Compulsive reading – Lee Miller: A Life with Food Friends and Recipes

December 04, 2023 by Lisa Reinisch in art, anecdotes, books, food, history, photography, recommendations

When this book arrived on my doorstep, I held off on unwrapping it until the day’s work was done. I waited until I could finally take it all in, everything the promotional blurb had promised: a whopping 350 pages containing “over a hundred of her recipes and material from the cookbook that Lee Miller was secretly hoping to publish at the end of her life”. That evening, I, bona fide Lee Miller fangirl and collector or cookbooks, greedily devoured the book. Here is why I couldn’t put it down until late, late that night.

Follow the mangoes: Masafi's Friday market

December 10, 2017 by Lisa Reinisch in anecdotes, food, history, local culture, recommendations, travel, UAE

Two rows of open-front stores line a short stretch of the E88 where it cuts in between two cinnamon-red mountain ridges, somewhere along what used to be the main route to the East coast. To the uninitiated, the Friday Market, or Souq Al Juma’a, may look like nothing more than a collection of random roadside junk shops backed by low-slung tenements. The question of driving on certainly hangs in the air on first approach. But then, invariably, cars slow down as the people inside take in the scene and, metre-by-metre, become intrigued.

The personal versus the universal at the Louvre Abu Dhabi launch

November 16, 2017 by Lisa Reinisch in art, architecture, anecdotes, Abu Dhabi, construction, design, launches, master plans, UAE

There is this thing I do whenever I drive across the bridge that links Abu Dhabi to Saadiyat Island, the emirate’s cultural tourism megaproject: I look over towards the stretch of shoreline where the master plan envisages five major cultural institutions (Louvre Abu Dhabi, Zayed National Museum, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, a performaing arts centre and a maritime museum) to take shape. I did it back when there wasn’t anything to see except an empty patch of sand. I did it when construction on the first of them, Jean Nouvel's Louvre Abu Dhabi, finally began. And I do it now, that the museum has been open for almost a week.

Vampires and pomegranates, or: why my brain almost imploded with joy the other day

October 29, 2014 by Lisa Reinisch in Abu Dhabi, anecdotes, cinema, events, Movies, music, recommendations, UAE

Last weekend, two films at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival (ADFF) blew me away, although they could hardly have been any more different from each other: one was the 1968 Soviet/Armenian classic, The Color of Pomegranates, by Sergei Parajanov; the other, Ana Lily Amirpour’s directorial debut, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, aptly described in the catalogue as ‘the world’s first Iranian vampire Western’. Discovering a surprising link between them felt unfeasibly exciting and pleasantly short-circuited a whole bunch of synapses in my cultural grey matter.

Here be museums: promising signs at the Saadiyat construction site

October 10, 2013 by Lisa Reinisch in Abu Dhabi, architecture, master plans, UAE, construction, anecdotes

The neatly dressed man with the backpack is standing by the side of the highway, next to a broken-down car, and waves at us. At first, we think he wants us to tow him, but it turns out he is not worried about getting to a repair shop; he has applied for work at the Louvre Abu Dhabi construction site and the breakdown has made him late for his job interview. Can we take him to Saadiyat island? Sure, we say. Of course. Secretly, I am not just happy to help the guy out, I'm also quite excited to see what is going on at a construction site I've watched with anticipation ever since I moved to Abu Dhabi. A few months ago, it finally went from stagnation to 24-hour activity and I have been wanting to peek behind the security fence ever since.