Happy Thanksgiving!

After 3 years of hilariously bad thanksgiving dinners in restaurants in the UAE (read: chickens instead of turkeys, HOT cranberry sauce, “pumpkin what?”, etc.), I have decided to take matters into my own hands. After all, this is my favorite meal of the year and why should I be deprived just because I’m a few thousand miles away from my grandmother?

Building the menu was easy and making the shopping list and preparation schedule was a pleasure (after all, my brain works in bullet points and timelines). However, sourcing ingredients was more of a challenge than one would expect for a city this awash in American brands and franchises. I had to make 4 trips to the store to get my hands on good turkey, I had to make my own bread cubes for the stuffing, frozen cranberries don’t exist, you wouldn’t believe how much I had to pay for fresh cranberries or for pecans, and so on. But where there is a will, there’s a way and by the shiny buckle on my pilgrim shoes I swear to you this will be a respectable Thanksgiving dinner!

I’m a bit intimidated by the turkey roasting. It is a form of magic I have dared not dabble in. But my superneighbor Denise is here to supervise and I’m armed with instructions from Baba over the phone and – here’s my secret weapon – written instructions from my mom! How cool is that?! I was rummaging through my recipe box when I found this, which is her menu and prep schedule from Thanksgiving in 2001. I remember looking at it when I was going through all her kitchen stuff deciding what to keep but I completely forgot I had it. It’s amazing! She should have been a project manager for one of the big developers over here. The buildings would have gone up on time and tasted delicious!

Ok, now it’s time to get to work. Please keep your fingers crossed for a juicy outcome. I’ll report back tomorrow (if I haven’t burnt the house down)….

Last Cupcake in Marienbad

Wowee this season of Mahmovies! is kicking some cinematic booty. This week's screening of "Last Year in Marienbad" was stunning, mysterious, and atmospheric. This was the first time I ever watched a French movie and didn't even bother to read the sub-titles the whole time -- it almost didn't matter what they were saying. It's all about those costumes! And cornices! And, sacre bleu, those cheekbones!

We're doing well with the cupcakes, too. This week's flavors were chocolate and tiramisu and they sold well (which is good because otherwise Mahmoud and I gain weight from the leftovers). We're well on our way to raising enough to cover food costs for a MESCO nursery for 6 months!

Next week I'm thinking about carrot cake... and some sort of chocolate something... any requests?

Cupcake Revolution

Nearly everyone who knows me knows that I will seize any excuse to stuff you full of cake. Really. Any reason at all. It’s your birthday? Here, have some cake! It’s my birthday? Here, have some of my cake! You’re having a bbq? Why, it would be better if we had some cake! It’s Friday morning? Let there be cake! And so on.

But it’s only Mahmovies that allows me to really rev my kitchen engine because, for Mahmovies, I get to bake for the whole town. It’s a deluge of cupcakes! I bake and bake and bake all day until every level surface of my kitchen is covered in cupcakes. During last season, we christened our apartment “Le Chateau des Gâteaux.” Here is the sign I made this summer out of some scrap material.

Today is the second screening of this season, “Last Year in Marienbad,” for which I will create some chocolate cupcakes with chocolate icing and also tiramisu cupcakes (dark coffee cake with marscapone whipped cream icing). I don’t have a recipe for the latter, but I’m feeling confident.

Last week’s cupcakes (vanilla with vanilla icing and chocolate cheesecake) were a big success. In fact, to stay in keeping with the theme of the movie, “I am Cuba,” I think we have to call it A CUPCAKE REVOLUTION. As the icing on the cake (no pun intended), I even had a t-shirt to announce it so! The one and only Fatima Najm gave me a fabric cut-out of Che Guevara... and that evolved into this nice cupcake revolution t-shirt!

Fatima also gets credit for the other major innovation of this season, namely that all proceeds from cupcake sales will go to charity! My personal mission is “cupcakes for you = batatawada for them!” I’m working with a group called Creatives Against Poverty, which is a collective of journalists, consultants, photographers, NGO workers, entrepreneurs, etc. who pool and contribute skills for social impact. We support many different NGOs, one of which is the MESCO schools and nurseries in Mumbai (http://www.mescotrust.org). This organization works on the quality and affordability of education for children from the slums, who often fall through the cracks of the education system in India. My contribution particularly is towards the daily provision of batatawada (a potato patty sandwich), which is sometimes the only hot meal these kids get in a daily diet of stale bread and chili paste. MESCO started providing food when they realized that faintness and hunger pains were among the leading causes for student absenteeism. Now they include the expense of batatawada in their operating costs and they have a full, smiling class!



My goal is to raise enough money from the Mahmovies cupcakes to support an entire nursery of 20-30 kids with batatawada for 6 months.

Happy Belated Fighting Breast Cancer Month

I celebrated the final weekend of October, which is the official global month of pink-ribbon-wearing, with a breast cancer walk. It was fun to do something like this in Dubai. The city’s typical recreation activities are indoors and commercially-/gastronomically-oriented, so it was quite a sight to see however many thousands of people up bright and early to parade around like normal bipeds. Granted, the walk route was circling a mall, but at least we weren’t IN the mall! This is progress.


Plus we got to raise money for breast cancer research and treatment while marveling at how much pink clothing some people own. Here’s Marwa, for instance, looking ravishing in rose from head to toe to camera.







I was not quite so pink, but I enjoyed wearing my various breast cancer event pins and also a tremendously unfashionable magenta baseball cap, emblazoned with a capital B. I would like to believe that the B is for BREASTS, but it is in fact for Bur Juman, the mall sponsoring the walk.

My only complaint is that we celebrated the start of the walk with a balloon launch. A balloon launch! In a region with enough of a littering problem as it is, we released thousands of pink latex balloons into the skies. Granted, it was beautiful, but really! Are we going to have a walk next week to raise money for the little beach birds who choked on these balloons?

On the positive side, we injected some amusement into the day for the construction workers working nearby. Here they are, clustered along the route, snapping pictures of us on their mobile phones to send home. I can’t imagine what captions they put on them…

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!

Happy Birthday to Me!

Sana Heeeeeelwa ya gamila, happy birthday to me!

Thanks to everyone for the birthday wishes and to Mahmoudi for the special midnight birthday jig and the amazing cake decorating equipment, which will allow me to exercise a little creative energy in service of my eternal quest to make you all chubby.

I’m really happy with 30. Here are some things I can do now that I couldn’t do last year:

1) Do handstands
2) Play squash
3) Small talk with grandmothers in Arabic
4) Count the colors in my hair (red, yellow and purple currently, if you’re wondering)
5) Cook mujadara
6) Say that I got to hang out with my brother not once but twice in the past year (after 3 years of being thwarted by bureaucracy)
7) Proclaim – with confidence – that the world’s best burrito is made in Berlin
8) Plan a wedding
9) Make cupcakes profitable
10) Create a small Wikipedia empire
11) Knit a monkey!
… and several others not fit for public broadcast ☺

It’s been a good year, has it not?