Parks

For a desert, Abu Dhabi has a lot of green space. Most of the major thoroughfares have green spaces alongside them with playground equipment and barbecue facilities. As mentioned a few days ago, people will go to the parks starting from the early evening in Abu Dahbi. They are a wonderful place for people to socialize when the weather is nice (read that: from October to early April). Because there are so many around, you can often just pull your car over to the side of the road and find a place to take your kids to play.

The unfortunate thing is that they're not very well maintained. Some of the larger parks in the center of town have some wonderful equipment, but when you get closer, you see whole platforms missing on little mini forts and other maintenance issues that make it impossible to sit back and relax while your kids go play on the slide.

This is of course contrasted with the amazing landscaping with the immaculately manicured grass, trees and bushes. You will always see workers keeping the park looking nice. I mentioned the broken playground equipment to one of them once just to see what would happen (I knew what would happen) and the man nodded when I pointed out the obviously faulty and dangerous slide. I'm not sure if he didn't understand or didn't care, but nothing was done. I suppose the surprise to me is that no Emiratis say anything. I'm sure that all it would take is a word from just one person and it would be fixed.

Of course, there are parks nearby that have little attractions like an air-filled bouncy slide. Sometimes these are provided free of charge and other times they are in an amusement-park midway-like atmosphere that is charging. One near our place even has pony rides. I would have to say that there are some great places outdoors to go when the weather is nice. I only wish that the city wouldn't just put up equipment then forget about it.