Off to the races

We have one day off per week – Friday – and that gives Saturday morning the feel of a particularly nasty Monday. I woke up this Saturday morning totally unready to start a new week.

But things improved when I got to work and saw that my afternoon schedule was cleared. I finished at 3pm and immediately headed off for a shisha. Just as the buzz was settling in, my phone rang, and it was my boss. This is almost never a good thing. The buzz started to evaporate.

But my streak of Saturday luck was actually just getting started. The boss offered me – for no apparent reason – a free ticket to the Dubai World Cup, the world's richest horse race.

Liz, I should have paid more attention when you tried to teach me about horse racing, that time we watched the Kentucky Derby a couple of years ago. I was seated at an extremely fancy table with a bunch of advertising execs/horse racing gurus, and I dared not open my mouth, except to sip the free champagne.

So, instead of floundering in the horse-related aspects of the evening, I focused on something I found much more interesting: the beautiful, freakish hats the women wore. As some of you may know, I'm not exactly in the polo set. So the subculture of rich people and their spectacular hatwear meant nothing more to me than a scene I vaguely remembered from Pretty Woman.
But this hat thing is real, people.


This is Nicole, owner of the evening's most beautiful hat. I was watching her for a while, then suddenly she came and sat down at my table. I told her how much I liked her hat, and in her response, she turned out to have the evening's most beautiful accent, too. "Well, aren't you raaahhther chaaahhming," she said. Her voice was the balancing point between pretentious upper-crust and Cockney. South of England, she said.

Here's a different version of the same hat. It's less successful, in my opinion:

I call her Dangly Sue.


This is the Cat in the Hat. She practically begged to pose for a photograph.


This is Jumeirah Jane, one of Dubai's most famous archetypes. Jumeirah is a neighborhood – Dubai's "good neighborhood" – a beachfront paradise of palm trees and fabulous villas. Every western expat except me lives there.

Jumeirah Jane is the rich, bored, western housewife whose husband works 130 hours a week at the bank or the oil company or wherever. She fills her days with shopping and grooming and Danielle Steele novels. It's a joke that everybody here understands, and that's why I was so surprised and excited to actually see Jumeirah Jane entering the racetrack. Look at her shopping bags, her antler-esque hat, the way she is thrusting her ticket at the lowly ticket boy. Snapping this photo was like catching a glimpse of the Loch Ness Monster.

That is not meant as a put down of either Jumeirah Jane or the Loch Ness Monster.