Chris Saul's Blog

Thursday May 10, 2007

Gimme all your lovin'

I can't seem to get enough ZZ Top at the moment.

Tres Hombres arrived in the post the other day and has been on permanent rotation. The three live tracks at the end are fantastic! Worth getting the album for alone. The live sound is incredibly raw and much rougher than the studio tracks - great stuff.

I came across this video of them playing on The Tube, a cult UK music show from the early 80s. Turn up the volume!

Punjablish

My taxi driver today told me that he was from Lahore and that he'd learnt all his English whilst working in Dubai. He'd never had any formal lessons, but could communicate very effectively and could certainly do his job without any problems.

You could almost argue that he'd learnt a unique offshoot or dialect of English, untainted by how 'true' English speakers would speak.

The radio station he was listening to had a DJ rattling away in full blown Hinglish.

Some Dubailish taxi phrases that are useful here -

'Backside' - the back of the building. (As in 'I come your backside sir?')

'Frontside' - the front of the building.

'Straight, straight' - 'Carry on driving straight on, my good man.'

'Signal left' - 'Turn left at the traffic lights, my good man.'

'Dubai too much traffic' - 'Have you noticed, dear passenger, the preponderance of vehicles 'pon these Dubai roads nowadays?'

'Indian man/Pakistani man/Arab man too much bad driving' - 'Dear passenger, drivers from a nationality other than mine are invariably poor drivers. I, however, am highly skilled, so it doesn't matter if I change lanes erratically, don't use my indicators and drive two feet behind the car in front. God will protect me and mine. And you too, hopefully. No need to put on your seatbelt sir, you're sitting in the back, so the front seat will absorb the impact.'

Facebook addict!

Mrs Saul has become addicted to Faceboook. I have had to sign up myself just to be able to communicate with her.

Accessing the site today is very slow and the page that finally loads doesn't render properly. I can access it fine through Sun's VPN though, so it doesn't seem to be an issue with the Facebook site itself. Is this the first sign that it's going to be blocked here in the UAE? I hope not - whilst I can see that people might abuse it or use it as a dating tool, for most of us it's simply a useful and fun way to stay in touch with friends and share photos.