Well that's half a term closer to retirement

We have just finished our longest half-term ever: nine weeks without a break. For those non-teachers reading this and sneering into your cornflakes, nine weeks without a break is about a decade in non-teacher years. We are off to Sri Lanka in a couple of days where we intend to spend a week doing nothing whatsoever.

Today we celebrated National Day at school. National Day itself is sometime next week, but this was the nearest schoolday to it, so there you go. National Day is the anniversary of the formation of the UAE (38 years ago, so the UAE would have been in the same year as me at school). National Day was celebrated by the kids and some of the staff (myself and Rachel excluded) wearing national dress and by there being a camel in the playground. Getting a bit blase about camels now. Seen one camel, seen 'em all.

Now it is Eid which means 10 days off school. It also means everything is shut from 10 o'clock this evening for 24 hours, so no celebrating the start of the holidays in the usual pub-bound manner; it will be a few quiet boozydrinks at home.

I must say that I am quite enjoying being in such a fiercely competitive country. The country itself, that is, not the people or the culture. The UAE is desperate to prove its world-class status so is going all out to get everything it can (Manchester City FC included - the recent friendly between the UAE National team and Man City was billed as 'Our Country v. Our City'). In the three months we have been here we have had an international golf tournament, a Grand Prix, the Fifa World Beach Soccer Cup and, starting next week, the Rugby Sevens. There is also the Fifa World Club Cup next month to which we will be going: four tickets for the final AND the 3rd/4th playoff came to 20 quid. We also had an international airshow last week.
I am often accused by the kids of spending ages staring out of the window. This is because the view from my classroom window is pretty good.

That's the Burj Dubai on the left there. Another instance of the UAE being competitive. It is the tallest building in the world. Usually, when a country decides to build the tallest building in the world, they settle for a small margin. Before the Burj, the tallest building in the world was Taipei 101 at 509m. Before that, it was the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur at 452m, a difference of 61m. Prior to that it was the Willis (formerly Sears) Tower in Chicago at 442m - a difference of 10m. The Burj, when completed, will stand at 818m. That's 309m taller than the next tallest. To put that into perpective, if you took Tapei 101 and stacked Canary Wharf ontop of it, you'd still be 74m short. That's a pile of 17 London Buses. Incidentally, 'Burj' means tower in Arabic, so don't confuse the Burj Dubai with the Burj al Arab, which is the tallest purpose built hotel in the world (the sail shaped one that you always see in adverts for Dubai).

Anyway, last week I had a day when it was all the kids that were looking out of the window. I asked them to concentrate on their exciting and fun English lesson, but to little avail. The problem was, the classroom window also faces the airport which is about a mile away and the airshow was on. So this was what they could see out of the window:

OK, so that's not entirely true. That's a picture I took of the following day's paper:

But they were really as impressive as the first picture and my real picture didn't quite do them justice:

I know that's sideways on, but I can't work out how to rotate it. Anyway, that's the Patrouille de France Aerobatic Display Team, the French version of the Red Arrows, and they were very good. So the airshow was three days of watching them, and F-22 Raptors and Eurofighter Typhoons and Airbus A380s circling the school. I think I was more excited about it than the kids.

Right, I've just had a phone call from the missus telling me she's ready to leave, so I'm off to start the holidays pretty sharpish.

Eid Mubarak everyone!