Over the last month or so Stu and I took part in a paper recycling drive, called “My Tree In Dubai”, launched by EEG in March. The idea was to recycle 60kgs of paper, and earn one of 250 trees that would be planted in Dubai. If you managed to qualify your tree would be named after you. The only hassly part was having to take the paper down to the center in Beach Road, but the rest was easy, and fun, especially considering there was even a facebook application where you could update the weight deposited with the date, and a few more leaves would be added according to how close you were to the target as a percentage.
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Category: firsts
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paper in all it’s guises (ok some of them anyway)
[the plaque] -
the Russell tour of Dubai
Yes, it’s been a while since I wrote, I know. I have two good reasons (excuses) for this, first, the hard-drive on our laptop crashed during the night, about 2 weeks ago. It seems that a particular windows update that downloaded and installed itself automatically (this little Vista nastiness has now been disabled) conflicted with the anti-virus I was using causing a crash. I removed the anti-virus but then the machine would not boot properly, anyway, long story short I did a panicked backup, removed a whole lot of programs, bought a new hard-drive just in case and now the problem seems to have gone away. But nevertheless I will be installing Windows 7 on the new drive and hope that it’s slightly less evil than Vista. Next step is a Mac I think.
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update: Burj Dubai
So Burj Dubai, or at least, Burj Khalifa as it was renamed at the last minute, is now officially open, and stands 828m high.
Unfortunately we were stuck in traffic on our way to the Creek, where we had reservations for dinner on Bateaux Dubai (again), at the moment of the fireworks so we missed seeing them, but we could see the tower twinkling away like a giant (dare I say) Christmas tree in the distance all evening. Very pretty indeed. Oh and the dinner was wonderful, I recommend it highly.
The picture above I “borrowed” from the UAE Community blog’s post on the opening, but B.D. gets all the credit. Thank you, I hope you don’t mind.
In case you missed it I found a video on youtube, enjoy.
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i in the sky
“WOW, WOW, WOW!”, is all I can say!
Stu and I took advantage of an amazing Eid BOGOF* offer from Seawings this past Sunday. And yes I do mean Sunday and not Friday. I was (still) not working, and he had a surprise day off due to Eid and Tecom being closed. So we called Seawings on Sunday morning (after trying all day Saturday with no answer but we won’t go there), and yes!, they had space for 2 on their 16h45 30 minute, or Pearl, flight. The 45 minute flight, which includes flying over the Creek, was just sliiiiightly out of our price-range (and not on special). But we were not unhappy as we still flew over and around many Dubai Landmarks, including the Marina, Burj al Arab, Burj tower, the Palm Jebel-Ali, the Palm Jumeirah and The World. Dubai is truly amazing from the air. Even though the sun was setting, and it was a little hazy, we had the best time. I have loaded a few photos here for you to see what I mean.
[the Seawings Cessna Caravan]
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I heart DXB
The great thing about having people visit you when you are living away from home, that is apart from just seeing them obviously, is getting to do all the touristy stuff you don’t bother with normally. Having to show people the sights of your new home really forces you to see stuff you would probably never get around to seeing, and doing things you haven’t yet gotten around to doing. This is exactly what happened to us this past weekend. Some of our friends’ family are visiting Dubai at the moment from the UK, and we were invited on (ahem gate-crashed) some of their outings. It’s been great actually.
[the “Big Red” sand dune]
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