Thursday night in Abu Dhabi

This evening, I took a walk outside, just to get a sense of the town. Last time I came here, I really felt disconnected from the city. Tonight, I wanted to hear what it had to say. It's really nice outside late at night- I went walking around 9 PM. I stumbled across a huge pedestrian greenbelt/walking path which ran parallel to the Corniche on the side of the ocean. The parks along this greenbelt were filled with locals enjoying themselves in the coolness of the evening. Families playing, kids running around, men talking and smoking hookahs, I even passed a skate park. In an underpass I passed through, there was a mural of an Arab boy playing with a hoop. Now, the kids here have MP3 players and rollerblades. There was a depiction of a woman with a leather face mask and the full length black robes. I passed a teenage girl with some friends of hers, wearing a black bra on the outside of her clothes. Oh the times, they are a' changing.

Theres a certain building in Abu Dhabi that I really liked when I first saw it. The building is formed by a single glazed wall which is folded twice in a compace Z shape. I walked to the entrance. It was a really cool building. Looked like Mies van Der Rohe's original ideas about glass towers. Its too bad that it was built incorrectly, and is currently sinking. There's office furnature in place in all the rooms, plastic still on, but no one is allowed inside due to the building's instability. Perhaps they'll figure out a fix later on.