Herman, Dec 09
Al Ain is an oasis in a sandy desert on the border between UAE and Oman, about 150km from Dubai and Abu Dhabi cities. It is a uniquely Arabic city, with a peculiar architecture designed to handle the high summer heat. Typical buildings are enormous lightly decorated concrete structures with 12 foot ceilings giving the heat somewhere to rise to.
Summer is boiling hot, with daytime temperatures in excess of 50 Celsius, while winter is like a cool summer in many other places, with daytime temperatures around 25 Celsius. If you want to visit, then you have to be prepared to handle the heat.
When I arrived here from Canada, the change was rather brutal - a temperature sign change from minus 25 to plus 25 and an 11 hour time shift that turned night into day. I have lived in the region before, so I knew what to expect, but this was the first time in my life that I suffered from 'jet lag' and just fell over and slept by 6 in the afternoon!
Here are some pictures that I took with my little Eee PC netbook built-in camera while walking from the Al Masa hotel to the Al Jimi mall. My Olympus camera drowned on my last white water canoe trip on the Bow river in Alberta Canada, so at present this little toy is my only camera and it works surprisingly well for fast loading web site pictures.
Green, green, its green they say... All gardens are irrigated with drips or micro sprinklers. Each and every little flowering plant or schrub has a drip watering it.
Arabic doughnuts taste exactly the same as in North America, but the coffee is much better here. There are also McDonalds, KFC and Subway Sandwiches, so Canadians can feel at home too.
Victorian benches.
Municipal buildings.
Leafy walkways.
There are many fountains and psychedelic camels in this water city.
A nice looking mosque behind the Al Masa hotel. There are mosques everywhere - probably no more than 10 minutes walk apart.
Al Jimi mall has everything.
Al Ain has few traffic lights. Most traffic control is with multi-lane round abouts, which are an adventure to navigate.
This was a Friday morning, so the streets were quiet. The speed limit in the city is 80km/h and on the highways it is 160km/h. So many people drive 120 in the city and 200 on the highways. To cross these wide roads on foot during the week, you need nerves of steel...
Et voila!