Photographs from the Middle East

Here are the best of my Dubai photos. You'll notice four distinct areas that we visited - they even seem to have different colour hues and tones in the photographs. The opulence and wealth of the Jumeriah Beach end of Dubai where the Burj Al Arab is located and the over-the-top spectacle of the Mall of the Emirates contrasted with the traditional Arabic feel of the spice souq and the sparse beauty of the desert.

The New Rothko Room

Yesterday I spent much of the afternoon in the Tate Modern, checking out the renovated galleries. I was a little worried about how they would deal with the Rothko room, but the new home for these paintings is absolutely brilliant. When I was a Masters student at Kings College London in 2000, the Rothko room was my refuge. I would often visit the gallery about twenty minutes before it closed and head straight for the Rothkos where I could sit alone and in silence between the huge canvases.


The new room is smaller, which is originally the size of space Rothko intended for these works, and the walls are painted the perfect complimentary light grey hue. Now the paintings seem to ooze out of the walls and if you sit there long enough, the paint seems to ooze out of the canvas as well. In this wonderful article about the new room by John Banville, he describes this effect as the colours seeping "up through the canvas like new blood through a bandage in which old blood has already dried. The violence of these images is hardly tolerable." Yet, I could sit in this room for hours - losing myself in these paintings or having the paintings disappear into me.

Buy a Diamond, Get a Free Pepsi!

As noted in the last post, my five days in Dubai were mind blowing. I've travelled to a lot of places around the world, and I think Dubai is possibly the most unique city of the bunch. The mix of traditional Arabian life next to staggering wealth and more skyscraper construction sites than I have ever seen, a huge desert still inhabited by Bedouin next to a gorgeous turquoise ocean and a bustling sea port.

Some highlights were visiting the Spice Souq, a safari out into the desert, haggling over prices for the cheapest designer bags that made me wish I had brought a bigger suitcase, lunch on a pier several hundred metres into the Persian Gulf with stunning views of the Burj Al Arab, and the infamous Gold Souq.

The Gold Souq was something else - we went at night and hundreds of stores selling pearls, diamonds, and every kind of gold you can think of that is weighed right in front of you was on offer. Indian brides were shopping for wedding and dowry jewellery, women clothed in the niqab were buying handfuls of diamonds, and little me was bargaining over a simple, yet gorgeous, white gold and diamond ring. When we eventually agreed to a price (ridiculously cheap...just amazing) the storekeeper insisted on finding me a pepsi. Not entirely sure why...because I was North American and he assumed I would want a pepsi? But it turned into this complete farce as he was yelling at his colleague to find me a pepsi, which I didn't even want, but have now actually brought all the way back to London. It turned into the slogan of the evening (photo above): Buy a Diamond, Get a Free Pepsi!

The desert safari was spectacular. We went dune bashing, which generally would not be my thing, but turned out to be a blast. We went to a camel souq where I met the little fellow below, and later in the evening I rode one. I also smoked a sheesha, but that's another story.

Back From Dubai

Utterly exhausted and still in awe of a mind blowing trip. More tales from the Middle East and photos when I recover from the 3am departure time of last night's long flight.

A Voyage Round My Father

During the summer I had wanted to see A Voyage Round My Father, which was playing at one of my favourite theatres - the Donmar Warehouse. However, the run was completely sold out and I left London disappointed. As luck (and demand) would have it, the play transferred with the same cast to the West End and I was able to see a performance last night.

The play is essentially John Mortimer's autobiographical account of his relationship with his cantankerous father, played by one of the remaining British stage legends I had yet to see - Sir Derek Jacobi. The Times review summed it up quite well by describing the play as a touching confession of posthumous love. The play itself was sporadically brilliant (but what is consistently brilliant, really?) and had some killer lines in it. But the best part of the evening was watching Derek Jacobi who was breathtakingly good. I actually feel honoured to have seen him perform and I don't say that very often.

My Fulham First

Last night I went to my very first Premiership football match. I have adopted Fulham as my local team. It was either Fulham or Chelsea, and I opted for the underdog. This harkens back to the late 80's when I started going to Vancouver Canucks games and they couldn't win a thing. The shock of a win induced an unbelievable euphoria - like last night as we won 2-1.

Some small observations: the pitch is much smaller in reality than it is on television; the smell of the freshly cut grass was wonderful (and then rudely interrupted by the scent of cooking sausages being prepared for half time); and apart from one particularly crass and unmistakable refrain, I cannot comprehend football chants. But admittedly, the best part of the evening was discovering that the Fulham mascot is....a badger. Those of you who know about my well-established badger obsession will understand (and probably wonder at) my excitement.

Things I Currently Love v.2

• Listening to Toronto Maple Leafs games on my computer as I'm falling asleep. Even lying in bed, I thrust my fist into the air every time they score.

• How I shocked the bejesus out of a woman on the tube today. Standing on the platform, I said: You're from BC. She stared at me: How on earth did you know that? I explained that when she opened she wallet to retrieve her ticket, I had seen her BC drivers license. In the hot, teeming tube station, we smiled at each other with the secret knowledge that we were both from the most beautiful place on this planet.

• That Arthur, my new aloe vera plant purchased yesterday, came with instructions that said: In winter, reduce watering to nil. It's like a kill-proof plant.

• The look on my father's I-just-got-off-a-ten-hour-flight face when I surprised him at the Heathrow Express this afternoon. If I can't visit home, the next best thing is home visiting me.

Thanksgiving and Thanks for BitTorrent

• This week I experienced my last first-day-of-school. I used to love this day - new teachers, new classes, seeing friends again, new resolutions. But now I'm just kind of tired. Sure, I enjoyed the school supply shopping, but after 23 first-days-of-school (Montessori through PhD) I'm just about done now. I had my schedule for this year's work approved by my supervisor and to see the actual end in sight is an enormous relief.

• I'm flying to Toronto tomorrow for Thanksgiving weekend. I'm looking forward to seeing friends and sleeping in my big queen-sized bed and drinking real filter coffee, but what am I the most excited about? The beginning of the hockey season and the baseball playoffs which are now in full swing.

• I acquired a reader's pass to the British Library and have been working there over the past couple of weeks. Imagine a huge room full of at least 200 desks, each one a large size, with comfortable chair and individual light....and a little signal light that flashes when the books you have ordered are ready to be collected. And the best part - even a sneeze will induce looks of death from the silent masses. You really could hear a pin drop in there and I love it.

• I have been faithfully downloading the American tv that I can't get over here. Hello Amazing Race. Hello Grey's Anatomy. While it will be nice to watch these shows in real time when I'm in Toronto over the next few days, there is something comforting about crawling into bed with my laptop, turning off the light and having a flickering screen of illegal images send me to sleep.

Kandinsky at the Tate

Yesterday I went to see Kandinsky: The Path to Abstraction at the Tate Modern. I'll tell you what was abstracting - me, after dealing with the enormous crowd in the gallery. I went with the same friend who toured the Hermitage with me, and it wasn't exactly the same treatment.

I wasn't particularly enthused about the show, but this may have been partly due to the mistake of going to an exhibit on a Sunday afternoon and partly that I'm not hugely fond of Kandinsky's work. (Though I will say that, as per usual, the Tate Modern did a fantastic job of acquiring such an enormous volume and wide range of works.) It isn't that I don't get what Kandinsky was trying to do with abstraction, but it eliminates a lot of the individuality of each painting for me. Then again, this theory should purport that I feel the same about Rothko's work, but I don't. My friend perhaps said it best: (As we both stared at a painting in front of us), "God, that's the perfect visualization of how I feel when I'm nauseated."

A few years ago, I had to buy a card for someone important to me at really short notice. I dashed into a corner store and had to pick something that didn't have flowers or a cheesy greeting on it. The only banal, yet colourful one that fit this category was a Kandinsky print. I found myself walking around the exhibit yesterday thinking more about this person than about the paintings on the wall. What does this say about Kandinsky? What does this say about me?

Comic Relief with Mom

Hunting for a flat and dealing with the British way of doing so is super stressful. My mom, thankfully accompanying me during this task, is comic relief.

Mom: The flat we're going to see today is right next to the Natural History Museum.
Me: Oh.
Mom: You've been there.
Me: No I haven't.
Mom: Yes you have. I took you there when we came to London during that Spring Break.
Me: I was seven.
Mom: Well, we should go again. They have great animals there.
Me: Animals? In the museum? (Pause) Are they dead?
Mom: Well, yes. But they're really nicely stuffed.

Hopping The Pond

I'm sitting in my loft, it's late, and I'm trying to get my head around the fact that I'm moving to London tomorrow. The 17 pound bag of articles and files that I'll be carrying on the plane with me tomorrow is helping. But my Zoodles and Swiss Chalet sauce packets and nalgene water bottle are packed and I'm surprisingly ready to go. Posting here will most likely be sparse as I deal with this whole homelessness issue. As in, my homelessness. Until then....cheers!

The Perfect Day

It was pretty much the perfect New York day on Wednesday. A deli bagel breakfast, shopping on Fifth Avenue where I bought a gorgeous suit, lunch in the lobby bar at the Four Seasons, an afternoon in MOMA and then an entire evening watching tennis at the US Open.

From our front row seats we saw both Sharapova and Roddick's matches, the hottest couple on the circuit at the moment. (Reading the The New York Times this morning, it referred to them as "Rodapova". God, I'm sick of the name fusion fad.) Roddick looked very good, so much so that I'm picking him to win the men's title. And I'm going for a wildcard for the women's and taking Serena. I was prediction perfect last year.

But the highlight of this year's event for me happened before the matches even started. I was wandering by the practice courts, which are covered in mesh netting, though you can peek through the cracks in the fence to watch. A guy was standing there peeking through and I asked him who was practicing. "Connors and McEnroe," he said. I snorted with laughter. Except that he wasn't kidding. So I watched these legends fool around on the court together for about ten minutes - something I never thought I'd see in my lifetime again. Photos taken on Wednesday night in Arthur Ashe Stadium.

(And as I have just been standing and pacing for the past 35 minutes in my loft watching Agassi play such an unbelievable and nail-biting match, I can't even imagine what I would have been like if I'd been there. Vomiting, probably.)