LOVE IS IN THE SEA
Flowers. Chocolate. Diamonds. Even oysters. It’s all here, in Friday’s annual ode to the so-called day of love, Valentine’s. Nonetheless you can, of course, expect Friday’s crack team of love experts, aka our writers, to keep it real when it comes to matters of the heart. So when Shreeja Ravindranathan decided to tackle a story about love, she decided to look at how people have met their partners in the UAE – no mean feat, as her story on page 28 suggests. Each day, she uncovered, 500 UAE-based lonely hearts sign up to one of the top Indian matrimonial sites. Others have taken things into their own hands, starting social media matchmaking groups to try to overcome an astounding statistic: That the odds of meeting your mate in your every day goings-about is 1 in 562.
Got a great ‘meet-cute’ in the UAE (the term refers to that moment in a romcom where the couple we’ll follow in the movie first encounter each other)? We want to hear about it – check Story Tellers on page 12 for how to send us your tale, whether your eyes met in a bookshop, or you clicked over a website click.
Are you conscious of a recent uncoupling? Russell Hemmings shares his tips on getting over a break-up and getting on with your life on page 32. Top tip: No crying into a pint of ice cream. (Although eating healthily is another of his prescriptions, I say go on and eat that ice cream – just be happy about it!)
Ice cream, chocolate and oysters (due to their zinc content, apparently) are often on the Valentine’s menu.
While you know you can get locally made ice cream and chocolate (visit fridaymagazine.ae for our favourites), you might be surprised to hear that the UAE is now home to an oyster farm, too. It’s over in the eastern emirate of Fujairah, where the seas are fresher and wilder, and a Scotsman decided it would be a good idea to grow the popular bivalves. It looks like it was a good idea – if you eat out at the likes of The Club in Abu Dhabi or Dubai’s Galeries Lafayette, Sean Connolly’s restaurant at Dubai Opera, or Maine Oyster Bar and Grill in JBR, you’ll be munching oysters that weren’t flown in from France, but that came from just down the road. In Fujairah, too, there’s a chef who’s having a love affair with oysters – Arva Ahmed met both, and tells their tale on page 57.
Although eating healthily is one of Russell’s prescriptions, I say eat that ice cream – just be happy about it!