Reader Appreciation Day

I wanted to take a moment to thank everybody visitng this blog so far for checking it out. It's not the most ambitious project on the web as of yet, but I love writing, and it feels great to be doing it again. Even moreso, it's gratifying to have people that care enough - that are interested enough - to read this blog. So once again, please know how much it's appreciated.

I do feel that The Easy Outsider has its wheels off the ground - that I have a good idea of what the blog is and what I want it to be. I'm aiming to write more frequently, and to cover subjects that extend beyond accounts of my day - such as commentary on sports, culture, technology, social media (and maybe politics?) here. While the first weeks we're very much about wandering and discovering, and I tried to avoid making rash assessments, I now feel familiar enough with the landscape to make some critical assessments. So that is a goal moving forward, but there will still be plenty about what I'm eating and where I'm swimming,

Also, I am going to attempt to begin responding to some of the comments. Despite the casual tone, I'm trying to view this project as seriously as possible, like I'm auditioning for a lifestyle blog on Yahoo! Sports or The Washington Post or whatever. Thinking about it in those terms keeps me focused in the direction I always intended for my writing. So even though it's fairly common for bloggers to carry on one-to-one conversations with readers in comment sections, I find too much of it can be a bit discrediting. That has been my thinking, but I don't want it seem like I'm ignoring the interest and support, so I'm going to try to respond to most comments moving forward.

However, please feel free to email me direct questions and feedback at shift78@gmail.com. Not being facetious at all when I say I would love to get more emails.

Furthermore, I also have abridged inane observations for you consumption on Twitter. If you want to follow me, I'm @steelydwill.

Now I need to make up for lost time on the comments people have already left, so here goes...

Brett - Latest update has me making my summer visit for two weeks around The Fourth of July, so looks highly unlikely that I'll be back for Labor Day.

Will - Coincidentally enough, Abu Dhabi Week just ran a fishing article. The article is written in the Will Leitch second person, which I find incredibly annoying, but there are some details about area fishing at the bottom.

Uncle Steve - Now notable progress toward becoming the UAE's next great soccer ref.

Aunt Nancy - The price of eating out is a mixed bag, but it's not necesarilly as ultra-expensive as we thought six months ago. It's easy to spend $60 a meal at one of the hotel restaurants - even more depending on the alcohol - and the quality is just as hit-and-miss as the $10 meals, in my opinion.

Barret - You are an excellent soccer player and I would personally vouch for you to replace one of the Brazilians for my nearby club, Al Wahda. However, your comments are scaring my family.

THE Oppressive Heat Arrives

The outdoor temperatures we just started reaching in Abu Dhabi exceed all of my previous experiences, surpassing youth baseball games in the low 100s at the Edrico Tournament every July. High of 107 degrees yesterday (42 Celsius), same number expected to register today. We knew this time was coming, as I doubt anyone moves to UAE without hearing sober tales about THE Oppressive Heat, and now here we are.

That seems to be the unconsciously agreed-upon phrase to describe the hot season around here - THE Oppressive Heat - as I've seen various strangers and bloggers use it. It should be the mascot of the Abu Dhabi professional indoor lacrosse team. Ex-pats will warn you that THE Oppressive Heat emerges as the central antagonist in UAE life sometime toward the beginning of May(not unlike The Ohio State University during September), and after five-plus weeks of highs in the 90s (which is fine by me), we leaped past the point of no return. For the next 5 months, all outdoor activity likely will have to be planned around it.

Now I have asserted many times over the years that I am a hot weather person, but that's as we define hot weather in the U.S. East. Birmingham, Alabama was certainly my favorite climate I have ever lived in, as I gladly exchanged regularly hitting 100 in the summers for winter days that rarely dipped below freezing. Miami's climate has always sounded great to me, and I don't have any more interest in seeing snow unless I'm skiing.

So secretly, I have been hoping that I won't find the UAE heat as oppressive as every single other person I talked with. 107 degrees felt survivable...like, you could still plan outdoor activities, as long as there's shade and a cool body of water around. In yesterday's example, we went to lunch by the pool at the Abu Dhabi Shangri La, and although you could feel the heat in waves like an oven door opened into an air-conditioned kitchen, spending a half hour in the artificially-cooled pool and then eating in the shade made it comfortable.

But the heat test has only just begun, as we don't plan to see another day with a high below 100 until October, and as we move deeper into the summer, we expect to hit numbers like 115, 120 or 130. Plus, unlike Vegas (where I remember feeling pretty comfortable outdoors the year I watched my friend Jeff play in the World Series of Poker in July), it is NOT a dry heat, they say. It is going to be plenty humid. All evidence suggests that time spent outside this summer will be time spent miserable, for me like everyone else.

Last weekend when we were hanging out at The Hilton and the weather was still pleasantly in the 90s, we set up shop in lounge chairs beside a middle-aged couple from Texas. Since you seem to run into a fairly limited number of Americans in Abu Dhabi (far more Europeans), they were excited to hear our American accent and immediately initiated a conversation.

We found out the guy is from Texas and keeps a summer home in Florida, so hoping for a little reassurance from the like-minded, I told him that I consider myself a hot weather person, and that I'm holding onto hope that everybody is exaggerating about how miserable the heat is, until it proves me wrong.

He chortled and with a still-distinguishable Texas accent said: "Brotha, I wish that was the case."

In related news, the average daily temperatures still look to be well over 100 in early September, and Labor Day is looking awful good as a time for my first trip back to the States. Heck, maybe I shouldn't wait that long.

Straight Flowing On A Boat

We're racking up an amazing number of luxury leisure experiences in The Middle East. I didn't write up much on my two trips to Emirates Palace or brunch by the beach at The Fairmont or brunch by the 31st-floor pool at the hotel that adjoins our building. Such times are pretty damn great. Feel free to cast me a braggart, but I promise I'm appreciating every damn moment of it. If I write a book about my time here, it might come off like the exact opposite of a Bret Easton Ellis novel, with a main character that is boyishly excited about every club and restaurant.

Yesterday was our second outing on a rented boat. The first time about a month ago, it was Leslie's entire company (up to that point) plus friends and family and boat crew. I'm no expert on boat sizes, but I'd guess it was a double-decker 50-footer, with about 30 people on board? This time, there were just five of us plus our Sri Lankan captain on a 30-footer.

Pretty outstanding day in the water and sun, as we spent about four hours out on The Corniche, the main seaside area along the Persian Gulf tributaries. The highlight of the day was a 15-minute period where a school of dolphins enveloped our boat. Leslie, of course, jumped in, hoping one would invite her to ride it. They were curious, but not quite that interested in making friends, so the closest anyone got to dolphin contact was from the boat about eight feet away. Unfortunately, they were fast and predictable, while my camera's shutter speed was predictably slow. Still, pretty amazing, and not something we had counted on at all.

Other than that, it was just a lot of swimming around and hoping that the water was fairly clean, drinking beers (which we had to hide like 16 year olds from the police boats) and frying like a hash brown in the 99 degree heat. I think we've gotten to the point of the year when no SPF can stand up against the Abu Dhabi sun for a prolonged period, and it's about to get a lot hotter.

Still, it was definitely one of those "it's good ta be da king" days, and we're generally not lacking for those in AD.

The Day We Got bin Laden, It Was Not Cute To Feel Like An Outsider

Well, one of the reasons I was excited to move to UAE is to see a different world perspective, and the bin Laden death certainly affected me differently here.

I'm proud of what I consider an important accomplishment for our national defense, and I'm highly interested in the details of the mission. But in an unfamiliar position of perceived vulnerability, I was mostly thinking of myself for the first 24 hours.

Still unwilling to let go of my American sports fixation, I woke up at 4 a.m. Monday GCT - in time to watch the last two periods of the Capitals game. After they disgustingly handed Tampa Bay a 3-2 OT win and 2-0 series lead on a shit line change 2.5 hours later, I angrily and abruptly went back to bed. Hadn't heard peep about Osama during the game, and I had been dividing my attention with Twitter, Facebook and Penn State football message boards. Must have just missed the early breaks on those platforms.

When I woke up again around 10 a.m. and checked Twitter, it was everywhere.

My first reaction was: "Wow, we finally got him. Justice wins out."

Within the first half hour, I had shifted to: "I'm in the Middle East now, I wonder if this will affect anything?"

And then finally, after receiving a fairly cautionary email from Leslie (who had left for work before I woke up) and reading the U.S. Warden Message (Hollywood has led me to become uneasy about any situations involving wardens), I was pretty freaked out.

Don't go outside any more than you need to. Don't visit crowded places. Don't take cabs. There could be some serious bin Laden supporters around. Anti-westerner sentiment that might have been below the surface may be ready to manifest itself in the form of a public incident. Someone like me could get victimized. This was the message I was internalizing.

Thus I spent most of the day feeling surprised, uncertain, alone and vulnerable, and for the first time since my early days, I would have loved to teleport home. I purposefully didn't leave the apartment at all yesterday until about 8 p.m. when Leslie and I grabbed carryout Italian from the mall. She went to work where business went on, which made me feel like a wuss, but she did have an office full of Americans sharing the experience.

It was was undoubtedly an overemotional overreaction on my part, but it felt like a potential game-changer on life here. The comfort that I had built over the last month seemed lost. That's not to say I was thinking "I wish we hadn't taken out Osama so I could still take carefree walks to Texas Chicken." I just had no concept of my own safety.

In the light of the second day, I'm no longer feeling or behaving like a 10 year old spending a night in a house alone. The good ol' Al Wahda mall next door has welcomed me in and taken my dirhams in exchange for Starbucks and Chinese food the same as any previous day.

Realistically, it's unlikely that UAE structures are going to be retaliation targets, or that westerners in this country are going to be attacked, but it's possible. I still can't say what the chances are. But you try to take a step back and assess the situation realistically and proceed with life.

Most of my family has been to Jerusalem. Many of my friends and I have been to baseball games at Tiger Stadium. It's a new type of safety concern for me, but that doesn't mean it's a grave one. Have some fortitude and adapt, Dan.

Other than that, I've been watching the news and reading the papers to try to get a sense of the Arab perspective. The image above is of today's The National, the English newspaper in Abu Dhabi that paid me to write two local soccer stories week. The themes of the opinion pieces seem to be 1) Osama was evil 2) he hasn't had much impact on Al Queda operations for a while 3) by orchestrating 9-11, Bin Ladin provoked the U.S. into bringing a fight to the Middle East and causing a lot of collateral damage.

I would like exposure to more of a "man on the street" perspective from the people of UAE, but the newspapers and English-speaking channels I've watched (CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera) haven't taken that angle yet. And I certainly can't figure anything out by studying faces at the mall.

I will say that I found some of the celebrations that they aired in the U.S. to be over the top. This perspective in Salon nearly mirrors my own view, but basically, I think there's a fine line between appreciating the serving of justice and celebrating the taste of blood. Without sympathizing for the incredibly evil, there's still a humanitarian-minded high road available for the taking here, and it doesn't involve crowd surfing.

Wild Wadi All I Ever Wanted

Yesterday was my one-month monthiversary in the UAE, and the celebration destination was Wild Wadi, a water park in Dubai. I consider myself a lifelong fan of water slides - preferring them by far over dry amusement park rides - but in truth I haven't been to one since I could legally drive.

After yesterday's trip, it will not be another decade before I return. In fact, if I ever get any visitors from the US, a day at Wild Wadi is almost guaranteed. Not only are water slides still great, they've gotten even better since my youth. Going in, Leslie, Sandra (her visiting friend) and I were half-expecting a fun-because-it's-pathetic experience. We thought we'd be laughing at Wild Wadi, not with it. Nope, it was pure fun.

Highlights included the 20-minute water slide where you guy up hill as well as down and the fish pedi pond, where you stick legs in a bowl and swarms of little one-inch garra rufa fish eat the dead skin off your feet. I was official photographer for that experience, but it looked like quite a unique sensation. Leslie and Sandra stuck it out for like 20 minutes, so I guess they came around after initially being freaked out. One lady customer had a far higher tally of fish gnawing on her feet than everyone else, to the point where you couldn't see them anymore - only little fish. I guess she had the sorriest foot care. Also, I'm glad I didn't get to see where I ranked.

But the true highlight of the day for me - and one of my favorite moments so far since moving here - came on the day's first slide, which was called Tantrum Alley. There's a good chance whoever named it didn't know exactly what "tantrum" means and probably wanted something more along the lines of American-style-hyperbole monikers like "cyclone" or "screamer." There was no crying, but there was substantial screaming in a variety of languages.

It's going to be difficult for me to describe this to differentiate from other water slide rides, but it involves 2-4 people on a large clover-shaped inner tube descending down about four stomach-dropping slopes that, at the bottom of each one, send you high up the sides like a half-pipe. Here's a video of randoms going down it, but I strongly believe their ride was lot more tame than mine.

Profoundly impacting the experience, I didn't get to ride this one with the girls, due to the need to stick the cameras in a locker (thus, no personal pictures) and the level at which "holding spots" is apparently frowned upon in The Middle East. So instead, I rode with three Arab high-school age boys, two of whom had eaten too much Texas Chicken or Hardees.

This situation developed very quickly - at the top of the line I had no idea that I couldn't ride solo. Within 15 seconds, I went from thinking I was going alone, to being herded into a spot next to the teenagers (all our feet touching each others', a little weird), to speeding down the first drop. Between myself and the two girthy kids, we made the ride extra exciting and dangerous. Each time we went down a slope and then up the side, it would look like either the jovial, long-haired chubby one was going to fall on me, or vice versa. I have to think that ride has caused some injuries in its day, and I especially imagine they shouldn't be allowing as much weight as we had on one tube.

In any case, it was damn fun, despite the small miracle we didn't have any casualties. Our tube definitely was airborne and threatening to capsize a few times - with the lads all yelling in Arabic while I screamed "Holy Shit!" and tried to remember what I had heard about tort law in UAE. Too bad there aren't any physical pictures, but I think some of the mental images from that ride are in my head for a good while.

I like to think my happy little Arab buddies feel the same way, and that somewhere on the internet they're writing to friends about their crazy water adventure with a giant white dude.