2009: Transitions and Trash Art

By December, the mood shifted. The financial crisis hit hard, resulting in the departure of several colleagues of mine. Populations of real estate agents and developers (who once ravaged the city and it inhabitants like ants at a picnic) have drastically vanished- not totally unlike when Chad and I took WD40 and a match to ant hills in the yard. As much as I delight in scammers being swept out of the city, no foreign investment means layoffs, and layoffs mean exodus of good people, too.

I moved again, to a new tower in the marina, across from the beach- Al Fattan. We have a great gym, a resort-style pool, a thai massage, and walking-access to restaurants and grocery stores.


I first lived in Al Majara, then lived in Al Sahab. Shatha is our office tower.






(My building is the blue one)

The stretch of beach road I live on has become chaotic over the past two months. A ton of shops and restaurants have opened up, including several Western chains. "On the Border" just opened, and we took time to swap stories with the temporary American training staff. The cafes are packed full of locals and expats until 3 AM. The traffic is awful at all hours after 6 PM.



To make it more hectic, Dubai Shopping Festival (DSF) has been going on since mid-January (DSF is basically a heavily marketed, month-long "tax free weekend"- essentially the stores mark up prices and slash them back down, and offer buy-one-get-one deals, and they think that makes it tourist season). For DSF, they organize nightly parades down the streets with clowns and dancers and stilt walkers. Artists and tribal drummers have been shipped in for the month. They also erected a carnival on the beach. I imagine the Camels are disturbed over the huge kamikaze and crane-bungee drop, and rightly so- I'm more convinced of the safety precautions at the Florence County Fair.



Other than the traffic, the one thing that really bothers us is the excessive, random artwork clogging up the sidewalks (most of it constructed from garbage). Gemma and I imagine destruction of all the trash art. I imagine an action movie where stunt cars drive down the promenade. Pedestrians adorn in abayas and dishdasha throw themselves out of the way. The car launches from an overturned signboard-turned-ramp and flies into the giant scrap-tire horse, obliterating it.



There'd be an explosion too, maybe like this:



Gemma doesn't bother with the mechanics or procedure; her solution is pre-dawn vandalism. Either way, the flexible-posing, giant waiters sculpted from empty soft drink cans (serving empty soft drink cans) would never see it coming.



There's even a man who stacks and balances rocks in precarious, gravity-defying columns. Oblivious to social or parental duty, parents look on as their children cross the barrier and topple the stone pillars, delicately positioned hours before. The stone man in the wheel chair often lacks his head by sun-up.



Once DSF ends, I imagine our neighborhood will return to some sort of normalcy. Hopefully the economic situation will improve here- otherwise I may need to take up rock balancing!


Sand Sculpting


The "DSF" Sand Sculpture - ridiculous.

More pictures on the webshots link to the right- album is "January 2009".