I saw this in the Xpress newspaper today and I could not resist sharing it.
Tomorrow, at Global Village in Dubai, an attempt will be made to break a world record for feeding the most people from the world’s biggest bowl of biryani. The bowl will contain 2.5 tonnes of chicken biryani and will be enough for around 300,000 people. The bowl itself is made from pure stainless steel (5mm thick) and weighs more than 700kg.
After a few warmer days earlier this week the weather has turned chilly again, chilly and windy in fact. This might be the reason that I have suddenly developed a nasty head cold and am feeling rather grim. It could also be that Stu has just had a cold and I didn’t fight the germs off effectively. Either way the result is the same, and I stayed home today.
However I did have to venture out this morning to the shopping centre up the road, primarily to visit the chemist but also for some groceries, and that is when I took the photo shown above. It seems that a combination of Dubai Taxi’s poor customer service and generally fewer people in town, both expats and tourists, has left the taxi drivers with nowhere to go and nothing to do. So they have turned the parking lot into a rather haphazard and disorderly taxi rank. In fact whilst I was parking the car I watched one fellow reverse into another, complete chaos really.
In a way I feel almost sorry for the drivers, no passengers means no income, but on the other hand I feel they only have RTA, and themselves, to blame.
Once again the week has flown, and the weekend is almost over. I realised on Thursday evening that I had reached the 6 month anniversary of my leaving Johannesburg, in some ways it feels like I have been here a lot longer, like a few years, but in other ways it feels like I just arrived. The thought of a five year stay here was rather daunting to begin with, but it seems that the time will pass quite quickly after all.
On Tuesday I met the girls for a pizza at Ibn Battuta mall, which is now the closest mall to my new office. Its a large mall, split into differently themed sections, which are all rather over the top but that is the way things are done here. The parking lot was packed when I arrived after work, but inside the mall itself it was like a ghost town. Apparently most of the cars belong to people going to the gym, not very good news for the quiet shops inside, even with the shopping festival on it seems people aren’t buying. In fact when I bought myself a new handbag the week before (yes I needed it) the lady in the store had said it has been the worst shopping festival ever.
We moved into our new offices this weekend, which are located at the opposite end of Dubai from where we were, which means its closer in distance to where I live, but with the non-existent roads in the area and the amount of construction going on it might be further in time some days.
I have a sea-view, well that is if you can call the sliver of water I can see in the port a sea-view. Mostly I have a view of SZR (Sheikh Zayed Road), the metro rail line and the buildings in the Jafza free-zone. I am also on the 13th floor, and have not decided if this should be considered lucky or not. Overall the office is an improvement, its nice to have everyone together in one place. First prize would have been if they had given us new chairs to go with the new desks, the first one I had looked like someone died on it (and not from natural causes either). And if they would get the aircon switched on and would stop testing the fire alarm every 5 seconds we might actually get some work done!
This is my new route to the office:
I have just heard on the radio that it snowed in Ras Al Khaimah yesterday, only for the second time in recorded history. In fact its so unusual that the locals don’t even have a word for snow. Ras Al Khaimah, incidentally, is one of the 7 Emirates that make up the UAE.
The picture above was borrowed from the Gulf News website which carries the full story here.