sandCat in Dubai

Category: holidays

  • 4 shopping days…eeeek

    xmas camelSeason’s greetings from the UAE. Whether you celebrate Christmas or not I would like to take this opportunity to wish you a very happy and peaceful festive season, a wonderful holiday if you are taking one, and of course a prosperous new year. I am sure we are all hoping that this coming year will be better than the one just ending, certainly from a financial point of view.

    Whilst I am sure we won’t be having a white Christmas here, we may just have a wet and chilly one instead. I know that 18 degrees would not be considered cold anywhere else, but when the summer temperatures are often over 50, with high humidity, anything below 20 can feel a tad cool. We have had a few days of rain already, in fact on the 13th it rained most of the day, in places it even poured, and we had a month’s worth of rainfall in a single day in some places. The picture below I took whilst coming home, the off-ramp to our house was more like a river. It’s certainly nice staying-at-home weather (if your house is one of the one’s that doesn’t leak that is). Driving around in the rain is not fun, what with the poor drainage, and even worse wet-weather driving, you are sure to encounter.

    water ponds
    [ponds on the off-ramp]

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  • “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?

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  • it’s a crime wave

    We returned from our 10 day holiday on Monday (yes it was lovely thank you) to discover that we had been victims of crime! And this after we had been feeling a) very smug about the fact that there is little to no crime here in Dubai and b) rather relieved to have escaped Johannesburg relatively unscathed in the first place. We had left our garden gate unlocked whilst we were away so that our gardener could water our lawn, which was vital given that we spent a small fortune on replacing said lawn a few months ago, and it was going to be rather warm and dry whilst we were away (well what’s new right?). Anyway, we got home to find that our sprinkler had vanished, along with the connection for the garden hose along with it.

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  • HAPPY NEW YEAR from Dubai

    I know it is technically not New Year until tomorrow, at least not according to the Gregorian calendar which we use, but as we already had Islamic new year on the 28th December I thought it would be safe to say it anyway. We planned a low key-ish celebration at home with a couple of friends; in fact the prawns are marinating in the fridge as we speak and the chocolate mousse is half made. And it seems it’s just as well we didn’t spend money on tickets to any of the many new year’s eve (or “NYE” as they call it here) parties, as they have just all been cancelled today by His Highness Sheikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and ruler of Dubai. I apologise for the long title, but this is how he is always referred to so I had better follow suit. The cancellation of all celebrations is in solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza who are under attack from Israel. So I guess this means no fire-works on the Palm, or hooting on the streets. We will still have our braai, and some champers, but we will be doing it very quietly!

    new turf

    Yes, we have replaced the turf in the garden. Even though we don’t own the villa we decided to spend the money as we are going to be here for at least another 6 months, and possibly longer, and also we were growing very tired of the increasingly patchy grass. It seems, according to the gardener anyway, that we had Gulf grass before, and this, combined with a merciless assault by some vicious fire-ants, left us with a very sad excuse for a lawn indeed. We are now the proud owners of Sharjah grass, which hopefully will survive a little better. Unfortunately we had to poison the ants in the process, and whilst I am not proud of this I am very happy with the results so far.

    I hope you all have a lovely celebration tonight whatever you might be doing. If you are going out, please travel safely. May 2009 (or 1430 AH if you prefer) be your best year EVER!
     

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

    our tree
    [our tree]

    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.

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