A Gingerbread Christmas and Fundamental Attribution Errors

By Ian Comandao - November 29th, 2009 Category: CCMBA 2010D| Residency 2: Dubai

I went over to a friend’s house earlier this evening. A group of people had gathered to, again, celebrate Advent – Swedish style.

I love these small parties. The hosts had prepared gingerbread cookies, saffron buns, and Swedish quiche, which is basically the same as regular quiche, only you have to mutter “hurdy hurgy gurdy” while you eat it. Better yet, we each had a 1.5L bottle of glögg to finish before the end of the evening.

And finally, the pièce de résistance, we each got to build our own gingerbread house using what I can only assume were pre-fabricated IKEA gingerbread boards and decorate it with little gingerbread people and imagine that they were all living perfectly happy gingerbread lives in socialist gingerbread heaven.

This all would have gone into the books as just another evening with too much alcohol and not enough canoodling (ask Niklas what this means), but just before the gingerbread build-off I was in an inappropriately deep conversation with another friend of mine who’s currently working for a German NGO which aims to open up Chinese minds to the realities of human rights and civil liberties.

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Dissecting Dubai – Part 3: Muslim Disneyworld

By Ian Comandao - November 15th, 2009 Category: CCMBA 2010D| Residency 2: Dubai

Well, the Dubai residency was certainly a surprise. And in more ways than one! The pace was certainly not as hectic as London, and for the most part the group was able to go out and actually see the city, find time to know more about each other, and ourselves, appreciate some not so obvious things, and welcome if not tolerate some of the more confusing aspects of living an international life. I’ve mulled over a whole lot of new things from the course of that week, and as the whole experience has left me with a rather dense collection of inner musings, I am left with little choice than to split up my next few blog posts.

This is Part 3 of a series of 5

The word “burj” is Arabic for “tower”.

Dubai has a lot of towers, but one of them really stands out – a proper sky scraper. I first saw the Burj Dubai flying in to the city on a stopover to London. It was a magnificent panorama; one large monolith surrounded by what might as well have been Lego pieces. It reached out into the sky, so high up it was kissing the clouds.

As yet unfinished, it was already glittering in the sun. It was magnificent, and resplendent. By the 4th or 5th day of the residency however, I started to feel that it was also incredibly out of place. Why build a kilometer-high building out in the middle of nowhere?

This was the Middle East, after all. It’s the land of sand.  Although, the same could be said of Las Vegas.

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