yet more newspaper articles

Our Gulf News newspaper has had some interesting articles of late. One is about the UAE's first animated series called Freej. It means neighborhood in Arabic and Darcy had mentioned it in an earlier entry. Apparently one of its second season episodes has caused some controversy. We've been enjoying watching the first season on dvd.

There continues to be more construction news in our capital city. Earlier I mentioned the city's newest five star hotel to open. Its grand opening will be in December. It looks impressive but the Ramadan room rates are still fairly expensive at 750 AED or about $204 USD for one night.

This article caught my eye as a huge construction project has gotten underway on the Corniche. We're not sure where exactly but it may be close to us. Another big story here is the decline of the mighty American dollar against foreign currencies. The UAE Dirham has been pegged to the U.S. dollar since 1980 which means that the exchange rate does not change. However, the weakened dollar has affected savings for expats here from Asia and Europe. The devaluation of the dollar hasn't affected our savings much yet. Most of our savings are in U.S. dollars but trips to Europe and the UK would be very expensive. We hope that the Canadian dollar doesn't surpass the U.S. dollar.

Just when I was hoping that Abu Dhabi would not fall into Dubai's trap of building Western style entertainment theme parks, the capital city signed a deal to build one! Warner Bros. I guess entertainment will have a big presence in the emirate after all...