Where in the world is John Henzell?

Some people say the summertime weather in the United Arab Emirates is unchanging. That’s clearly not right, as this page from today’s newspaper shows. It’s only hot and sunny some of the time. Sometimes it’s sunny and hot…

I’d never seen a silent haka before, but then I’d never tried to watch a rugby test in a Muslim nation in the middle of Ramadan either.

The holy Muslim month of dawn-to-dusk fasting is designed to be a time when the faithful spurn earthly pleasures in favour of reflection and piety.

That included a ban on entertainment, which created a problem for a different sect of the faithful, which included myself, who were determined to see the winner-take-all Trinations game between the All Blacks and the Wallabies.

The 8pm kickoff time in Brisbane meant a 2pm kickoff in Abu Dhabi, in the middle of the fasting period, making it a mission to find somewhere that was screening the match. But doggedness and determination are sometimes required as much off the paddock as on it, and with the help of an expats’ forum website and a lot of calling around, we found the Hemingway Bar of the Abu Dhabi Hilton was showing the test… with conditions.

The conditions included that all the curtains had to be drawn, which was OK. And that no alcohol could be served, making it possibly the only time I’ve ever watched rugby without beer. And that the volume was turned off.

This last one flummoxed us. It was only commentary and not the music which is usually banned in Ramadan. Not that I was that desperate to hear Murray Mexted’s mellifluous commentary but despite appealing to the manageress, the sound stayed off.

So it was that about 18 of us watched the odd spectacle of the silent haka (OK, so we snuck the volume up just a little to hear the stirring Kapa O Pango haka) and nursed brightly coloured alcohol-free “mocktails” instead of the usual pints. I went for a coffee over a Shirley Temple.

It was an interesting bunch. There was a Maori woman from Huntley with her Egyptian husband, both bedecked in All Black paraphernalia, there were a dozen or so predominantly female teachers who were brought over to train the UAE teachers, and a smattering of other nationalities, included a solitary but unbowed Wallabies fan.

“This is the first time I’ve watched rugby without drinking,” one of the teachers said, voicing the thoughts of most of us. “It just seems wrong.”

The game was a cracker, with the lead changing from one side to the other and the end result in doubt until well after the final hooter, when a turnover allowed the All Blacks to kick the ball out and ensure a narrow four-point victory.

For all the silence from the giant LCD television, there was no silence from those watching it and every score was greeted with the usual mix of yells and screams, as if it was going to have any influence on a game being played six time zones away. In between our sporadic yelling, the other end of the bar would occasionally go similarly ballistic as someone scored in the Man U and Liverpool match.

Besides that, the other main excursion was a trip to the Grand Mosque on the outskirts of AbDab, as the expats call Abu Dhabi. This mosque was truly grand, as you’d imagine from the $2 billion — yep, billion — budget that went into it.

There was an endless procession of mind-bending facts about it, tempered by the knowledge that it was scaled back in size by about a third when they realised it was not a good idea for it to be bigger than the mosque in Mecca. Even the mini version has a capacity of 48,000, with the 10,000 in the main hall praying on the world’s biggest hand-knotted carpet, which is more than half a hectare in size.

The minarets outside are 107m high, complete with (of course) aircraft warning lights on top. Nearby stands the tomb of Sheik Zayed, the moderniser of the UAE and who initiated the mosque. It’s a modest building where Islamic scholars take turns to recite the Koran over his grave 24/7.

But the bit that really resonated for me was realising that this is truly a modern-day Taj Mahal, where ridiculous oilbucks wealth has allowed detail of a kind usually only prescribed by all-powerful Mughal rulers. (And the initiator of the Taj, it should be remembered, was overthrown by his son for being too extravagant on the building)

The huge scale and amazing attention to detail included a Kiwi touch. Yep, the ubiquitous and reviled tacky tourist medium of paua — mother of pearl — was used to help create the decorations on some of the 1096 hand-hewn marble pillars.

Opening hours during Ramadan are restricted but I went in to have a look around during one of the thrice-weekly openings for infidels like me. Hardly anyone else was there, apart from a few Germans, and I met one of the long-bearded Emirati faithful who’d earlier sat reciting from the Koran (Quran, if we’re being precise) in front of a pillar of paua. Later he came up to me and we Salaamed then shook hands in the Arabic style, which is the same as in the west but ends with each bringing our hand back over to touch the chest over the heart.

“Muslim?” he asked.

“La,” (”No”) I replied, and a slightly awkward silence ensued.

Today will be two weeks since I arrived in the UAE and even the oddest things are beginning to gain the tenor of familiarity. Whether it’s the cry of the muezzin in mid-afternoon calling the faithful to prayer (and me to my coffee break) or the mundane aspects such as my glasses instantly fogging up in my brief forays into the opporessive humidity between the aircon of the hotel, the aircon of the taxi and the aircon of the office.

Only a month or so ago, I revelled in having no keys, no cellphone, no job and no home.

I still have no keys (the hotel works on a swipe card) or cellphone (you need to be a resident before you can get a cellphone plan) or a settled home outside of the maid-serviced hotel room. But I do have a job, to which I’ve already done my first news feature — on the “man drought” in New Zealand, which is relevant to the UAE because the Emirates has the highest percentage of men on the planet. With 2.7 men for every woman of working age, the UAE is the world’s pre-eminent “man reservoir”.

But I’m not sure we’ll see a sudden influx of single women. As the saying goes, sometimes when the odds are good, the goods are odd.

I’d only been in the United Arab Emirates for a few hours when I was offered my first foul madams.

I didn’t even have to leave my room — there on the room service menu on the Arabian breakfast option, among the olives, white cheese and flat bread, was “foul madams”. It was entirely in keeping with my initial impressions of Euro Hotel, which was decorated in a style best described as trying to replicate Saddam’s sex palace.*

I thought it prudent to go for the artery-clogging American breakfast instead.

Even though this was Ramadan, the Muslim month of daylight fasting, there was no problem getting food during daylight hours, so long as it was eaten in your room and not in public. It soon turned out that I was unlikely to offend any Muslims because so far as I could tell, the staff were exclusively Indian Hindus. (Hindus who couldn’t make an American breakfast to save their lives, but that’s another story)

It’s been emblematic of my experience in my first week. Apart from the immigration counter at the airport, I’m not sure if I’ve actually spoken to an Emirati, who comprise either 10 or 20 per cent of the population in their own country depending on which statistic you read.

I’ve seen them, though, driving past in the huge American four-wheel-drives of the sort that, ironically enough, Americans can’t afford to drive any more. And, to their credit, the Emiratis tend to be fonder of high-end BMWs, Mercedes and Range Rovers than of American SUVs.

The taxi drivers have been Indian, Syrian, or Pakistani. My colleagues on The National are Brits, Canadians, Americans, Australians, Kiwis and a substantial smattering of nationals from around the Middle East.

The Emiratis, a Goan man working at my hotel explained, don’t do those sorts of jobs. They all work in the big offices of the oil and gas companies, or for the US$500 billion sovereign wealth funds that are trying to ensure a post-oil future for the UAE.

So, it’s been quite a ride. I’ve been surprised by how ramshackle some of the urban environment is, outside of the artificially pleasant surrounds of a few big buildings and major hotels.

An even bigger surprise is how much it reminds me of southern California — there’s the same oversized cars, the same vacuous wealth, the same yawning disparity between rich and poor, the same oppresively unchanging sunniness, the same all-pervading layer of dirt on everything, the same blast-furnace heat, and the same way that anything green and lush is only that way because it’s artificially created. The other surprise is how I’ve ended up here, when I swore I’d never live in southern California.

But Abu Dhabi is also surprisingly dysfunctional too. For all the massive oil wealth, the locals seem to share that peculiarly subcontinental capacity for tolerance of the substandard.

For all the western input, The National reflects this. I had hints of the shambolic operations beforehand, such as when I signed the job offer and faxed it to the number listed on the form, only to be told that nobody has yet worked out where the fax machine is that relates to that number.

I arrived in Abu Dhabi in the middle of the night, when the temperature was still a ridiculous 35degC/96degF. (The planes don’t land in the middle of the day, I was told, because the temperatures are too high to refuel them safely) Then I took a taxi to the supposedly pre-booked Euro Hotel, arriving at 1am to find they had no booking for me. Fortunately, they had a spare room — the famous Saddam sex bunker — and I decided I was more interested in booking in than on trying to work out the problem.

Then I went to work and was moved to another hotel, just off the Corniche that runs along the waterfront. The Euro (dubbed the Eurotrash by hacks who stayed there before me) had a room rate of a mind-boggling NZ$400 a night but the new hotel, The Al Diar Capital, puts it in the shade with a walk-in rate of NZ$550 a night. And the company is paying for my first month, and will foot most of the bill for possibly another few months after that.

My home away from home, The Capital Hotel.

“You’ll like The Capital,” I was told by one of The National staffers, conjuring up images in my mind of gyms or pools or such things. He quickly scotched such thoughts by finishing his sentence: “because you can buy alcohol there without a permit from the government.”

It’s nice enough. The aircon at Saddam’s sex bunker was seemingly perpetually stuck on the Antarctic Ice Shelf setting but at The Capital, it’s merely equivalent to the inside of a Dunedin student flat in winter. After a short time in the UAE, it comes as no surprise to learn that the per capita energy consumption is the highest in the world and twice even America’s.

I’ve also been advised that habituating any of The Capital’s bars will lead to approaches by some of the skinny young women who I’ve spotted around the hotel, who have stood out for being scantily clad, for tottering around on ridiculous heels, for their a fondness of oversized golden accessories and for their eastern European accents. It seems the Euro Hotel is not the only place with Foul Madams on the menu…

At the end of my first week at The National, I have not written a single word for print. That in turn might be because I still haven’t been given a log-in for the computer system and don’t have a phone. I only have somewhere to sit thanks to Jo and Blayne, former colleagues from The Press, who pointed me towards an empty desk. Possession seems to be 99 per cent of the law in the newsroom. I don’t even have a swipe card through the security and have to be swiped in by the guard or follow others through. For that matter, I don’t even have a work permit yet, which will apparently take another month.

I’m reportedly going to be working on the Saturday (the Muslim equivalent of our Sunday) edition of The National, which has been published six days a week since April or so. I asked someone up the food chain when we were intending to launch.

“The second,” he said.

“…of?” I replied.

“November.”

November! The oddest thing is that not only am I not able to do any work, I don’t seem to be required to either. It’s an odd thing for someone who doesn’t like to go a single day without filing at least a couple of stories. The guy who’s going to be my boss has now gone away for two weeks so I’ve volunteered myself to write for the daily edition. The odd thing was it seems nothing would have even been noticed if in that time I’d kept my head down and come in for a few hours each day, surfed the net and left again having achieved nothing other than warming the seat. I probably wouldn’t even have needed to come in at all.

Ramadan has been no problem, mostly because The National’s bosses have set aside a room at the back for us infidels to eat and drink without offending our Muslim colleagues. It’s been interesting watching the transition from day to night (designated as when it’s sufficiently dark to be unable to distinguish between a black thread and a white thread) and the iftar, the literal “break fast”. One night I was in one of the many, many malls and watched as people ordered food in the final 20 minutes before the end of the day and the staff got it ready to serve once the time came. Outside, you’d have heard the wail of a muezzin on the minarets, calling the faithful to prayer. In here, the time was displayed when the fountain suddenly burst into life and the food suddenly began being served. Traditionally, the fast is broken with a few dates and some tea but my experience so far is that McDonalds and Burger King tend to be more popular among the locals.

Some things don’t change though. The same seventies shows that were on the Greymouth motel’s cable are on here…

Overall, though, Abu Dhabi has seemed to be particularly tolerant. Some women are locked away in the full burquas but there’s no problem for other Middle Eastern women to wander around in jeans and tight fitting clothing, even though Ramadan is supposed to be a time when extra discretion is required. From what others have said, the worst reaction caused by culturally inappropriate clothing is stares and nothing more.

Reading back over this, it seems a little negative, reflecting a difficult time to be in a challenging country. As you’d imagine, there’s an onslaught for the senses at present but I’m also looking forward to the time when it becomes more familiar and I start to take in some of the minutae of this fascinating place. Such as when I went into a supermarket and found tins of beans labelled “Foul Medammas”…

حتى في المرة القادمة (until next time)

JH

* Yes, Kathy, that was your line. Remember, it’s recycling and not plagiarism.