With the desert still in our thoughts, our dusty crew drove into Al Ain around 4PM on Saturday afternoon. Al Ain, sometimes referred to as the UAE's Garden City, quietly hosts somewhere around 615,000 souls. It is the closest thing to my own hometown that I've found in the Middle East. Unlike Dubai, Al Ain has a downtown you might actually want to walk around in. I don't mean to be hard on Dubai, it's a nice city and I hate to see it's collagen filled lips in a pout.
We checked into the Al Ain Hilton and found it pretty much as you'd expect. The Hotel was clean and welcoming and even had a waterslide, on which I was definitely the oldest person not escorting a child. We had a relaxing, if unremarkable stay at the Hilton, and our camera stayed put in it's bag as I'm pretty sure everyone knows what a resort looks like. That night we were treated to huge buffet that featured at least one discrete food item per attendee. My own plate was piled with grilled lobster tails, grilled Iranian style chicken, grilled rice pilaf, grilled salad, grilled tea, and so on. The food was excellent, so delicious that it more than compensated for the instant coffee.
The next day we managed to descend to the lobby just in time to join the group on a tour of the city's very active outdoor souks, or markets. Departing from Tim's Villa (he commutes home on the weekends) we made our way along a cobblestone footpath through a remarkably dense congregation of palms. Peering down form the elevated path we could see an aqueduct channeling Al Ain's natural spring water through the area. Shortly, we came to the goat souk, where we met some of the friendliest people we've come across here in the UAE. They were eager to have their pictures taken, even demanding that we return the following weekend with prints. These rural goat ranchers, many of whom are from Egypt, Yemen and Oman, are quite different from the Lamborghini driving Emarati in their 2003 flashback Von Dutch caps. Two of the men proudly produced their own cameras, which in each instance was a wether beaten camera-phone. Perhaps this is where the glut of discarded cell phones should go each year, they can become the polaroids of the third world.
Our crew of excited new friends plucked an unbelievably docile goat down from their truck bed, depositing it in Vanessa's welcoming arms. The goat was significantly tamer than our two extremely spoiled cats, and made no attempt to wriggle free. We spent so long with the goats that we completely lost track of the group and wound up wandering around Al Ain on our own for the rest of the afternoon. I did have one of the team's walky talkies (when you write that term down it seems impossibly silly), but couldn't elicit a single 10-4 from our good buddy Francis.
Downtown offered a ponderous number of Camel supply stores, many of which featured the image of a red crescent (think red cross) surrounding a camel's silhouette. These dromedary depots were packed to the humps with all variety of powder, pellets, and solutions dedicated to camel welfare, all laid out in a casual manner that brought to mind Toby's Feed Barn. The shopkeepers seemed completely baffled by our desire to photograph their storefronts, but chances are none of them read this blog anyway.
Nearly all of the UAE's small eateries, shawarma shops you might call them, offer a wide variety of fresh blended juices. So, to wrap up our exploration of downtown we bought ourselves a pair of smoothies and hailed a cab back to the Hilton, opting to spend the balance of our trip in or near the pool-- which is almost always fine by me.
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