Chris Saul's Blog

Sunday February 10, 2008

Abu Dhabi's Green City

Abu Dhabi's new green city is good news.

Up until now, quite understandably from an economic standpoint, there's been little use of green energy in the UAE (to the best of my knowledge), but things change quickly and big investments are now being made.

I was once told by someone who knew someone, who knew someone, who knew the supposedly eccentric English owner of a shop in Dubai selling solar power equipment, that the best customers were Afghans working in the more remote areas of the UAE on farms and suchlike. Needs must and decades of hard times had meant that these particular customers knew how to live off the land better than anyone else.

My father recently installed solar panels too, beating Abu Dhabi to the green punch.

Chris meets John Abraham

A couple of years ago, I was briefly touched by Bollywood magic. Whilst buying some walkie-talkies at a small electronics stand in one of Dubai's malls, Bobby Deol walked past me coming out of a tobacconist's, much to the excitement of the Indian guys manning the till. I had no idea who he was, even though the chap taking my money looked at me as if I were an idiot and told me that it was *the* Bobby Deol!

Today, whilst standing in passport control in Johannesburg, John Abraham was standing a mere six feet away from me, in the queue for South African and African state passport holders, for some reason. That queue tends to move more quickly, so maybe his superstar status wangled him some preferential treatment. I should really have asked for his autograph, but he was being mildly besieged by some of his fellow citizens, so I didn't.

The local Dubai press usually has Indian stars in their tabloid sections alongside Western stars, so I'm vaguely familiar with the more famous names and faces - I just can't get into Bollywood films though, even though I tend to watch lots of them by proxy when staring at my neighbours' TV screens on various Emirates routes. Two exceptions are Lagaan and The Ballad of Mangal Pandey. Highly recommended if you are a fan of films with evil, be-whiskered colonial types and don't mind fast-forwarding through some of the longer song and dance sequences.

I wonder if I'll ever get to bump into Aishwarya Rai?

Das ist Service!

Seven or so years ago, I got my first WAP enabled mobile phone - a Nokia 6310i. Whilst on the 371 back from Richmond station to the shared house I was living in in St Margarets, I gave the WAP browser a go, keen to live the mobile revolution, currently the focus of most of the presentations I was giving at Sun at the time.

I wasn't able to get to Amazon's UK WAP page for some reason, but Amazon's German site worked. I bought an album by Catatonia. The process was slow and fiddly, but it worked and my album duly arrived a week or so later. That was pretty much the last time I ever used a mobile phone to access the internet until getting my current Sony - seven years later.

Today, in my inbox, was a mail from Amazon.de telling me that Catatonia's former lead singer has released a new album. Now, that, dear readers, is what I call service. It is also what German speakers might possibly call 'Service'.

If I do buy it, I will still not be using my phone to do so.