A Quick Brag (or: I'm Kind of a Big Deal) (Again.)

Encounters with Sheikh Mo and Barack Freaking Obama.

Guys, I know I suck at blogging these days. Actually I have like 3 drafts that I've never finished, and several cool stories I never even started! I'll get to those one day. Tonight, I'm just here to brag.

I spent the weekend visiting long lost friends in Abu Dhabi. Tonight, one of these friends and I drove out to a sports bar on a Yas Island to watch the Chelsea-Stoke match (draw!) (also cricket was on. Does anyone even understand that sport? I mean, besides the UK, Australia, and the billion+ inhabitants of the subcontinent?), and afterwards we sat along the harbor talking. In fact, see this purple structure center-right? We were sitting (bottom left corner) looking across the water at it when a man stopped a few meters away and interrupted our conversation.

Excuse me, he said.

I looked up and saw a stylishly-bald fellow in a pink dress shirt who looked kind of like...

My friend* was immediately on his feet. Mr Zane! Wow! How are you? And shook his hand. I was just thinking maybe he didn't look familiar after all when my friend turned to me and said, Rayzzle! This is the guy from Titanic!

And I was like, What?

And then I said, WHAT?

And do you know what? HE TOTALLY WAS! And there was my friend, standing with him like he was some old friend and pointing him in the direction of whatever hoity-toity place he was looking for.

Only then did I get on my feet--he was gone by now--and my friend was like, Can you believe that was Billy Zane?

I was like, I can't believe you even know who that is.
We were both like, That's the closest I've ever been to Leonardo DiCaprio.

Isn't that crazy? Such is the glam life I live over here in the UAE. My weekdays are spent handling paperwork for royalty (<--yes, that is an allusion to a story I will not be publishing here EDIT: two stories) and my weekends are spent running into celebrities I can't recognize.

Life is good.

Brag brag brag.

*I'm not being intentionally cryptic here. No wait, yes I am! But only because I've recently decided not to use real names here and it being the wee hours of the morning, I'm not witty enough to come up with a good alias.