designing the layout of the site. Along the way, Mahmoud has discovered that he never wants to use DropBox again and I have discovered that I like writing XML code. Who knew?!

Big thanks to Stephane for his gorgeous design of the site, to Jes for the fantastic programming, to Nas for his general surly charm and advice, and to my father again for the sublime logo which graces the top right corner of every page. If anyone out there needs a website or logo and wants to work with these wonderful artists, please let me know and I’ll be glad to put you in touch.

Now go admire our gorgeous site! Go! Admire!
http://www.veritasfilms.ae

Happy Navratri!

On Thursday night, I had one of those experiences that makes living in Dubai worthwhile, when the extraordinary density and diversity of the expat populations here allows for complete immersion experiences of the sort generally impossible outside of the country in question. On Thursday, it was India...

We went to the public celebration of the ninth and final night of Navratri, the Hindu festival which marks the beginning of autumn and honors the Goddess Durga. I think it has the best tradition of any holiday I've encountered -- it's basically a week-long dance marathon! We went on its final and most frenetic night when Dubai's gujarati community rents out the football pitch of a local social club, pitches a stage for the dozen-strong band, and fills the place to capacity with Indians of all ages: toddlers to teenagers to grandparents, all decked out to the nines in their most colorful clothes and jewellery. Men in technicolor kurtas embroidered with gold, women in a rainbow of saris, gold and silver sequins on every swirling hem, everyone dancing ecstatically, dripping with sweat, beaming smiles...

I'd estimate there were about four thousand people total, but it had a wonderfully friendly feel to it because the dancing style is communal. People drift in and out of different groups, each dancing in a circle of around 15 or 20 people people. It seemed to me that there were maybe about a dozen different dances (all involving some combination of clapping, kicking, twisting, spinning, shoulder shaking, and slowly revolving around the circle in a clockwise direction), any one of which could be chosen by the group to go with any of the songs being played by the band.

At first, we were trying to stay discretely between circles, just marveling at the energy and colors, but we couldn't stay inconspicuous for long. We were absolutely the only non-Indians in the whole place. Like magnet, if we came within 5 feet of a circle, I'd get pulled into the circling ring (with some kind soul giving me tips on when to spin or clap) and Mahmoud would get escorted to the center of the circle where the young men shake it with machismo. There's a fine line between laughing with us and laughing at us -- I'm not always sure which side of the line we were on -- but they certainly full of smiles!