From ridiculous to...

I've often wanted to know the logic behind some of the more esoteric choices of business names here. Take the German Beauty Centre for instance: is there a particular German beauty technique? Is it a centre for beautiful Germans? And so on. Ideas welcome.

And carrying on in the ridiculous vein: last week was the Abu Dhabi Cityscape show: a week-long exhibition for the property sector, held at the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre. The stalls seemed to run the gammut from the worst possible taste, to really rather good. Some of the tackiest also seemed to involve employing modestly (just) dressed young ladies to parade around the hall in pashminas bearing the stall-holder's logo. The official (I assume government sponsored, but I could be maligning the Australian government) Australian corner seemed determined to demonstrate almost every graphical stereotype known to antipodean man: not, perhaps the best idea when promoting your country's design skills for export. The generally received wisdom that it was significantly quieter and more downbeat than last year, but that we mustn't mention the R word.

To recover a colleague and I took ourselves over to Oman for a day, just to see the Indian ocean and to get an idea of whether we felt like going for a longer break. We stopped at the little town of Majis, not far from the port of Sohar on the Indian Ocean, and had a walk along the (real) beach, and had a rather good lunch in a very basic restaurant. We seemed to cause much bemusement amongst the locals, who couldn't really understand why we were there, but were very friendly. I imagine the Emirates must have been a bit like it 40 years ago.