March 11 started fairly normally. An editorial meeting, a longish Friday afternoon lunch, a comfortable run in to the weekend. And then capital shook, the sea swallowed Tohoku, and Japan changed for good. Almost 6 months later, the country is preparing itself for a rice harvest that many expect to be dangerously contaminated, and the inept government has just accepted the resignation of the 6th prime minister in 5 years.

Millions of column inches have been filled contemplating the catastrophic effect the Great East Japan Earthquake has had on the country, but – given that we blogged through the first major aftershock, minutes after the initial quake – Time Out Tokyo‘s response must have been one of the first. Not that we predicted the financial and political fallout, of course, but we did what we could to help the confused foreigners stranded in Tokyo at the time, an effort that ultimately landed us a Time Out International award.

Based on last night’s performance, Prince is an artist whose recording career could benefit from the kind of back-to-basics shift that so often breathes life into rock’s flagging elder statesmen. His Yas Arena show, performed over two hours with five encores in front of a 30,000-strong crowd, was built on a clear love of two key things: live performance, and live performance of a little thing called funk. Stick to this agenda, and I reckon he has at least an album or two of quality material left in him.

All smiles until they started beating themselves down

When I first arrived in the UAE, I met up with a family friend who’d spent more years in the Middle East than in his native Ireland. Keen to impart some of his local knowledge, we arranged a trip to Dubai’s Global Village where he agreed to verse me in haggling culture. ‘The golden rule,’ he explained, ‘is never to show any interest.’ ‘So, I’m to feign lack of interest in something I’ve got my heart set on?’ ‘Right,’ he grinned. ‘They can’t stand it.’

Clearly, the world of bartering is a confusing place, not dissimilar to that of relationships. But the idea that there might be a ‘golden rule’ was intriguing. It suggested that there might be a science to getting the perfect price. With this in mind, I took a few half-baked theories to the streets of Abu Dhabi.