Weekend

After a late start on Friday we headed for Bur Dubai with Liz driving to get used to the traffic and driving on the right hand side of the road in a left hand drive car. We tried to pick up Jack's mobile where we had left it in an Indian supermarket, to get it unlocked so he can use it with Etisalat. It wasn't ready so we had a drive round Jumeirah, Um Suqiem and Dubai Marina.

At around 5pm we headed for Madinat Jumeirah, a shopping mall and centre built on an arabian style with loads of restaurants and bars, hotels, villas and its own waterways system for ferrying people from one part to another. It is all built to look like a scene from arabian nights. We met up with Bruce and Lisa from the school to eat and I had my first alcohol for three weeks, courtesy of Liz driving :-) those three bottles of corona tasted good. We took a boat around the waterways after dark which was fantastic with all the lights through the palm trees.

Saturday we spent unsuccessfully villa hunting, but we also looked at a couple of serviced apartment complexes nearer to the school so hopefully Liz can have her own car and drive the kids to school- the taxi trips have been taking an hour each way from where we are in Deira meaning Liz has been spending around 40GBP a day for the privilege of sitting in a taxi. One behind the Mall of the Emirates and Ski Dubai looks great and will save us a lot of grief, we are now waiting for a vacancy over the next couple of days so we can move across town. Saturday evening we met up with Mark and Sarah, Dad and Liz at Mark and Sarah's apartment on Sheik Zayed Road. We had a relaxing afternoon looking at baby Holly, swimming in the pool and eating takeaway pizza during the Liverpool-Birmingham match live.