About
The purpose of the Arabic Belly Dance blog-site is to provide general information on aspects of the Belly dance, also known as Oriental dance, Raqs baladi, Raqs sharqi.
Included will be references to history, personalities of note, art, literature, dance styles and costumes, current and past activity, female and male participation, instruction and practices.
My name is Jim Robinson, the author of this site
I am a former production management specialist in the field of a printing, publishing, and the graphic arts, now retired.
My personal interests lie mainly in the sciences, leaning more so to the life-sciences where the great unsolved mysteries of life’s origins have yet to be discovered, but I am also a follower of anthropology, the earth-sciences, astronomy on the topics of super-nova and gamma-ray bursts. I’m a reader really, just interested that’s all, not a student.
My wife and I and our children, now grown up, live in Canada, with one exception, a daughter living in England, the country of my own birth.
I have written elsewhere, articles on:
Terrestrial Volcanoes, Impact Craters, The Sun, Questioning the Cause of Dinosaur Extinctions, William Shakespeare, The Genius of Gutenberg, The Stock Market, etc., etc.
Diabetes
I also have a web site on the subject of diabetes, information for diabetics, of which I am one, a type 2 for 20 years now. I am not a health care professional and my comments conform to mainstream diabetes treatment and procedures. I just state them from the viewpoint of a patient.
Oriental Dance
I come to the topic of Oriental dance, writing on the history, culture, personalities, and connections with art and literature, as a challenging exercise to learn something new but with, in some ways, an affection for the former civilizations and history of the Middle East.
That is even though I spent almost a year in Egypt in less than comfortable conditions as a member of the British Armed Forces when Great Britain still controlled the Suez Canal.
It was not like being Lawrence of Arabia I must add, considering my duties as a lowly sapper in the Royal engineers. But the sands were the same.
