yes beauty CAN be calculated, and Christmas in Dubai: part 2

So the jolly old guy with his white beard and red suit has been and gone for another year. Luckily for me my change of address memo must have reached the north pole in time as I received this very intriguing looking book from my boss, a lovely pair of sunglasses (see pic below) and our secret santa at lunch yesterday brought me some scrapbooking goodies. I am a very lucky girl indeed (this said without any sarcasm whatsoever). Honest.

Stu and I started the day with toast and boiled eggs, and champers (of course). We had our own “white” Christmas for an hour or so as the morning started off very foggy, but it had cleared nicely by the time the gang arrived at noon. We set up the tables outside, and I had made them as festive as I dared without going overboard, which, trust me, would have been very easy to do with the huge variety of festive bumpf on sale. For lunch we served the following:

The lunch was, I think anyway, a huge success. I am basing this assumption on the fact that our guests only left at around 10pm. I think its safe to say they had fun. We played two rounds of the SA version of 30 seconds, the boys v the girls, and I admit they beat us twice, but only just. We had all elected not to play in couples as most of us had tried this before and knew that it would only end in fights, tears and a lot of name calling. Once everyone had left I tidied up as I always do after we entertain, I just cannot leave it until the next day no matter how tired I am. This was made slightly more challenging by having to lug buckets of hot soapy water down the stairs as the water feed into the kitchen had started leaking earlier in the day and we had switched it off completely. I fell into bed around 11pm, tired but happy. What a great day!

I want to share one other funny little thing with you today. The picture below is a scanned article cut out of the Gulfnews newspaper, written during a camel show that happened in Abu Dhabi this week.  From the article its clear that a camel is judged out of a total of 100 using a point system, with points being allocated for the head and neck (a possible total of 25), the front part (for 15), the upper part which includes the hump shape and position (for 20), and the general shape and fitness makes up the balance of 30 points. The prizewinning camel apparently sold for 15 million dirhams (just over 4 million USD)! It certainly seems that winning a camel beauty contest may be worth more than winning Miss World. It makes you think, doesn’t it?