What to do on return to Australia?

Not that we are counting or anything, but I've noticed that there are only six weeks to pass before we leave the UAE via the Abu Dhabi Airport. We fly out just after midday on 20 June 08 and head for Johannesburg and a three week holiday in South Africa.

We arrive at Alice Springs via Perth and Ayres Rock arriving late afternoon on 12 July 08. It will possibly be somewhat of a shock to be surrounded by people who are mostly white and speak a language we understand. We'll have to familiarize ourselves with the currency again and I can imagine that every time we buy something for the first few days we'll convert it into Dirhams to see how much it really is.

Hopefully, Meredith or Dale will meet us at the airport and we can drive home, shower and sit back with a coldie while we contemplate what to have for dinner and what we'll do in the immediate future.

It will be winter in Australia while our Northern Hemisphere friends head off for their "summer" holidays but we will have time to acclimatise in South Africa. By the time we reach Alice Springs, we should be weather hardened and be able to take the relatively colder climate.

Christina hopes to return to work at the Alice Springs Hospital but admitted under my cross examination that her passion for midwifery has faded somewhat after 30 odd years. It's just a job now and she'll do it because she's good at it and doesn't have to worry too much about what to do, when and how. On top of which, it's the one job at which she can earn the most money.

There will be some "settling-in" things to do like some gardening, house maintenance and unpacking and storing our container load of goods that will arrive a few weeks after we do. Meredith has bought a nice house for her and Tory, so we will also have to help them move just a couple of kilometres west of our place.

I'm going to continue work on my online business and hopefully fine tune some things that aren't working as well as they should be. I'm also hoping to do some short term consulting/contracting in a range of areas for which I have the ability. Yesterday I began sending out messages to business acquaintances advising them that I'm going to be available from August 2008.

Before then, we still have a few things to do here before we fly out.

Stay well and some of you we'll see soon.

Robin

PS: Our lovely young friend and ex-officio grandson Onat Ustun turned 2 yesterday and I took this photo of him with Christina. Ain't he a cutie?

ANZAC Day 2008 at Al Ain

At the going down of the sun and in the morning we remembered them.
All those young men and women who fought and died in the service of our countries; those thousands of people whose lives were cut short too early at one of the wars in which Australians and New Zealanders have been involved during our short histories.

While ANZAC Day ceremonies and events are held at Abu Dhabi and Dubai, nothing official had been planned for Al Ain. I decided to do something about it, so with the help of Australian expat Suzanne Bluff, we arranged with the old Al Ain Golf Club to hold a barbecue and to cater for an unknown number of visitors. (It was a ridgy-didge, bring your own everything do).

I prepared and circulated a short flier and the expat network did the rest. Not every Australian or New Zealander in Al Ain was here, but there were enough of us to have a really enjoyable time. Best of all, people met others whom they had not met before.

We had a very short memorial during which we read the Ode and observed a minute's silence while the Last Post was sounded from a 10 Dirham set of speakers. I'm loathe to call them Mickey Mouse speakers because they did the job admirably well.

The old Golf Club, nowhere near as salubrious as the NEW Golf Club, is never the less an excellent venue to socialise. Drinks are cheap, the surroundings used, but comfortable and of course, the company is what makes these types of events. The company was fantastic. Even the weather was terrific with a gentle breeze.

If you read this and you played a part in disseminating my flier ... many thanks. If you will be here next year after I have returned to our wide brown land, please continue the tradition.

Best wishes

Robin

PS: Click on photo strip to enlarge.

Getting Ready to Leave ... The Highs and Lows

The first sign that we are leaving Al Ain soon is the advertisements we have placed on the Higher Colleges of Technology and University of UAE public email boards. They've been fairly successful, we've sold most of the big stuff we wanted to sell. We do have a refrigerator to go, but feel confident that will move as the weather hots up. Selling the cars shouldn't be a problem either.

When we arrived here, with only a half dozen boxes of memorabilia from home so we wouldn't forget our roots, we got 30,000 Dirhams to set ourselves up. That's just under $9,000 AUD. We had no idea how far it would go or how much anything cost here so we bought some cheap stuff we later replaced. We never really used all of the allocation, but some day we'd be sitting back and I'd say to Christina something like, "Have we got a can opener?" "No", she'd say, "we need to get one". Sometimes when it was urgent we'd walk off to Al Ain Mall immediately and buy what it was we needed.

We had to buy a stack of curtains for the unit which has very high ceilings and consequently, long curtains, a stove, washing machine and everything, nothing is provided here other than the house.

For the first few months we didn't have a car, so we walked to the Al Ain Mall to do our grocery shopping and wheel it back in a shopping trolley. The roadways in our housing complex are paved with concrete pavers, so the trolley would bump, bump, bump all the way to A25 which just happens to be the farthest away from the mall.

Sometimes we'd use a taxi of which there are millions here and they are so cheap I don't know how they manage to pay for fuel, even though it's also cheap. I fill the 60L tank on our Nissan for about 75 Dirhams or $21 AUD. I'll get a shock when I fill up at home since our diesel Toyota has a 110L tank ... probably have to take out a loan on the house.

We are looking forward to ending our tour and getting back to Australia, our kids and friends, but the downside is that we will leave behind some of the loveliest people we have met who come from Canada, England, Scotland, Turkey, the US and even Australia.

We will also miss some aspects of the way of life. Al Ain is a lovely city with a mainly pleasant climate. We have lived very comfortably here where there is no tax on salary and everything is very cheap, especially food, although in the time we have been here, prices have risen quite a bit.

We have a lovely Indian lady, Rosie, comes once a week to vacuum and mop the floors and iron our clothes and a Sri Lankan fellow, Bubblo, who washes both cars every Friday morning and waters our garden every day. For these services we pay a pittance by our standards although when the Dirhams are converted to Rupees, the value for them is much greater than it would be for us in AUD.

Guess who will do the housework, water the garden and wash the car when we get home?

Our experience here has been one of the highlights of our lives and one that I recommend to anyone fortunate enough to have the opportunity.

Robin