Warm Dubai Hug

The average temperature here is about high 70's in the day and high 60's at night, so with a big warm hug, I am welcomed into the Holiday Season in Dubai!
So far December has been exciting here in Dubai:


First up was UAE National Day Weekend Celebrations, which take place all over the city...but our small community here at Downtown Burj Dubai had a little celebration all our own, with falcons, dancers, traditional Arabic music & singing and good eats! I really enjoyed hearing the music and watching the men, in their crisp white dish-dash, spinning slowly back and forth, with the little boys and gorgeous little girls flitting about, tossing batons and handing out Arabic writings. The women, dressed and content, sat together in the tents on cushions, weaving basket threads, making traditional breads and sweet balls, doing henna and gossiping quietly all day long.

There was an older woman making the khobiz mohala (almost like sweet dough balls in hot honey, and there is another even elder women making khubz adi, flat bread like pita or naan), and I was totally taken with her. At first I felt like a rude tourist taking her picture, but my intentions were not that: here she was, sitting on the paved sidewalk in the middle of this concrete & steel jungle of buildings, in a lovely traditional tent & cushions, almost squatting, with a metal face-mask covering most of the middle of her face, and she has wrinkles. She has history. She is like a story waiting to be written, and she is one of many that have most likely pinched themselves a good thousand times a day in the last decade, watching their desert get swept away in the daily cleaning. Neat. Strange. Enlightening. She never seemed to stop making the bread.

It was a really nice celebration and it lasted 2 days, with fireworks closing the weekend on December 1st (for the record, UAE National Day is actually on December 2nd). For us, the Old Town crowd, we are being treated to 4 weekends of Downtown Burj Dubai Boulevard events: next weekend, we are being treated to Meet & Greet your Neighbors. A BBQ will ensue, and there will be landscape & interior decorating workshops, traditional goods and community canvases, where we all get to paint! FUN!!! I will post pictures next weekend on that!

On a more American traditional note, I went to Wafi City Mall yesterday to continue on my Christmas shopping journey and low & behold my eyes caught a glimpse a great big, GINORMOUS glistening Christmas Tree. Right there. Right in the middle. Towering up to the glass ceiling, with stars and blues and silvers. And then, I noticed it: the Narnia theme.
Apparently, Wafi is celebrating the holiday with the traditional story of Narnia of the Lion, The Witch & the Wardrobe. It is actually really cute and I went around taking pictures of all the displays, with the talking beavers telling the story at each scene. Apparently over the course of December, Wafi will be transformed into a Narnia Winter Wonderland, but for now, I have only photographed the beginnings of what's to come.





And so, with a big warm hug to all of you, I am happily enjoying and cuddling into my big warm Dubai holiday hug.

d:)