On the way there, I made a brief stop outside the Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex …

where NASA is listening for signs of life in outer space, using these big radio dishes:

At Tidbinbilla, I saw these …

… and these …

Unfortunately, koalas was nowhere to be found in “the wild,” though I did see one of the critters …

It was great to be out and about in the bush, even if it was somewhat domesticated bush. One of these days, I’ll be back in search of a more rugged experience.

At the airport, I resisted the temptation to buy these …

I did, however, buy some of these odd-looking items …

What are those, you ask. They’re little scent pots made from the very absorbent cones of the Banksia Grandis, which is found in Southwest Western Australia. A few drops of eucalyptus inside, I’m told, and your room will smell like a forest.

When I first heard about the conference on cosmopolitanism being held by the Island Southeast Asia Centre (ISEAC) at Australia National University in Canberra. I jumped at the chance to add Australia to my list of continents visited. Only Antarctica remains, though I won’t really count Africa until I’ve been sub-Saharan. (Something that may happen this summer.)

Canberra is a planned city, situated between Sydney and Melbourne, though closer to the former. The spot was chosen in 1908 as a compromise, because neither Sydney nor Melbourne would agree to let the other become the nation’s capital. Canberra was designed by the Chicago architects Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin, and next year marks the 100th anniversary of the beginning of construction.

As capital cities go, Canberra is pretty sleepy. The picture above was taken from the Telestra Tower at the top of Black Mountain, just west of the city center, and it shows the downtown. My hotel, the Crowne Plaza, is next to the cranes just to the right of the center of the picture, and the Canberra Centre, a mall that occupies several blocks, its buildings joined by enclosed walkways on the “first” floor, is just to the left a little forward. ANU is in the foreground at right. It’s very, very green all around the city, which seems dominated by its landscape.

To put things in perspective: the shops in the Canberra Centre close at 5:30 p.m. on weekedays, 5:00 p.m. on Saturdays, and 4:00 p.m. on Sundays. It’s open late on Fridays (9:00 p.m.). A few restaurants — like Sammy’s Kitchen, where I had lunch yesterday with some of the conference organizers, or Kingsley’s Steak & Crab House, where I had a wonderful T-Bone for dinner, are part of the centre and spill onto the street, and they remain open after the rest of the centre has closed. But the whole area has a deserted feel to it at night. On Saturdays, the parking meters near my hotel only charge you from 9:00 a.m. to noon., which tells you something.

i decided to rent a car because I was arriving late last Wednesday night, and while driving on the left is something I get used to quickly, I decided to take it easy on myself an opt for an automatic transmission rather than a manual. Left-handed shifting at night on unfamiliar roads seemed like it might have been a bridge too far.

But nothing in Canberra seems like it’s too far. The airport is about a 15-20 minute drive, and Google Maps keeps telling me that wherever I want to go is about 8-10 minutes away by car.

Looking for whatever culture might be available, I bought tickets before arriving to see an Arab Australian comic named Akmal (Saleh), who was trying out material for a new show at the Canberra Theatre Centre, about a five-minute walk from the hotel. That was Friday night. On Saturday, I’d planned to attend the Canberra Symphony Orchestra‘s outdoor “Proms” concert, but I received an e-mail at mid-morning saying that the concert was cancelled due to a forecast for severe weather. For a while, as I visited the National Museum of Australia in the late afternoon and then walked around the artificial Lake Burley Griffin in the bright sunlight, it seemed that the weather gods might have been playing sport with the symphony. But from the top of the Telestra Tower, which I visited next, you could see clouds rolling in from the distance, and, sure enough, there was driving rain, crackling thunder, and lightning bolts at about 7:00 p.m. The post-storm air, tinged by the smell of wet eucalyptus, was delicious and very un-Abu Dhabi.

This morning I’m going to venture south of the city centre toward the Parliament Building and the National Gallery of Australia, which has a special exhibition called “Renaissance: Raphael, Botticelli, Titian, Bellini.” The exhibition features 15th- and 16th-century paintings from the Academia Carrara in Bergamo and runs until April 9.

After that: further down south, to the Tidbinbilla National Park, in search of a brief bush walk and a marsupial or two.

As far Antarctica goes, who knows? According to this recent article from the National, the company Antarctic Dream will be running cruises in November …

There was swimming …

… not to mention grilled cheeseburgers, sausages, and hot dogs with yellow mustard. And sparklers — lots of sparklers.

And some fireworks from the platforms on the lake. Not airborne, but the kids deemed them “awesome” anyway.

A grand time was had by all!

Old-fashioned photos courtesy of newfangled software: Hipstamatic for iPhone.

[Settings: Lake, Lifeguard Chair, and Sparklers 2-5 -- lens: John S.; film: Ina's 1969; flash: off.  Sparklers 1, Fireworks, and I Love New York -- lesn: Kaimal Mark II; film Ina's 1969; flash off.]

The Dallas Opera moved into its new home at the Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House last fall. The building, which is part of the AT&T Performing Arts Center, still has that new-building smell (the NYU Abu Dhabi downtown campus building has it too). It’s surrounded by lots of construction, as the Dallas Arts District takes shape around it.

The opera house itself is a red circle in a square (though in fact it’s shaped more like a horseshoe than a circle). It has a sixty-foot glass facade, with an interior that features brushed steel, metallic grey paint, reflective curved red panels. Every portion of it seems to have been given a sponsor’s name, as you can see from this description on the Dallas Opera’s website:

A 21st century reinterpretation of the traditional opera house, the 2,200-seat Winspear Opera House’s principal performance space, the Margaret McDermott Performance Hall, is designed to be the environmentally conscious, state-of-the-art standard against which future opera houses will be measured.

The opera house’s principal entrance, known as Rosemary and Roger Enrico Family Gateway, features the Annette and Harold Simmons Signature Glass Façade that ascends to the full 60-foot height of the building, creating a seamless flow between the opera house and the surrounding park. The transparent façade provides dramatic views of McDermott Performance Hall, which will be clad in vibrant red glass panels, in addition to the Grand Lobby, the staircase and the Mary Anne and Richard Cree Box Circle and Grand Tier levels. From within the Winspear Opera House, the Simmons Glass Façade will provide a sweeping view of downtown Dallas and portions of Uptown.

One of the ways in which the hall is a “reinterpretation of the traditional opera house” is in it use of the chandelier. When you walk in, the auditorium is dominated by a chandelier that is made of illuminated rods hanging down from the ceiling. In an homage to the Metropolitan Opera’s rising chandeliers, this chandelier also rises: each rod is fully retracted into the ceiling, leaving a starfield pattern on the ceiling — which then  twinkles as the house lights go down completely.

I liked the acoustics from where I was sitting in the dress circle, and the hall seemed quite cozy compared to the Met. My one complaint: I don’t think I’ve ever sat in a more aggressively air-conditioned venue.

Click here to read Bloom’s account of the photo shoot and here for a more detailed account of Bloom’s timelapse techniques (with additional material about Dubai).

NYU students who have been to Prague (or who are thinking of spending a semester there) might enjoy his tribute to the city:

Prague: Canon 1DMKIV from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.

And fellow Star Wars fans might enjoy his peek at the Skywalker Ranch:

I often ask my students to look for what I call exemplary moments in the texts that they are reading, by which I mean a moment — it can be a word, a phrase, sentence, a passage, a stanza, a scene — that captures something crucial, whether it be formal or thematic, about the larger text from which it is drawn. But you can find such exempla not simply in texts but all around you.

Here is an exemplum that captures, for me, many of the paradoxes, difficulties, and opportunities that NYU Abu Dhabi presents.

It’s the physical address of NYUAD:

New York University Abu Dhabi
Behind the ADIA Building & Across Al Nasr Street from the Cultural Foundation
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

The building is so new that it doesn’t have a proper address yet (or maybe the address above is simply going to be the proper address). In any case, the city’s addressing system is in flux. Here’s an explanation of Abu Dhabi’s street addresses from wikitravel.org

Street addresses in Abu Dhabi are simultaneously very logical and hopelessly confusing. Many roads have traditional names, like “Airport Rd”, which may not correspond to the official names, like “Maktoum St”, and the city is divided into traditional districts like “Khalidiyya”. However, by recent decree, the city has been split up into numbered “zones” and “sectors”, with all roads in each sector numbered, First St, Second St, etc, and the vast majority of street signs only refer to these. The system of main streets is straight forward enough once you realize that the odd numbered streets run across the island and the even numbers run along it. So First St is in fact the Corniche, and the odd numbers continue out of town to 31st St which is near the new Khalifa Park. Airport Rd is Second St and the even numbers continue to the east through to 10th St by Abu Dhabi Mall. On the west side of Airport Rd, the numbers go from 22nd Street to 32nd St by the new Bateem Marina. Alas, confusion is caused by the local streets, which are on green signs (main streets are on blue signs) and are also called First, Second etc. Most locals opt to ignore the system entirely, and the best way to give instructions is thus navigating by landmarks, if taking a taxi, odds are you will get to “behind the Hilton Baynunah” much faster than “Fifth Street, Sector 2″.

Eid Mubarak! Back home it’s Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, the first day of the Christmas shopping season, but here, in Abu Dhabi, it’s the Eid Holiday, which commemorates the willingness of the prophet Ibrahim (PBUH) to sacrifice his son Ismail for God”s sake. Despite the fact that I hate traveling over Thanksgiving weekend, I find myself here in the new downtown campus building of NYU Abu Dhabi, awaiting a group of applicants who have been flown here from all parts of the globe as part of the “November Candidate Weekend.”

Outside, it’s summer weather: a lovely 85 Farenheit, though rain is predicted for Sunday night! As we walked into the building, we passed a group of men who were finishing up the ritual sacrifice of what looked like a lamb (which is one way that Eid is celebrated here). That was upsetting one of my colleagues, who’s an animal rights activist, and I suspect the candidates will be taken around the other side of the building, in case any of them are not quite ready for that aspect of Islamic culture.

I’m thrilled to be here. After my last visit I was trying to figure out a way to get myself invited back sometime next term, so when the invitation came to take part in the Candidate Weekend, it seemed like too good an offer to pass up. (Luckily, my wife agreed!) The past year’s work has been about building a curriculum and a faculty, but my colleagues on the Arts and Humanities Coordinating Group haven’t had a chance to get a sense of what the students are actually going to be like. I’ve observed them, last night and at breakfast this morning, and they are indeed an amazing bunch. So I’m looking forward to watching them think like cultural critics from 75 minutes. Our subject? What else, but cosmopolitanism!

I picked up the first two seasons of the television show Freej at one of the duty-free shops in the Abu Dhabi airport. Freej is a 3D animated cartoon produced in Dubai, which has been a big hit in the Emirates since it debuted in 2006. The series depicts the lives of four friends — Um Saeed, Um Allawi, Um Salood, and Um Khammas — older women living in one of the more traditional neighborhoods in Dubai (freej means “neighborhood” in Emirati Arabic). They gather each day in Um Saeed’s house to drink coffee and chat about their lives, and periodically they go off on little adventures. Each of the characters has distinctive traits (as well as color coding) and wears a niqab (veil). Um Saeed is short and highly educated and generally intiates the conversation; Um Allawi is tall and constantly trading stocks via laptop and cell phone; Um Saloom is forgetful and narcoleptic; and Um Khammas, a North African, is an acid-tongued singer and caterer who specializes in weddings.

The show and its creator Mohammed Saeed Harib (pictured below), were profiled in September in the New York Times.  The 31-year-old attended Northeastern University, where he and his peers watched episodes of South Park. Freej has something of South Park’s irreverence, though it embodies Emirati values and foibles rather than North American. The ladies’ talk isn’t obscene, but it is colorful (at least as far as I can tell from the subtitles). A third season was shown, but the series is now on hiatus due largely to the global financial downturn.

I hadn’t expected my children to take to the show. My nine-year-old can read the subtitles, but my five-year-old can’t. I secretly hope that they would though, because it would be a way of exposing them to the culture of the Emirates and the Islamic world.

As an experiment, I put on the first episode, entitled “Ramadan,” and began reading the subtitles aloud. The 15-minute show features the ladies sitting in Um Saeed’s house moaning about how hungry they are, anticipating the feast that will come with nightfall, and clicking through television channels in search of something to watch. All they find, however, are shows promoting Islamic values, game shows, and sitcoms with titles like “Pain” or “Suffering.” Finally, they break their fast and, stuffed, figure that there must finally be something enjoyable to watch on t.v. But all they find is that new show Freej. “Overhyped,” Um Saeed complains, “just four old hags sitting around complaining. And that Um Khammas really brings the show down!” So Um Allawi faces the viewer, points the remote, clicks it, and the episode ends.

My kids were captivated and we’ve been watching it together for the past few days, daddy voicing the subtitles. We’re almost done with season one. My younger son can’t wait to start season two, because he’s already figured out that it features Um Saeed’s grandson and his hijinks.

My older son and I were out for a walk last Sunday, and I was telling him a little bit about my trip to Abu Dhabi. It’d be really fun place to spend a year, I told him, because it’s summer there all the time, and we could travel to really interesting places like Egypt and India. And you could even learn a little Arabic.

He looked at me and said: “And then I could understand Freej without the subtitles!”

[Image of Mohammed Saeed Harib from the New York Times.]