Here are some beautiful photos of Al Ain that I stumbled across that you might want to see:
Road atop Jabal Hafeet
Young camel at the Camel Souk
"The Abandoned Traditions" (my personal favorite - I'm fairly certain that this is the museum that was formerly Sheikh Zayed's house).
Oh, but don't bother trying to see them if you are behind the proxy, since they are all on Flickr.
[update]
SD has provided links in the comments so that everyone can enjoy them.
This blog began as a description of our life in Al Ain, UAE (United Arab Emirates). Brn worked at the UAE University Libraries Deanship for three years and Bss homeschooled our four children, D, B, P, and O. After returning to the the USA for five years, we are living in Abu Dhabi now.
6 comments:
ha ha I tried clicking on them all before seeing your final line!
Time to go a-tunnelling...
/re-emerges into daylight and removes mining helmet
They were so beautiful! For the benefit of those not experienced in proxy pot-holing, here are some imageshack links:
Road atop Jabal Hafeet
Young camel at the Camel Souk
The Abandoned Traditions
thanks sd. I cheated by looking at them at work (the university has a different proxy server than the main one).
Bizarre that we think of it as "cheating", isn't it? When the reality is that there is no reason we should not be allowed to see these pictures in the first place.
For example I was overseas and got a new laptop, and installed and used Skype from my hotel room. And I felt really sneaky and guilty and wrong. Even though this was a western country where Skype is totally legit.
It worries me that I am getting so used to certain restrictions here that freedom starts feeling weird. I think my days here are numbered. I know my blog is more negative these days but that's because I honestly don't enjoy this place as much as I did five/six years ago then. It really was a nicer place back then, it's not must misty-eyed nostlagia. People really struggle and suffer here now.
And I don't want this place to change me permanently in bad ways. I'm glad it has opened my eyes to other cultures and made me get a social conscience about the less fortunate and the exploited, but I never want to find myself going overseas and feeling shocked or disgusted because someone is wearing a tank top or a mini skirt. And while I doubt that will ever happen, because I have extremely strong beliefs about the innocence of flesh/bodies, my reaction to using Skype has really worried me. I feel that this place has actually institutionalised me to some degree.
I had similar experiences when I was in the US for a conference this spring. For example, I noticed how often I was looking at the URLs of links before I clicked on them to see if they were going to a sight I knew was blocked.
how often I was looking at the URLs of links before I clicked on them
In a way, it's not a bad habit to have picked up, because particularly when using a public or work internet, one should always be a bit more cautious.
On the other hand you get lulled into a slightly false sense of security here about things like porn banners of pop up ads, most of which are blocked/the proxy image shows up instead (which is quite useful for those of us that don't want them!) but of course back home they could suddenly start appearing on a site you use, and you had never realised they were there.
Swings and roundabouts. But give me freedom any time. Net nannying should be left to parents, and I think when the "digital native" generation (under 20s) become parents, it will be. Because they will actually understand how the internet works and how to control access, which the majority of parents/adults these days don't really, seeing as they did not grow up with computers and only got the internet years into their working adult lives.
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