An excerpt from Salon -
Notes from a trailing spouse: the hot sauce is great but grocery shopping can feel like a roller derby and Abu Dhabi is no place for a barfly
There are high high-end bars and low high-end bars; both are enough to make a deeply committed social drinker weep
By Bex B
No matter where I am in the world or for how long, the first order of business is to go to a local market and do what I call buy and spy. You’d be amazed what you can learn about a culture by checking out what people have in their shopping baskets. So on our first morning, while still reeling with jet lag and that particular horror of meeting 104-degree heat married with 100 percent humidity, I set out to find my market.
My early expeditions had me rolling up to a couple of the French outfits, Géant and Carrefour. Great for butter and the odd black chicken, but they didn’t have the array of hot sauces that I needed to fill the gaping hole left by not having jerk.
Then I found Lulu’s. Aptly named, it’s a lulu. Hypermarkets, as they are called here, which now that I think of it, must be an anglicized version of the French word hypermarché. Which brings up another point: Why all the French-owned markets? In every other aspect, Britain has its fingerprints all over this place.
Lulu’s is not for the faint-hearted, especially if you go there on a Friday night after evening prayer. All at once every guest worker, whether they are from Sri Lanka, Pakistan, the Philippines, America, Britain, or Australia, along with large Emirati families with squads of children careening up and down the aisles, descends on the store.
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As you can imagine, this state of affairs has me drinking at home more often than not. Buying liquor, as the Brits like to say, is jolly good fun. There are designated stores; all tucked away with blacked-out windows. The one we like to go to is accessed through a basement door in the garage of the St. Regis. The cloak-and-dagger feel is amplified by the fact that the garage floor is coated with the squeakiest paint so that when driving any turn of the wheel makes you feel like you’re in one of those squealing car-chase scenes in the movies.
Once upstairs it’s all pretty pro forma, that is, until they put your purchase in the thickest, blackest plastic bag I’ve ever seen — body bags have nothing on these suckers — all to ensure that your offending vodka is kept well out of sight. Once home, I have the strangest urge to whisper as I unsheath my bottle, “It’s all right, you’re safe.”
http://www.salon.com/2017/02/05/notes-from-a-trailing-spouse-madwoman-in-the-desert2-eating-and-drinking/?source=newsletter
