More home-made sandwiches for lunch! I left them open for the sake of the photograph.
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Tag: Photographs
The short answer is: you can’t
But should you have a camera on you when such a storm hits — even one with dying batteries and not the greatest response time in the world — it’s worth attempting a few shots.
I’ve been very active on twitter since installing TweetDeck, and recently began posting pics there through twitpic. So when today I thought of posting some more, I figured I might as wel do it on my own website rather than on some third party service.
This post marks what is hopefully the first in a new direction for allVishal.com. I’ve been mulling a redesign of the site for ages now, and instead of waiting for just the right moment, when everything is perfect, I may as well start laying it all out there, content-wise. The journal was always supposed to be a place for all my junk — if you’ll pardon the term — all the rambles and the random thoughts and the craziness, the mundane and the just plain… well, plain.
To that end, I’ve been taking my Kodak c875 out every day with me nowadays. I never did this much before, but since getting the Pentax K200D SLR a few months back I have grown to appreciate the little silver thing’s qualities anew. It’s not quite as pocketable as some of the slim fashioncams out there, but it does still fit in the pocket of my tightest jeans (okay, so I don’t wear very tight jeans, but still). And there’s no two ways about it; it still produces great results.
So, here’s the recap of a lazy Friday afternoon driving around Dubai, no agenda, no idea of what to do, and partly cloudy with a chance of sandstorms.
Not knowing where else to go we ended up driving to the Palm Jumeirah. It’s a pretty desolate place, lots of construction and me-too villas. Not a shop or green space in sight. Other than the sheer novelty of driving on a piece of land that didn’t exist ten years ago, there isn’t much to see, and even less to photograph. Still, I try.
To get to the ‘crescent’ (a large circle of land that encircles the Palm shaped landmass itself, and acts both as breakwater and home to several resorts) one takes a twisty underwater tunnel — there are, unfortunately, no windows — from the end of the trunk.
Other than the Atlantis Resort (which draws crowds who come to see its fancy aquarium), there isn’t anything else to see on the crescent. There are several resorts under construction — months away from opening — and still more empty lots with signs for future resorts. As a result, the edges of the crescent are pretty empty on a Friday, save for curious people like us driving to the ends, and a couple of construction workers.
It was a typically brown-skied Dubai day — we don’t see the colour blue in the atmosphere until much, much later in the year — hot and humid and oppressive. The only other thing to see from the crescent is the open sea, and it was sparsely populated by jet-skis and pleasure yachts buzzing about. And trust me, this photo is color-corrected — you don’t even want to know how grey it was in reality.
From the Palm we followed the roads in a daze and somehow, through the spaghetti-like tangle of roads, ended up in the Dubai Marina. I did not bother with pictures of more skyscrapers under construction, but this picture of some hastily sprayed graffiti caught my eye. It wasn’t on any finished structure — just on a pile of large bricks used to hold up an under-construction overbridge — which makes me wonder if the person who did it actually works on the construction of that bridge.
As evening set in the air seemed to get a bit duller, but it wasn’t the usual sharp sunny evening. A cloud peeked pensively over the horizon. “The weather has no right to be this way unless it plans to rain,” my brother said. He wasn’t wrong about a change in weather, but what we got was not welcome rain, but a sandstorm. We literally drove into it. In moments, the air around us was engulfed, the skyscrapers disappeared, and everything went even more brown than before.
The sandstorm didn’t stop people from taking exactly the same kind of nonsensical posed pictures they tend to take any other time.
I leave you with this photo. I keep hearing of people lusting over sports cars, relishing each instance to see them, and even I like them too, but after you live in Dubai for a while you get very used to it. This wasn’t the first Audi R8 I’d seen in a month, it was the fifth Audi R8 I had seen that day. Exactly five seconds after this a red one passed by going the other direction, and by the time we got home I’d seen two more, and a McLaren Mercedes SLR. Let’s not even talk about the number of Porsches. I’ve stopped even noticing those.
It sounds like I’m boasting, and I suppose I am — I like cars enough to feel lucky that I live in a place where I can and have seen every major car whose poster has been on the walls of every boy’s bedroom — but seeing them so often, you do start to realise: they’re just cars. Are they cool? Yes. Do I have a heat attack whenever one passes by? No.
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A while ago on a drive through Fujairah and the Northern Emirates I took a bunch of photos of the landscape from the car. It was a nice enough day, but far too grey and harsh, and I didn’t think any of the photos were any good.
A few days ago I was looking through those same photos before archiving them to DVD, and tried playing around with some of the levels. Lo and behold, the peculiar, lovely color of Kodak cameras came into play, and the pictures were suddenly pretty good!
So here are fifteen of the best. You should keep in mind that the day didn’t look like this — but hey, who cares now, the pictures came out good. Enjoy.
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I made sandwiches for lunch today. One of them’s a simple tomato, cucumber & edam cheese with red lettuce and chutney. The second is a sauteed mushroom with smoked turkey job. I haven’t eaten them yet. Off to do that now.
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A couple of weeks ago did my bit to help ease the credit crunch by put a good deal of cash into retail spending. I bought myself a Pentax K200D digital SLR camera. It’s the first professional camera I’ve ever owned, and while everybody and their mother told me to get a frakking Canon or Nikon, this one — quirks, warts and all — is the one I wanted (also there was a rumour going around that the model was discontinued, and indeed it took me a week to track it down in a store).
I’ve spent the past couple of weeks testing it out. With no real SLR experience behind me I haven’t half a clue as to what I’m doing. The days have also been brown and grey, which doesn’t fill me with enthusiasm to take pictures. Here’s a bunch of decent ones I’ve taken so far (out of hundreds of lousy ones, heh).
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(Since a couple of people asked for the recipe of this after I tweeted it yesterday, and I got tired of repeating the same in chat windows and comment boxes, and figured I might as well post it here.)
A couple of days ago, I tried to experiment with tofu. I’ve eaten it several times before in restaurants, but never cooked with it, and have always eyed the fairly inexpensive blocks sitting on supermarket shelves with some trepidation. But having seen enough cooking shows where tofu is used, I thought I’d give it a whirl.
I didn’t, however, have any oriental ingredients in the house, it being ages since I last cooked stir fry. So while I would have liked to come up with some kind of sweet and spicy dark soy glaze, perhaps some celery and cashews, that implementation would have to wait until next time. I did have my faithful stock of everyday ingredients though, and I craved smoky, charred flavours that day. Instead of stir-frying it I decided to oven-roast it.
First, I heated some extra virgin olive oil in an oven-proof skillet, and added in a couple of cloves of sliced garlic, as well as a dried red chilli for heat (you can use chilli flakes or powder later, but I like the garlic and chilli to infuse the oil a little). When they started to colour, in went one medium sliced onion, which I slowly browned.
Meanwhile, I cubed a pack of fresh mushrooms, a medium sized carrot and a zucchini of roughly the same size. These went into the pan when the onions were not-quite brown (they’ll be finished off in the oven) and tossed about (I think that here you can add in pretty-much anything that might roast well: red bell peppers spring to mind, eggplant might work too).
Now for the tofu: it’s fairly delicate — at least the one I got was — but a steady, light hand and a sharp knife will yield few uneven pieces. I cubed these to around the same size as the other vegetables, and a couple of minutes later they went into the pan with everything else. I didn’t stir or toss vigorously now, because I wanted to keep the tofu chunks as whole as possible. Some breaking and crumbling will occur, so just go with it. later you’ll be blessed with tiny charred nuggets of goodness every now and then.
Then I seasoned it with salt, pepper, dry Italian herbs, and a splash of balsamic vinegar. I tried to mix as best I could without destroying the tofu, and then took it off the heat and put it under a low grill
This gave me time to prepare the salad it was going into. I would have like to have something peppery in the house like rocket (arugula), but all I had was romaine lettuce, so that would have to do. I also had a can each of chick peas and sweet corn kernels. Since this was a hearty full-meal salad, I added those into the salad bowl too along with the chopped lettuce. I didn’t have tomatoes in the house, but one of those would be nice too (or something sweet and tart like green apple). For crunch and more flavour I tossed in some walnuts too.
(Now, I know this may sound like too many ingredients and flavours, but I like my meals complex. Feel free to omit anything you don’t like, or scale back accordingly.)
Every seven minutes or so, I checked on the tofu. It was grilling nicely, the edges going a nice brown colour. As they roast they get easier to handle, so I gently stirred them around to expose unroasted areas, then put them back under the grill. Since I was doing the salad meanwhile, time went by quickly, and by the time I thought the tofu was done around 25 minutes had passed under the grill. You can ramp up the heat and see what happens if you’re in a hurry.
The final step is to just place everything in a bowl. You can put the cold salad ingredients at the bottom and spoon the roasted tofu and veggies on top, but I jut put everything together. I don’t like heavy dressings, so just another splash of balsamic vinegar and extra virgin olive oil on top for me.
And there you have it. I liked the way it turned out, and I’m definitely going to try tofu at home again. I also proved to myself that it’s versatile enough that you don’t need to use it only in oriental dishes. I’m vaguely curious as to what saag-tofu tastes like now!
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(These three were taken in Oman last July)
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Ever since stone-age man first propped up a palm-leaf awning between two commercial mud huts, stuck a fountain in the centre and posted a sign for ‘toilet’ and ‘food court’ next to it, mankind has had malls to go to. A civic space that provides some place for Madame to shop, Sir to ogle, Young Master to gorge and fourteen-year-olds to stand around in groups trying to look cool (and failing en masse to do so).
And, like most things we’ve invented, over the subsequent thousands of years we have been attempting to make ever greater, more elaborate versions of the two-shop-fountain-and-food-court model we know as the shopping mall. Take the great pyramids of Giza, for instance; a quirky design whose unique architecture and indecipherable signage had led to it long being mislabeled as a place of worship, and even a tomb! Well let me tell you, the pyramids now have serious competition.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I have been to the Dubai Mall, and I have lived to tell the tale — with pictures!
1.Kinda, Sorta The Biggest Mall* Evah!
By now the legends of Dubai Mall have spread far and wide. Its gargantuan size, the unending traffic leading up to its arcane parking, its humongous goldfish bow–er, aquarium. This, my friends, is The Biggest Mall in the World™.
Or is it?
Our most trusted source for modern information tells us that while the Dubai Mall is a massive 12.7 million square feet big — the term ‘50 football fields’ is bandied about here and there — the actual shop space (Gross Leasable Area) is only 3.8, the same as the once-largest West Edmonton Mall, and paling in comparison to the South China Mall’s 6.5 million (if only in theory and not in practice).
But getting back to Dubai Mall, you can’t help but be reminded of this ratio of 3.8 to 12.7 when you’re walking around it massive hallways. And I do mean massive. The ground floor hallways are as wide as the city street I live on. This is the kind of place where you soon start to plot out your route to maximise efficiency, favouring corridors on the inside curve of the direction you’re headed. Take the wrong path and your destination might be an additional few hunded metres away than you expected. A lot of this is down to how the place is laid out, but more on that later.
Of the 1200 stores set to open, about half are ready right now, but despite this there are entire sections and stretches where all you can see is boarded-up shopfronts with the words ‘opening soon’ painted on them. Several stores aren’t even booked yet, with a generic ‘new store’ sign stuck on the plywood. Right now, the chief function of these unopened storefronts is as signage, such as, ‘Aquarium’, ‘Gold Souk’ and — my favourite — ‘More Shops’.
No, really.
2.Big Fish Story
It’s safe to say that the big attraction that draws crowds to the Dubai Mall is its aquarium. Since the mall was announced the aquarium has featured heavily in the hype, and indeed in the finished mall it is set dead centre in the structure. At this point I should rattle off the usual list of achievements like it housing 33,000 marine creatures behind the world’s largest single acrylic panel that keeps 10 million litres of water from flushing unuspecting tourists away. There’s that done with.
The acrylic panel has a wicked level of distortion when you get up close to it. I’m sure I’d end up with a headache if I stared at it for too long. There’s even a clear-walled tunnel that goes through the tank, but they charge Dhs 15 (nearly $4) or something for it and it most definitely seems like it isn’t worth it, because it’s a scant few metres from the other (publicly accessible) side. Despite this there was a healthy crowd waiting in line, so what do I know?
For a feature that’s meant to be a showstopper, there’s very little sense of drama to it. “Oh look, some fish,” you say as you pass by a darkened part of the mall. Sure, when you step back and take it all in for the first time it is impressive, but doesn’t take your breath away. Then that shark you saw swimming by twenty seconds ago comes back from doing a lap of the tank, and if you stay for a few minutes longer you’ll see it again a half dozen times. It’s then that you realise just how small the tank must be to a creature used to dozens if not hundreds of square miles of territory to swim around in. And it’s not just the sharks, everything in the aquarium just sort of swims around in a circle, aimlessly and endlessly (and with 33K things in there, trust me, it’s quite crowded).
Maybe it’s because I’m particularly biased: I detest zoos and aquariums, and even feel uneasy with the idea of keeping dogs and cats as pets. The hundreds of people around me were ooh-ing and aah-ing no end, so I’m sure it’s quite a treat for most folk.
It’s just not for me.
3.Fashionably Late
The other big concept that defines Dubai Mall is that it’s not just one gigantic monstrosity — oh no — it’s six or seven of them. Malls within a Mall, the building split into several architecturally distinct sections, some of which are semi-detached from the main flow of things. One of these is the haute-couture hub, Fashion Avenue and Catwalk.
Very few stores in this section are open (even compared to the rest of the mall), and you go there just to marvel at the cavernous hallway. Being off the beaten track means that this section is — save for a couple of very bored-looking security guards — completely empty and quiet as a tomb. The interiors are straight out of a science fiction film, with white light panels everywhere. It’s like being transported to an Imperial hangar bay in Star Wars — The Death Star Mall!
The couple of shops that are open are manned by near-comatose salespersons who look like they haven’t seen a human being all day, let alone made a sale. As you pass by the look at you with a lazy blink, and you wonder if they think you’re even real or some figment of their imagination. An uneasy feeling starts to creep upon your shoulders then. All these lights. All this air-conditioning. All these millions poured into building a place like this, into renting a shop and stocking it and manning it, and there’s just nobody here, and there probably won’t ever be a crowd of thousands descending upon what basically amounts to a side-lane.
It’s just… bonkers.
4.Atrium Overload
So you get back into the regular section of the mall, back into the even brighter lights and the corridors which are as wide as a four-lane highway, and consult a map. It looks simple enough, a quarter-circle with a few lines bisecting it. You spot the little ‘]’ shape latched onto the circumference which is Fashion Avenue, and then head to a place called Grand Atrium.
“Oh, this must be it!” you say as a few minutes later you end up in an atrium. Except the Grand Atrium you saw on the map is three whole atriums away, and when you get there it isn’t any bigger — certainly not Grander — than the ones you passed on the way here (actually it’s much smaller than the one in Fashion Catwalk), but it just happens to be near the main taxi-drop. There are around six or eight minor and major atria dotted around the mall, and while each is pretty to look at, they’re scattered around with such abandon as to completely confuse first-time visitors. For instance, if you call someone and tell them to meet you at the Gold Souk atrium, do you mean the one placed at the centre of the Gold Souk area, or the similar looking one that’s at one end of the Gold Souk (and not a short distance away)?
5.The Ice Rink Cometh
Most malls find a centre of usage, i.e. a place where people tend to spend most of their time. This is usually the Hypermarket or near the cinemas, the places most likely to see traffic in the hundreds and thousands. For now, it would seem, the Dubai Mall’s centre is the Ice Rink.
Sure, so the aquarium has more people around it at any given moment, but the ice rink is near the (pathetic) food court, and near the eventual 22 screen cinema; it has large, wide corridors with space for retaurants to spill their tables onto, it has ample space for 14-year-olds to mill about and show off their hair to each other. This is even where management has decided to keep the often dozens-long queues for taxis. And most importantly, it has a big-ass TV.
Now, the Dubai Ice Rink is not exactly a handsome looking venue. It’s an olympic size rink set against a bright red yet somehow bland wall, with jello-coloured round nooks in the ceiling above it, and that’s about it. The lighting on the halls around it is so bright and uniform that the one restaurant that is open — the usually sublime Dome cafe — with probably never attract my coin because it’s saddled with the least inviting ambience of any cafe I’ve ever seen. It would be like having coffee in an operating theatre.
You know why it has a big-ass TV? Because something has to relieve the tedium of skating round the most boring rink in the world.
6.Pathfinder
One of my favourite Dubai malls is called Mall of the Emirates, the largest one before Dubai Mall opened. It’s a model of efficient mall design, with very few wasted or out of the way spaces. The whole thing is set up in a very simple elongated loop with a central atrium. Despite this, I know that hundreds of people find it confusing, and often get lost there.
Boy, would I like to see what they make of Dubai Mall.
I explained its basic structure before, that of a quarter circle with various bits attached to and within it, and that’s basically what you can see in the map above. The scale of it doesn’t quite come through in the image, and I’m sure very few visitors will ever see all of Dubai Mall. They’ve tried to make things easier by providing both interactive touchscreen maps like the one above, as well as large manned wayfinding & info bureaus dotted throughout the complex. The former are clunky to use and their touchscreen systems are both slow to respond and innacurate, (repeatedly selecting W when you want V on a shop-listing, for instance), and the latter are helpful but currently unreliable.
For instance, the thing that swayed me to go to Dubai Mall in the first place when I read that a massive bookstore was already open there, from the Japanese chain Kinokuniya. So, not having spotting it yet I approached the desk, and they helpfully pointed me in the right direction, more or less. It helped that I knew which exact atrium I was looking for, because had I taken their basic instructions of left, left, up, up, whatever, I may have ended up somewhere else. Anyway, along the way I spotted several more signs on unopened shops that pointed vaguely towards Kinokuniya, and even noticed an LED display proclaiming “Now Open on Level 3” — only when I actually got there the shop was far from open.
It wasn’t even open on my second or third visit to the mall. The last time I went there it was, and oh boy was it worth it. Enormous, intelligently stocked, well-priced — one of the few things that justifies the Dubai Mall’s existence at this point.
7.Parking Lot Hero
But all of this is irrelevant if you can’t ever get to the mall in the first place. I’m generally adept at wayfinding, especially in the kind of silly tangle of bridges and loops that comprise most modern city road systems, but Dubai Mall’s parking really does take the cake.
Getting into it through one of several little entry-ways is easy enough. The parking wraps around three sides of the mall on several levels, but once you’re in there, good luck making any sense of it. Because, while parking is ample and the structure big enough, they’ve laid it out in the most bizarre way possible. Instead of simple rows and trunk-roads to get in and out, you enter a series of clusters and nested loops, some containing a hundred spots, some containing a dozen.
And there’s no simple 1,2,3 progression of levels either, with Gm and G and ‘cinema’ written here and there, but not really meaning much. Here too the signage is crazy. Do I really need a sign that cheerfully proclaims ‘More Parking’ every few metres?
Getting out is not exactly easy either. There was one section — I can’t even remember where — after ten minutes of leaving our space where we, following any sign marked ‘exit’, were led into an infinite loop. Luckily that area was empty and I could see where it was we eventually were supposed to go, but if there were cars blocking my view I would probably still be there, stuck in that parking building.
8.The Souk That Sends You Mad
As above so below, we’re told, and I’m fairly sure that extra-twisty section of the parking lot was directly under the area known as the Gold Souk. I have no pictures of this area. I don’t have a picture of the kitsch gold horse statue, or the several more quaint fountains, or the atrium, or the floors, because you couldn’t pay me to go back into that hell-hole.
Look at that map. Look at that twisty mangle of corridors, and imagine yourself at the left end thinking, “Ooh, a gold souk, this looks interesting.” Now imagine youself walking down that infinitely long single corridor of gold shops (most unopened) for fifteen whole minutes, only to emerge at the end and realise that you’re only halfway through. Imagine setting off down the rest of it and wondering with a chill down your spine if you’re just headed back the way you came.
Argh! It’s all the same! And. There’s. No. Way. Out.
9.Waitrose Dungeon
All of which makes the dungeon a bit of a breeze, really.
I call it a dungeon because it’s on a level below the ground floor, and unlike the shiny marble floors everywhere else they’ve decided to lay down a drab brown brick job here in this labyrinthine place. There are about three forks that lead off from the easiest way to get there; one of them has a bunch of nondescript stores and promising looking cafe and boulangerie names, and the other ends up in a second food court that is open for business, but is so off the beaten track there were about five people eating there. Signs pointing towards it from the rest of the mall are not going help when it take a fifteen minute walk to just get there.
The main attraction down here is a branch of the British supermarket chain Waitrose. It’s hidden somewhere behind an assortment of less-than-flagship stores (these must be the megamall’s equivalent of the cheap seats) and nick-nack stalls, and looks impressive enough from the outside.
Except it’s a Spinneys. Sure, so it says Waitrose on the outside, and Spinneys has been stocking some Waitrose products on their shelves for years, but this is exactly a big Spinneys. It has the same pasta salad in its deli, the same types of bread in its bakery — it’s a Spinneys (but surprise, surprise, the prices are higher). Why should I trek all the way there when there are dozens of them conveniently dotted throughout the city? And if there is a large stock of specialty Waitrose items in that store alone, why make it so big? Does Dubai really have a burning demand for more greasy, overcooked pasta salad?
10.The Good, the Bad and the Retail
It’s hard to really like Dubai Mall. I know it sounds silly to complain that the Biggest Mall in the World is, well, too big but yes, it is.
It’s big, but in the sense that morbidly obese people are big; it’s bafflingly laid out with several features that must have sounded cool in theory, but don’t work in practice; the signage tries to be cute rather than helpful; the food court is underwhelming and there’s a severe dearth of sit-down restaurants and cafes elsewhere in the mall; there’s no real ‘killer app’ sure-fire draw store like IKEA to bring crowds in… and have I mentioned that it’s huge?
For all my love of design I can’t for the life of me imagine spending hours looking at hundreds and hundreds of me-too pret-a-porter dress stores, because that’s what makes up the bulk of shops. The one major attraction, Kinokuniya bookstore, is only really going to satisfy book nerds; it’s set up in one long spiral curve and I swear the end of it is in a different country than the entrance, and that’s just going to annoy anybody who isn’t a complete bibiomaniac (also it doesn’t have 85% of its shop-space dedicated to greeting cards and sparkly pencils like other, real bookstores, harrumph!).
Most of all, there’s just no elegance in it. The lighting is severe, the air-conditioning freezes you to the bone. It’s loud and big and silly and strange — everything a mall should be — but it just doesn’t come together.
Still, one hell of a bookstore.
And you can keep your bloody half-crazed fish.
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