For the last two days I've been tirelessly scouring the internet looking for the Bugs Bunny cartoon when he references Abu Dhabi. Any reference at all. So far I haven't found anything, but I swear that one exists.
In fact, the only cartoon reference to The Dhabi I found was in "Garfield and Friends" from the late 1980s. Apparently Garfield repeatedly threatened to ship the overly-cute kitten Nermal to Abu Dhabi.
So there you go.
Anyway, as I've mentioned before, Abu Dhabi is one of the seven emirates that make up the U.A.E. (the other six are Ajman, Dubai, Fujairah, Ras al-Khaimah, Sharjah, and Umm al-Quwain). And I hadn't been to The Dhabi before this trip, so I get to cross that one off my list. I've now been to 71% of the emirates, only missing Ajman and Fujairah.
Granted, the U.A.E. is pretty small, it's 32,278 square miles - which makes it just a hair smaller than the State of Maine (at 33,414 square miles). That being said, it's not like when I lived in Maine I took regular jaunts to Fort Kent or Lubec often. In fact, I've never been to either. Ever.
Anyway, there was one other crazy thing on our trip that I want to mention. We followed Route 11 (no, not Poland Spring Road in Casco, Maine, but close) which we in Dubai know as Sheikh Zayed Road, named after Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan who was the President of the U.A.E. from its inception in 1971 until his death in 2004.
I always figured that naming the road after him because he was the President of the country and the principle founding father. That, or they were upset with him, I mean, naming a busy street after a great ruler is a little foolish, as most people refer to the street with disdain when they speak, "There's always so much stupid traffic on Sheikh Zayed!" "This jerk almost killed me on Sheikh Zayed!" "I hate [driving on] Sheikh Zayed!"
With that mindset, it's quite possible that in a few years folks in the United States could name particularly violent or poorly designed stretches of highway after our current leader, but I digress...
The one way, of course, you can get around this is rename a road that already has at least two names, kind of like Maine's "10th Mountain Division Highway" (a/k/a "Roosevelt Trail", a/k/a "Route 302".)
But lo and behold, changes were afoot when we crossed into the Dhabi. And it was bigger than just the pavement being a slightly different hue (although it was). Suddenly the road was called Sheikh Maktoum Bin Rashid Road.
"Maktoum?" I said to Liz, "Aren't they the leaders of Dubai?"
Yep. Apparently Dubai named Sheikh Zayed Road after Sheikh Zayed because he was also the ruler of Abu Dhabi, and then Abu Dhabi named their segment of the road after Dubai's ruler Sheikh Maktoum bin Rashid Al Maktoum.
They traded names! Weird.
But I guess it's better than having your road named after your own ruler. At least a little bit.
