Staying pretty in the desert

Time for a refreshing break from rental market ramblings.  Ready?  Let's say "salon."

I'm not actually much of a salon sort of a gal.  For one, I'm cheap economically conservative, and for two, I really have nothing to contribute to the idle chit chat about last night's reality show that constitutes 99% of the conversations in pretty much any salon.  I'm more of the just-cut-my-hair-and-shut-up type.  But I do go to these places once in a while, and I'm going to up the frequency by some order of magnitude once we arrive in our new home.

There's a salon (or sometimes a "saloon") on pretty much every corner in Abu Dhabi.  A huge number of these are for gents, but I'm going to focus on the ones for ladies in this posting (for reasons that should be obvious, salons over there are not unisex).

Here's a short list of spas and beauty salons in Abu Dhabi.  And here's another one.

Note the conspicuous lack of addresses.  Take Effie Salon, for instance.  It's on Najda Street. Great.  Najda Street (also called 6th Street) is about three kilometers long.  And like most streets, it has two sides.  If it hadn't been smack in front of the hotel we were staying in, I never would've found the place.

But as it happens, Effie's has an enormous sign on the side of the building it's in.  That was sort of helpful, but I still had to circumnavigate the building and ask two salesgirls in one of the shops to point me in the right direction.

Here's what to do: Stand in front of the Al Maha Arjaan, facing Najda Street.  Look to the right and slightly up.  You'll see the sign.  Now walk around to the side of the building facing AWAY from Najda Street.  That's the entrance and there's a directory in the lobby if I remember correctly.

The benefit of not being able to find Effie's right away was that by chatting with the salesgirl I found out that it's a GREAT place to have your eyebrows threaded, but not a very good choice for a manicure and pedicure.  So I ventured up to the mysterious Effie's and had my brows threaded.

I know what many of you gals are thinking, and it rhymes with whisky tango foxtrot.

Eyebrow threading is an ancient art, and interestingly called bande abru (bande = 'thread'; abru = 'eyebrow') in Persia.  Or what used to be Persia.  Notice the amazing similarity to English's 'band' and 'eyebrow.'  Pretty cool, huh?  That's because Persian (Farsi) is an indo-european language, not an afro-asiatic language like the semitic Arabic.  But I digress.

I didn't notice any Persians at Effie's, but the woman who did my eyebrows was a wonderful Indian lady named Dorothy.  Yes, really (remember, it wasn't that long ago that the Brits were still in India).  I had some serious doubts about the efficacy of winding thread around my little eyebrow hairs, and even more serious doubts as to how in the world any premeditated shape would be achieved, but five minutes and pretty much zero pain later, I walked out with the best eyebrow job I'd ever had.

For fifteen dirham ($4.09).

The thing about salons in Abu Dhabi is that they are dirt cheap.   (The same treatment in London's Mayfair costs $23.00.)

Now Effie's isn't the poshest place on the planet, and it seems to cater more to non-western women, which might turn some expats off.  But not this one.  It was clean and tidy, and Dorothy was fantastic.  I didn't have the heart to tell her I was going somewhere else to have my nails and toes done.

Which brings me to manicures and pedicures.  The nice gal at the shop near Effie's recommended Nails (yet another website under construction), which has a branch in Khalidiya at Al Muhairy Centre and another in Abu Dhabi Mall.  I chose the Abu Dhabi Mall location because it was within walking distance (about a mile, which is the most I can do in 110 degree weather) from our hotel.

Nails was great.  No appointments, but I only had to wait about five minutes before two gals went to work on my hands and footsies.  I walked out about 40 minutes later with a superb manicure and pedicure, for a grand total of $27.26.

And this is one of the EXPENSIVE nail salons in the city.

Sometimes, I really do enjoy being a girl.

Newsflash: "Lewd stares distressing for women" from The National

You've got to love The National.  First of all, this article appears to have been printed in the "Sport" section.  Hmmm.

http://www.thenational.ae/article/20090711/WEEKENDER/707109836/0/sport

In case you don't feel like reading it, here's a one-sentence summary:

Western women get stared at in Abu Dhabi.

There are plenty of little cultural tidbits in this article, sprinkled around like hundreds and thousands on a cupcake, but my favourite is this quote:

"Emirati men are courteous.  They never stare."

Well, this might be true, but it's also true that I've been honked at, asked to sunbathe, and invited to the beach for a swim by men who are unmistakeably Emiratis.

So what is this all about?  In my mind it seems it would have been more appropriate for the implied quantifier to be the existential, as in 

Ex NOT STARE(x), where x = Emirati Man

rather than the implied universal

Ax NOT STARE(x)

But that could just be the frustrated semanticist in me talking.

I think what's at the heart of the matter is this:  For some reason, expats have the idea that they should never, ever, say anything negative about life in Abu Dhabi.  Don't take my word for it -- go log on to some Abu Dhabi expat forum, start a thread titled "One thing I hate about Abu Dhabi."  Then count the minutes until some moderator deletes your post and gives you a little electronic slap on the hand.  I'm not advocating that we all bash Abu Dhabi, but let's try not ignore the fact that certain aspects of life there are dislikeable, and let's not apologise for disliking them.

Including the fact that men, some of whom are Emiratis, stare at us.