Abu Dhabi: The walkway at Al Khalidiya Park has walls and a roof, and still it does not feel like being indoors. Look out and the park is right there: lawns, trees and play areas in plain view, nothing between you and the garden. Cool air rises from vents set into the ground, holding the track at around 25°C while the October evening outside stays hot. You are not shut away from the park. You are walking through it, with the heat somehow kept at bay.
On a Monday evening, with the light gone soft, a man is already out on it.
His name is Dr. Atef Ebed. He is 78, a retired scientist, and he walks to the park from his home four or five times a day, staying for hours.
“Usually I walk by the Corniche, but when this opened, wow. I started coming here almost every day.” he said.
What he started coming to is a cooled walkway of 660 metres, one more reason to be outdoors in a city that already knows how to make the most of its parks.
A park with a new heart
Al Khalidiya is one of the capital’s oldest neighbourhood parks, the kind of place that lives in the muscle memory of a whole district: a picnic, a football match, a child’s first wobble on a bicycle. After a major redevelopment of the entire park by The Department of Municipalities and Transport (DMT), it reopened this year with refreshed playgrounds, sports courts and better public facilities.
The centrepiece is the track. It threads between the play areas, the courts and the quiet gardens, with benches along the way and lighting for after dark. It makes a walk possible at any hour and in any month, on any ordinary evening.
It is also a welcoming place for everyone. The walkway is friendly and accessible for People of Determination, including wheelchair users, so that a stroll in the park is open to the whole community.
The people on the track
The people on the track that evening had arrived by very different roads.
Nievva Pinuela, 47, has lived in Abu Dhabi for around ten years and had never visited this park. She stood on top of one of the vents as she spoke, delighted. “As you walk, there is like some cool air,” she said, and laughs at her own phrasing. She loves to walk, and said the cool air makes it a pleasure.
Does the artificial cold feel strange in a garden? She does not hesitate. “Unnatural? No. We used to have AC in our home. So, it feels natural.”
Muhammad Farhan, from India, has been in Abu Dhabi for two months and lives close by. He comes every evening to walk and to play football.
The air conditioning, he said, is what makes it easy to spend time here. To him the garden is beautiful, and it gives him “a peaceful mindset”.
The man who has seen the city change
None of them has seen as much of the city as Ebed.
He is originally from Egypt and has lived in Abu Dhabi for 45 years. He arrived, in other words, in the early 1980s, when the country was barely a decade old, and he has watched it grow up in the same years that he grew up.
He worked for 40 of them, and in that time, he came to know a great many people. Abu Dhabi, he said, is his first home. He has lived a very good life here, and his wish is to stay for the rest of it.
“I have not found a good life and people as here.”
What the walks gives him
For Ebed, the track is not a pastime. It is the structure of his day.
He has always been a walker, and the cooled path means he can keep walking all year round, in his own neighbourhood, on his own two feet. He does not need a car or a ticket. He simply leaves his front door and arrives. Four or five visits a day, each lasting hours, is not a figure about leisure. It is a routine.
The routine does things for his body, and he is specific about them. “It is better than the gym,” he said. He comes home a little tired, and then he sleeps well. He feels healthy, and he feels better after each walk. “It is good for my age.”
It also matters where he walks. The track is safe, he said, and well-lit after dark. It is flat and gentle, with benches along the way. Everything is within reach of a man who has taken care of his health through a long life.
And there is the matter of company. After forty years of work, Ebed knows people all over the city, and some of them he now meets on the track. A walk that might have been solitary becomes a string of greetings. “I meet good people,” he said.
He is also ill, and he mentions it without being asked. He has cancer. What he said next lingers longer than any figure about metres or degrees: he thanks God that it happened here, and not somewhere else in the world.
In Abu Dhabi, he said, he has found good doctors and the treatment he needs. In that light, the daily walk is another thing the city has given him: a way to feel well, sleep well and stay among people, for as long as he can.
A city built for its people
What the track shows, on this one evening, is who a park is for. A newcomer who plays football after work. A woman who has lived here for a decade and discovers a new corner of her own city. A man of 78 with a long life behind him and a walk he looks forward to every day.
Ebed has one request of the rest of us. The place is unique, he said. He has seen nothing like it outside the UAE. “It is very important we keep it clean and show respect to the innovation.”
Then he goes back to walking.