On new cars, being a tourist and a visit to Oman

February marked the next milestone of our stay in the Middle East as that was when I received my third monthly bank statement. Which means I am credit-worthy. Which meant we could buy a car. Although we are here primarily to pay off debts, it seemed silly to be paying nearly 2000 dirhams a month for a very basic hire car. So we looked into what we could afford for the same amount through finance. I had decided, before our arrival here, that due to ultra-cheap petrol (23p a litre) I was going to go for something that I could not afford to run in Europe. My initial criterion was that it needed to either grunt, go off road or waft. A survey of locally available nearly-new automobilia suggested a Chevrolet Lumina/Caprice might suffice. Despite the American brand name, these are actually rebadged Australian Holdens. They look like normal family saloon cars. Except that they have 6 litre, Corvette derived engines. But, in the end, the lure of desert camping trips proved too high, and we went for a 2 year old Jeep Cherokee (pics to follow, along with pics of the flat, school etc.). It’s a wonderful thing, with a 3.7 litre V6 engine (so it does grunt and off roading) and, being American, it was relatively cheap. Most people here drive 4x4s and 90% of all 4x4s on UAE roads (and, occasionally off UAE roads) are Toyota Landcruisers. They are, as an almost failsafe rule, driven by the ignorant and arrogant who make no concessions to other road users whatsoever. To the point where I feel a little bit sick every time I see one. Which, as I’m sure you can well imagine, is frequently. The rationale given for the dominance of the Toyota brand is their bombproof reliability and consequent very low depreciation. Imagine my delight then when Toyotas recently started killing people and had to be recalled. One of the branches of the Landcruiser family is so dangerous, apparently, that they have had to stop selling them here. Secondhand prices will plummet accordingly. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.




Our first adventure in the Jeep was a trip to Al Ain Zoo. I’m not much of a one for zoos, but it seemed like a good one. The animal enclosures were spacious and there was a variety of beasts.

Meerkats!

Being the UAE, of course, they were all the biggest animals available – the tiger was the size of a small horse, the bear the size of a large Jeep, and so on. They have a pair of white lions, which I’m fairly sure aren’t normal lions that have been bleached.

White lions

The high point for me came when I spotted some very strange birds in an enclosure:

I called Rachel over to show her and they all took off and flew away. They were, of course, native birds, not an exhibit. I sometimes forget we live in an exotic and faraway land.



Towards the end of February, my parents came to stay. This meant that we got the chance to do all the touristy stuff that residents (fools that we are) rarely do.

Me and mum being tourists

We went onto the Palm Jumeirah by monorail, looked at the Burj al Arab (the sail shaped hotel) and tried, twice, to go up to the observation deck of the Burj Khalifa (the tall building). But, less than a month after opening, problems with the electricity supply meant that it closed down temporarily. We tried at the beginning of the visit and again at the end, but to no avail. As I write this (halfway through April) the observation deck is still closed with no immediate prospect of change.

The Burj Khalifa! Still haven't been up it though.

Bastakiya - the renovated 'old' part of Dubai - now a warren of museums and art galleries and part of the tourist trail

We also went to Oman. The problem with owning a car in Dubai is that there really aren’t that many places to drive it to. You can’t drive through Saudi (not that anyone would want to), which means you can choose between other parts of the UAE, Oman and the Yemen. As the latter is pretty terrifying, the only other country is realistically Oman. So we set off in the Jeep to cross the mountains. It was a pretty boring journey – the mountains are not particularly spectacular, and once in Oman, the scenery is unchanging for the three or four hours it takes to get from the border to Muscat. Unlike the UAE, Oman feels like a real country – it has older buildings. It is much greener and, despite the UAE’s much vaunted oil wealth, Oman actually feels more prosperous.

Muscat is lovely. Strange, but lovely. Due to the landscape, it is divided into several clearly separate sections, each kept apart by rocky bluffs. We were staying in Mutrah, which is the main (as far as I can tell) tourist part – very pretty with one of the best bazaars in the Middle East. As it is also the main anchorage for cruise liners, it tends to be overrun by western sightseers. Of which we were a small but significant part.

Mutrah seafront

The old and the new - a dhow and a cruise liner in Mutrah harbour

Hotels in the Middle East are generally expensive, so the Hotel Mutrah was, by necessity, a 3 star establishment. But it was an excellent place to stay. Made more so by the Omani people we encountered. Without wishing to stray into generalisation, I have heard from many sources that the Omanis are very welcoming people. Unlike the Emiratis. And our stay certainly did little to disabuse us of this notion. The hotel bar was obviously a pretty rough, local watering hole – bar girls aside, entirely male and given over to playing bar-sports and watching other sports. As the only Westerners (and with two women!) in there, at no point did we feel uncomfortable or in the least bit unwelcome. Imagine a group of middle eastern tourists walking into an East End local. Do you think they would be able to say the same? Assuming they survived, of course. The restaurant attached the hotel was also excellent. It didn’t look like much – a staff canteen at best. But the Indian food there was of a quality I have not come across before or since. I only hope that it hasn’t raised the bar so high that I am disappointed when we go to India in the summer!

On our second night, we ventured into the part of Muscat where the big international hotels are, hoping for a bit more life. Which is what we found. It had three bars! Three! One of which was too full.

Before our return to Dubai, we visited Muscat itself – the administrative centre of the city. We were near enough the only people there. We had a look at the Royal Palace (fantastic! Concrete!). Then we went home.

The Omani Royal Palace

Following the parental visit, not much happened. We are sufficiently into the everyday grind now for the seemingly exotic location to make little difference. The only thing of note was that last month, I got to payday with the equivalent of £150 still in my bank account. That has never happened before! As with most people, it is now the holidays for which we live, and we had 6 weeks of grindstone heading towards the carrot of 10 days in Nepal. Except that Nepal seemed so alien to me, so far outside of my comfort zone (as, to be honest, is nearly anything that doesn’t involve cheeseburgers, games consoles and shopping malls – I appear to be an American teenager) that I really wasn’t looking forward to it at all.

I need not have worried. As I write this, we have been back from Kathmandu for about 12 hours and, as will be told in the next blog entry (which I am hoping to complete in the next 2 days or so), we had a wonderful, wonderful time.

Kandy, the Klub Kup and Khristmas

OK, so I’ve been a little lax in keeping this thing up to date. So here goes.
The train to Kandy left at 3.35pm and we had to check out of the glorious Galle Face at midday. Cue a couple of tortuous hours spent sitting on the verandah reading a book. A wonderful way to spend our final hours in a wonderful hotel. That and another trip to the factory shop to score some more shirts and another suit (Cerruti this time).

The train arrived about half an hour before the departure time, giving us plenty of time to settle in. At first, we thought we might have got it wrong – this was supposed, after all, to be the jewel in Sri Lankan Rail’s crown, the first class non-stop express between the island’s two main cities. It didn’t look like any jewel in any crown I have ever seen. The carriages were at least 50 years old, the promised air conditioning was four ceiling mounted fans that didn’t work. The toilet, well, I’ll leave that to your imagination. Can you imagine it? Actually, it was worse what you just imagined. This was first class. Second class seemed to consist of wooden benches in cattle-car conditions. Third class was basically clinging to the outside of the train.

Our seats, however, were worth every rupee of the £1.80 they cost us. We were facing backwards, but with a big window from which to watch the receding tracks.

Rachel travelling first class. We had lots of really good photos of the train on Rachel's camera but she lost it. Again.

It mentioned in our guide book that the train could be “a little bit bumpy”. In the same way as Hitler might be said to be “a little bit naughty”. I have been on tamer roller coaster rides. There were stretches of track where we were leaving our seats (vertically) twice every second. I feared I could feel my internal organs pureeing. I don’t like roller coasters. And I didn’t like this very much either.

This was the closest I was able to get to a level photograph due to the roller-coaster-like properties of the train

But on the calm stretches of track, it was beautiful. Farm and paddy land gave way quite quickly to mountains. Looking backwards down the track, we noticed that there seemed to be a surprisingly large number of people appearing from the undergrowth in our wake. It turns out that the railway tracks are also kind of public footpaths – there aren’t that many ways through the mountains.

The journey took close to four hours. Dusk came about three hours in, bringing flocks of what looked like massive gliding birds, but turned out (in true Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom fashion) to be fruit bats. Huge, massive fruit bats. Fruit bats the size of small geese.

It was fully dark by the time we reached Kandy, and the collection we requested from the hotel didn’t materialize, so we just jumped into a cab/minibus and off we went. The Queen’s Hotel is owned by the same people who own the Galle Face, and though not quite as old (built in 1895), it is every bit as colonially charming.

The lobby of the Queen's Hotel

At first it was a bit of a culture shock – after the Galle Face, it was, shall we say, unrestored. The room was spacious enough, with lots of dark wood and high ceilings, but there was little there – no bath (and the shower was…old), no room service, no booze in the minibar. Though there was a phone, there was no internal directory. The check-in clerk had reeled of a list of different numbers we might find useful, but there was no chance we were going to remember them.

A sign in the bedroom

The view from the bedroom window

We got used to the comparative lack of luxury fairly quickly though. To be honest, I had kind of fallen in love with the place after a couple of hours. Particularly the bar attached to the hotel, the Pub Royale which was resplendantly Victorian and...just wonderful.

The bar at Pub Royale

We ventured out into the dark and rain-slicked streets of Kandy to find that pretty much everything was shut. This was at about 7.30pm. Turns out it was Poya – the monthly full moon festival where they celebrate the full moon by shutting everything. We ended up eating at Pizza Hut.

The town of Kandy

Over the next few days, though, Kandy showed itself to be quite a lot livelier. Though it is Sri Lanka’s second city, it is tiny. It has three major streets, a lake and the temple of the sacred tooth (one of Buddha’s teeth is said to be contained therein). Tiny, but busy. We took a day tour of the region with the taxi driver who had picked us up at the station, including visits to the elephant orphanage (a field with lots of elephants in it), an elephant-poo paper factory where they make paper from elephant poo, a tea factory (my favouritest, favouritest place – it smelled utterly wonderful and I spent a small fortune on different kinds of tea) and the Kandy botanical gardens, which were beautiful and had some wildlife.

The Geragama Tea Factory

Tea leaves before...

...and after.

Elephants at the elephant orphanage

Some of the local wildlife

Some more of the local wildlife (monkey in a wig)

Fruit bats

In total, we were in Kandy for three days, which felt about right. Unfortunately we didn’t have time to tour the ancient cities (another 2-3 day tour), but that’s a reason to go back next year, right? We got a cab from Kandy direct to the airport (faster than the train) and home we went. The duty free shopping in the departures section of Bandaranaike airport was a bit disappointing – the arrivals duty free sold guitars, cookers, fridge-freezers, you name it. I suppose it might be a bit difficult to get a duty free washing machine onto the plane though.

Overall, we loved Sri Lanka – the hotels, the history, the (seemingly) genuinely friendly people, and we will definitely be going back next year some time.


After Sri Lanka, we had an interlude of two weeks at school before the start of the Christmas holidays (or December Break as we have to call it). The day after we broke up was the final of the FIFA World Club Cup in Abu Dhabi, for which I had managed to procure four tickets. I was a tad trepidacious about the whole affair – the tickets had not been posted so we would have to drive into the centre of Abu Dhabi to collect them and then find our way to the park-and-ride facilities and so on. It turns out I really need not have worried – it was as easy as fruit-filled baked goods. We (myself, Rachel and two friends, Marie and Harry) collected the tickets with no fuss and discovered that we had been allocated parking at the stadium (presumably because I must have been one of the first people to buy tickets) so we got there with plenty of time to spare. The stadium itself is a masterpiece in reinforced concrete that speaks volumes on the subject of 1980s municipal architecture.

The Zayed Sports City stadium

Stadium interior

I liked it, anyway. The first match we watched was the 3rd/4th place playoff between Atlante of Mexico and the Pohang Steelers from South Korea. Pohang won on penalties, but the standard throughout wasn’t much above the bottom reaches of English league football.

We arrived quite early

The final was between Barcelona of Spain and Estudiantes of Argentina. The standard was much higher, as you might expect with players such as Lionel Messi, Xabi, Carlos Puyol, Thierry Henry, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Juan Sebastien Veron on the pitch. It was relatively slow starting, though a thrilling finish saw Barcelona win 2-1 in extra time.

Barcelona fielded a very young side (boom boom)

The week after we got back, it rained for the first time since we arrived. It rained quite hard for about 3 hours. The result was near catastrophic – there are no drains on the roads in the UAE, so the whole country seemed to have flooded.

Our apartment building suddenly had a moat – we were unable to drive into the car park on the ground floor.

The road outside our apartment

Christmas was a week later. It seemed a bit flat, though most of the shopping malls had some sort of Christmas decorations up. Many people bemoaned the lack of snow and cold as not being Christmassy enough. Having watched the news reports of the devastation being laid waste to the UK by freezing temperatures, I can’t say I would swap weather, however unChristmassy it might be. It was 26 degrees on Christmas day. We went round to Harry and Marie’s flat for Christmas Dinner which was extremely pleasant. I’m still considering returning to the UK next Christmas though, if I can afford it, of course.

Other things:

New Year’s Eve was spent in the desert at a camp that promised unlimited food and drink. The food had run out by the time I got to the front of the queue and the drink had run out by 1 a.m.. We had a pretty damn good time though.

January the fourth was the inauguration of the Burj Khalifa (that which used to be called the Burj Dubai and now officially the tallest building in the world). There were lots of fireworks. We saw them on the way to a restaurant to celebrate Rachel’s 30th birthday. My wife is officially exactly 30 years older than the tallest building in the world. As an aside, the local paper put what has to be the most positive spin I have ever seen on the recent global financial crisis. Thanks to the crisis, it said, no-one would be able to afford to build a building taller than the Burj for many years to come. There’s positivity for you! Happy New Year!

The Delights of Economic Tourism. Part 1.

We have been in Colombo, capital of Sri Lanka for three days now, and are moving on to Kandy tomorrow afternoon. So far, I must say, so very, very good. I’m not sure that Colombo itself has a great deal to recommend it. Indeed, we received a text message from a colleague who had arrived in the city a day ahead of us telling us it was, in her words ‘shite’. I don’t think I’d go that far. It feels like a third world city: very poor and clearly battered by 37 years of war. There is a huge army presence still, with every bridge, every building of note and most major junctions having heavily armed checkpoints – a minimum of six Kalashnikov-toting soldiers at each, and often a tripod mounted heavy machine gun or, in a few cases, a rocket launcher. It has a different feel from other cities with a heavy armed presence, Cairo for instance, in that the Sri Lankan soldiers don’t seem to view their guns as macho accoutrements, more uncomfortable but necessary tools. The armed soldiers are a lot more cheerful for a start – more than happy to wave and smile and call out greetings. This was a bit unnerving at first. But we got used to it.

Given that Colombo has little to recommend it, why then so far so very, very good? That is because of the hotel. I would go as far as to venture that Colombo would probably be worth giving a miss entirely were we not staying at the Galle Face Hotel. As it is, we will indubitably be back. The Galle Face Hotel is the oldest hotel in Asia. The oldest hotel, in fact, east of Suez. It was founded in 1864, 46 years before Singapore’s Raffles, 64 years before Hong Kong’s Peninsula and 23 years before Conrad Hilton was even born.

The Galle Face Hotel seen from it's swimming pool.

These days it is split into two sections – the Galle Face in the northern wing and the Regency (not sure why you would choose to call a Victorian Hotel the Regency, but there you go) in the southern wing. The Galle Face is the original part, slightly tired by all accounts, but charming. The Regency, where we are, has been renovated in line with what modern customers would expect from a hotel of this standing. The building is all one, though. And the building, along with the location, is what makes to hotel what it is. Our hotel bedroom looks out over the courtyard which faces straight out westwards across the Indian Ocean.

The view from our hotel window.

This evening, we took high tea on the verandah and watched the sun set behind the palm trees.

Rachel and I taking tea on the verandah. Note the colonial moustache.

The view from the verandah.

The verandah.

 On our first night we ate at the Sea Spray – the hotel’s fish restaurant, our table right beside the balustrade, three feet from the breaking waves. The hotel is impossibly, unutterably, astoundingly wonderful. I am currently reading a memoir by the journalist Paul Harris who stayed at the hotel for a year in the mid 90s. I am very jealous.

The rest of Colombo is…well to be honest, we have rarely left the hotel. We went up to the station to book our train to Kandy (£1.80 each for the best seats in the first class observation carriage – I’ll let you know what it’s like anon). We also made a sortie out towards the National Museum this morning, but Rachel came down with food poisoning (not the fish restaurant! We suspect the water) so we returned. I went out alone to the mother of all factory surplus shops, intending just to have a look round. I came back with 4 suits (Dunhill, Armani, Boss and Valentino) and 7 shirts (Paul Smith, Ermenegildo Zegna and others) which I assumed were knock offs. But, apparently, the shop is world famous and 99% of its stock is real factory surplus/seconds.

My new suits.

The one thing that has kept me constantly amused is the scam artists, of which there are many. Try to walk anywhere from the hotel and within twenty yards a local will fall into step and engage you in conversation which will eventually work round to his recommendations of where to go. Most often this can be deflected with a smile and a firm ‘no thanks’ but the persistent ones are often worth listening to for their invention. The heart of all the scams is that they will try and charge you to go to a special, one-day only elephant festival at a nearby temple. The thing is that there is an elephant there every day and it is free. One particularly persistent chap earned full marks for inventiveness with his replies:

Him: it is a special one day festival!

Me: I’ve been.

Him: No! This is a Hindu festival. The one you went to was a Buddhist festival.

Me: I’m short of time (I had reached the cash point that I was heading for, 100 yards from the hotel)

Him: Don’t go to that cash point. I will show you a better one.

Me: Better how?

Him: That one gives you Indian money. No good, you can’t spend it. I will show you a Sri Lankan cashpoint.

Needless to say, the money was fine. Another favourite is them telling you that you can’t go a certain way because of security checkpoints. All lies! The only one that worked was a Bajaj driver (three wheeled moped taxis, like TucTucs in Thailand) who told me I should visit a shop on the way to where I wanted to go. I asked him why and he told me that if I did the shop owner would give him a litre of petrol and he was very poor. More examples of honest Sri Lankan advertising:

In case you can't read the strap line, it says "because it is really good"

And some not so honest naming of a hotel:

I think that 'bus stop' might have been more succinct:

The thing that I suspect will most evoke our visit to Colombo will be the sound of crows. Previously their raucous cawing reminded me of the beginning of Worzel Gummidge, but it seems that the whole of the city of Colombo is given over to them. The hotel employs a man to stand on the terrace with a canvas strap to make cracking noises to scre them off. It is also the first time I have ever seen urban scarecrows:

The final footnote to all this is the cost. Rachel and I are very much economic tourists and the strength of the Western and Dubaian economy (don’t believe everything in the news!) means we can afford holidays like this, and feel OK about spreading some of our relative wealth around poorer countries. The hotel is £50 a night. The fish restaurant (one of the most expensive in the city) was £9 each. High tea on the verandah, £4. My designer suits cost £40 each and the shirts were £5 apiece.

Cheers!

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!

A Quick Trip to the Off Licence

This weekend was largely given over to a quick trip to the off licence. It takes about 3 hours, if the Great God of Traffic wills it so. Which means it has to be carefully planned to slot in between weekend hangovers. So it was Friday at about 1pm that we set out for Ras al Khaimah. The journey is fairly straightforward: you get onto the Emirates Road at the bottom of our road, then keep going straight until you get to the end, where you turn left. The last trip was made in the early evening after school with the entire process enlivened by the sight of some wild camels. I say wild, they aren’t really – they are owned by Bedouin tribesmen. But they are allowed to wander free rather than being kept on farms. Our trip on Friday was made during the day, so we first sighted camels about 10 miles out of Dubai, occasioning a volley of photographs from Rachel.

We next sighted some 12 minutes out of Dubai.

And then 14 minutes. And so on. We reached the off licence in a state of Camel fatigue.

Twelve hundred Dirhams (about 200 quid) later, we set off home with a boot full of booty.

The 7km between the off licence and the Emirates Road is made along Ras al Khaimah’s main road connecting its two largest towns. Once we had managed to negotiate a U-turn* traffic seemed unnaturally slow. The reason?

Camels in the road. We enjoyed that. The only regret was that they hadn't wandered onto the road a few hundred yards further along where there was a 'Humps Ahead' warnng sign. That would have made a pretty good photograph.

After the camels, the journey, again, was largely uneventful.

They don’t call it ‘the Empty Quarter’ for nothing. That is until we reached Sharjah. Sharjah is the Emirate right next to Dubai, just beyond the school we both teach in. Dubai has no money – its economy is propped up by oil money from Abu Dhabi. Sharjah has no money. Its economy is propped up by oil money from Saudi Arabia. Consequently, Sharjah is somewhat more conservative than Dubai. Not least in its tolerance to alcohol. A few years back, there was a well known and well loved Booze Souq in Sharjah. No more. Booze is now very, very illegal (except, for some reason, in the bar at Sharjah Wanderers Football Club). It is illegal to be in Sharjah with alcohol in your bloodstream. There is an off licence closer to us than the one we choose to use. Whereas our choice is mostly made on the basis of the greater range of booze stocked in Ras al Khaimah, there are stories of locals waiting outside the off licence in Ajman (right by the Sharjah border) then manufacturing accidents involving expats with a carload of illegal booze in Sharjah and blackmailing them so the police don’t get summoned. Apparently such instances are rare, but the shop in Ras al Khaimah has the added buffer of 20km extra before you reach the border with the dry Emirate. Nevertheless, I got to play Smokey and the Bandit with my bootfull of contraband for the last 15km of the journey home. Which was 14.5km further than it took Rachel to tire of me yelling ‘Breaker 1-9, breaker 1-9, I’ve got the pedal to the metal and a Smokey Bear on my tail’ in a faux American accent.

Anyway, we got home without any interference from Jackie Gleason or any other type of law enforcement professional. And we filled our drinks cabinet.

Isn't that a beautiful sight?
And then we feasted.

On camel.
All in all, a good weekend. Cheers!



*For some reason, the road planners in the UAE are loath to let drivers turn across the flow of traffic. And nearly all roads are dual carriageways, at the very least. Consequently, journeys have to be carefully planned taking into account which direction each road feeds onto. For example, we live on the same side of the same road as our school, but our drive to school is nearly a kilometer further than our drive home as we have to travel away from school until the nearest U-turn place at our end, then past the school to the next set of traffic lights and back at the other end. If you miss your turning it can sometimes take hours and many, many kilometers to get back to where you wanted to be. This isn’t helped by the nationwide policy on road signage which is to remove every third sign for most of the journey, then all signs when you are less than half a kilometer from where you are supposed to be.