sandCat in Dubai

Category: outings

  • the flip side

    If you travel much on business then you probably also suffer with the over-plastic syndrome. That is, one loyalty card for each airline you may ever have flown with, one for each hotel you may ever have stayed in and perhaps even one for each car hire company you have ever hired from. If you are very careful and extremely organised you may manage to always stay at the same hotel chain when you go somewhere, or even use the same airline, but for most of us we end up collecting dribs and drabs of points here and there. And then you move countries and lo-and-behold all the miles you collected on your previous national carrier become null and void as they expire into uselessness before you know it.

    working-dhow
    [a working dhow on Dubai Creek]


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  • fish finder to be

    In this month’s Aquarius magazine – hmm or last month’s maybe (its a great mag btw) I read about this Fish Finder initiative by EWS (Emirates Wildlife Society) and the WWF. Essentially what it means is that after a half-an-hours training you become an official ambassador for EWS and are able to identify unsustainable fish on sale in the supermarket, and of course educate others about the “choose wisely” program (which you may have noticed I support whole-heartedly). I quite fancy the idea of getting to be all militant and bossy in Carrefour (haha). Anyway after volunteering for this I ended up as a volunteer in general for EWS – not a problem – and was invited to help at a talk this past saturday at the Sharjah Aquarium.

    big-tank
    [the big tank]

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  • 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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  • Art Dubai

    Stu finally agreed to go with me to Art Dubai this morning (see nagging does work) as it was the last day of the show and I made him feel guilty that we don’t see and do enough cultural stuff here (ok the limited budget isn’t helping either but anyway). This acquiesence may have been helped by the fact that there wasn’t a Super 14 match on the box at the time but whatever the reason, we went and I am happy.

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  • dust + rain = mud

    This weekend the wind blew constantly, well that’s how it felt, bringing with it bucket-loads of dust from the desert; sand that is able to sneak through door seals and under windows and cover everything in a fine fine layer of grit. As “Life in Dubai” puts it, it really is the worst kind of weather. Our intrepid gardener cleaned the cars as normal on Saturday (not sure how he managed it actually in that), but he need not have bothered as all that dust, combined with last night’s unexpected cloud burst, left the cars looking like we had been off-roading all weekend. The good thing is that at least the rain settled the dust, but this morning, in true Dubai fashion, the roads were flooded and it was chaos. Luckily some of the schools are on holiday today because of the Prophet’s birthday on Friday, so the traffic was lighter than normal overall.

    dusty-car
    [sand on the car yesterday]


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