“all good things…

…must come to an end, or they wouldn’t be good things”! At least that is what my granny would always say at the end of our holidays with them. I am not sure where the saying came from but I have never felt that the two things have to be mutually exclusive. I mean, what would be so bad about having good things forever??? I guess what I am trying to say is that our holiday is over, and it was very good indeed. In fact we have been back in Dubai for a week but I have just not been very inspired to write until today. I know this is a blog about my life in Dubai, but seeing as how I travelled to France from here and back again, I feel I can sneak in a little bit about my holiday. Pretty please?

We started off in Paris, in a lovely little hotel near the Bastille. It wasn’t fancy or expensive but clean, and more importantly, reasonable and well-located. I loved Paris, but certainly two days is nowhere near enough time to see everything. We did a Seine River cruise to get in some of the main sights and then the following day a route march around some parts of Paris with my sister-in-law and her hubby. It wasn’t quite a cross-continental hike Dad, but I think you would have approved of the pace. From Paris we hired a car and drove, over 6 days, to Nice, taking a scenic route and stopping along the way at Montjean-Sur-Loire, Libourne, Conhilhac-Corbieres and finally Arles before arriving in Nice in the middle of a rainstorm. For a place that has 360 sunny days we managed to have 2 days of rain. But when you live in the desert even that is not really a problem. In fact it rained for our entire journey on the last day’s drive, almost 260kms of heavy downpour. That part was not fun. I had purposely booked us into smaller towns along the way, and had found most of our lodgings using the Logis de France website (which is a collection of 3000 independently owned and run establishments), and I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of both the food and lodgings in each case. Once we arrived in Nice we stayed in a villa on the hills in the north, with a view of the med, that I found on French Connections. For Stu’s birthday celebrations I had some help organising the personal chef who cooked a delicious meal for us, and I can highly recommend Sun-for-you if you are considering an event in Provence (I didn’t include a link here as the website is down right now, comment me if you want it). Magnifique!

Most people, when you mention you have been to France, will ask you if you found the people to be rude. There is a common perception, even stereotype, that the French are unfriendly and won’t speak to you in English at all, ever. I have to say that this was not my experience. OK, I will admit that the officials in the airports were rude, but then that is normal for airports I have found. Generally people were friendly enough, and I found, mostly helpful, especially if you tried to speak some French (even badly) to start with. However outside of the big cities most folks don’t seem to speak much English at all, and I really felt it wasn’t a case of not wanting to speak it, but not being able to. I also think that the influx of other European holiday-makers and travellers, who don’t necessarily speak French, has changed things and more will try to speak English if they can. Aside from being surprised once or twice in the meals I chose (like a peasant’s salad which contained some kind of fried offal), and battling to communicate with the operator when our toll road card was swallowed by the machine, we managed pretty well all told. Needless to say we ate and drank ourselves to a standstill, overwhelmed by the wonderful selection of bread, cheese, wine, fresh fruit, veg and fish at the various markets and stores. Fantastic!

Some of the food..

and wine…

and places we experienced.

If you haven’t visited France yet I really would recommend it. I particularly loved the west coast area and Bordeaux.

And now back to reality. I haven’t achieved much this week on the job-hunting front actually. What with catching up with laundry, uploading photos to various places for the family and paying bills I have managed to distract myself for a whole week. So now I am in the process of re-writing my CV after I was informed by a professional CV reviewer that it’s not really presented in the best possible way. And I am keeping an eye on the various job sites and the newspaper for something that matches my skills and takes my fancy. I have applied for a few things online but have not had any responses. A few friends who have been through the process here warned me that the agencies don’t respond and you have to keep on reminding them who you are, so I will have to put my tenacious hat on for a while I think.

Last time we spoke I told you about the opening of the Dubai Metro. Well a quick update for you. On the 27th September 7days reported that there had been a million passengers on the system and people were being asked not to use the train at peak periods, that the system was struggling to cope with crowds at busy times. Conversely this Thursday in the Xpress they reported that apart from weekends the train is not busy at all during “rush” hour. I think a lot of people are riding the train to see what it’s like and to have done it, but not using it as an alternative form of transport yet. As trains are not yet running as often as promised, and only 10 stations are open, it will be a while before people are able to use the system for work purposes. When we landed in Dubai on the Friday night, at around 23h00, and saw the queue for the taxis at terminal 1 we would have considered using the metro, but it only runs until 10pm or so. This is bizarre to me as I am most likely to use the train for airport travel, to alleviate parking and traffic hassles, but with the majority of flights departing and landing after 10pm this is not actually possible. And it isn’t running at all on a Friday morning, which I guess is due to Fridays being a religious day. But this is strange when you consider that the train is driver-less, so why would it make a difference?

Anyway that’s all for today. Until next time, à bientôt!