An afternoon of leisure

One of my friends and her husband have recently bought a 30ft pleasure boat, and with a few (a lot of?) lessons under their belt they are happily cruising up and down the coast of Dubai.

Last Friday they kindly invited us along to experience their new baby. Here are Julia and Graham in the back of this shot.

Below is the famous Burj Al Arab, and the Jumeirah Beach Hotel. You don't normally get this view of them! We also went right round the Palm Jumeirah which is the most developed, there are hundreds of villas that look like they might be nearlly ready for occupation.

Here we are in the life raft..... Spot the odd one out!

A late lunch and a few glasses of wine were much appreciated after a hard afternoon of boating.... He he.

Zadok was quite green on the way out but picked up once the boat had stopped moving.

A very good time had by all!

This weekend I have had my good friend Jen visiting. She is currently living in London and popped over to visit me. Hopefully she is on the way to the airport as I type. I have a stack of photos, I'll post some of them next. Then I promise I'll post about our apartment's progress and a few of the other many, many projects that are going on here in Dubai. That will take me up to the summer holidays I think, just 5 weeks to go! Zadok and i are both coming back to Australia to catch up with family and friends. Cant wait!

Happy Birthday To ME!

Yesterday I celebrated my birthday. It's great being a teacher on your birthday because kids get so excited for you.

Here is a terrible pic of me! It was my little friends birthday as well, her Mum brought the cake for us to share.

Sheila and the kids made me this adorable card... Who taught those kids to spell!!!! Click on it for a better look. I got lots of nice pressies and lots of really good laughs! Zadok and I went out for dinner last night and next week we are going out with a big bunch of friends.

It's half term this weekend, so in just 6 hours I will be lady of leisure for a full 4 days...

Pizza Cat

There are many hundreds, probably thousands of stray cats in Dubai. They are generally skinny, ragged looking things. The lucky ones get 'adopted' by individuals or businesses and maybe get a meal a day or someones scraps, the unlucky ones become a meal.... But that is another story!

There is one that lives arounf the bottom of our building that we refer to as 'Pizza Cat'. She is fed each day by the pizza shop downstairs. She likes to lay on/under our car.

Pizza Cat is certainly not the most attractive thing we have ever laid eyes on... For some reason though, my not-usually-superstitious husband seems to think if he sees her in the morning he will have a good day...

Maybe you will too!

Sharjah Equestrian Show

Anyone who knows Zadok's Mum, Lesa, will know that she is a bit crazy about horses. She has a number of her own and has started breeding. Before she came over she got wind of this Equestrian show held in Sharjah (they arrived just after the Dubai one had finished.) So Zadok called up and got us an official invitation an off we went to Sharjah.

First of all we were treated to some Arabic dancing, not the most vigorous of dances....

Then we got to see the Arabians, parading...

And on show.... (quite similar to going to Mall of the Emirates on a Friday evening really)

The most entertaining/amusing/disturbing thing about the whole performance was that all around the edge of the arena people were standing with plastic bags tied to the end of sticks, shaking them like crazy to get the horses razzed up, caring them so they were bucking, prancing and leaping all over the place.

Lesa was suitably horrified by all this.... The other thing was the securtiy, there were police everywhere! I guess there was a lot of pricey horseflesh around!

Mamzar in a different light

Of course I dragged our visitors off to my fave spot, Mamzar Beach Park. I wouldn't bore you with more photos of this lovely location but when we got there we witnessed what we figured was the filming of an ad for some sort of soft drink.

There were lots of skinny girls prancing round in their bikinis (that is not one of them in the foreground....)

None of the buildings in the background are usually there, just clean white beach... The huts were just all part of the set. In the right photo you can see what must have been the star striding down the beach under the cover of an umbrella. We are watching out for the ad to come on TV!

At the end of the afternon even beach-despises Zadok and Lesa had to admit they had had a very pleasant afternoon... I knew I'd bring them around!