Heading Towards Summer

It's been a few weeks since I posted anything here, so I thought I'd show you a shot of a lovely house entrance we saw during our recent Oman trip.

Fences and grand entrances are a cultural thing; Arabs have apparently retained the seige mentality from the days when their fellow Arabs marauded every part of the country stealing women and other valuables. Everything has to be fenced here, despite the almost non-existent crime rate and many of the fences would be worth 10 times more than our Alice Springs house.

Similarly, the vast acreage that householders occupy here is astonishing by our standards where developers are endeavouring to cram as many duplexes into as small a space as possible. It's even more astonishing when you consider the size of Australia and the smallness of the United Arab Emirates and many of the Middle East countries, the only exception being Saudi Arabia which is huge (but mainly sand!).

We had a lovely few days at Muscat, the capital of Oman; visited the Grand Mosque (which is indeed grand), saw the Sultan's Palace, went to the Muscat Gold Souk and generally tripped about the city. The traffic engineering is excellent and the city is attractively adorned with Arabic structures that go over the road (like a bridge), and jut up out of the hilly landscape. It's a very nice city.

We bought two Arabic coffee pots (similar to those on the gate above) and a few small trinkets at the souk and of course took hundreds of photos.

Now I've just finished my first week of teaching and we are counting the weeks off until our mid-year jaunt to Europe. God it's a tough life. The weather here, at the tail end of winter is absolutely delightful as we head towards summer.

Stay well and keep visiting our blog.

Best wishes

Robin
for Christina and Robin

Al Ain Air Show

G'day

Yesterday we attended the Al Ain Aerobatic Show 2007 and watched those remarkable men (and one Russian woman) in their flying machines.

The weather was perfect and I managed to take 277 photos before the battery on our new camera chucked it in. One of the shots of the British Red Arrows at work is at left. [Last year one of my photos was shown in The Australian]

We arrived at 12 pm and watched some stunning flying until around 5.00 pm and then went home via Al Ain Mall where we had a quick snack (no cooking or dish washing for us last night!)

We bought an Air Show T shirt for grandson Tory and I bought a baseball cap with a jet on the front for my cap collection. We expect to be off to Dubai tomorrow or the next day to meet up with our good friend Alison Pyper (from Alice Springs living in Kuwait) who is visiting an Arab Health Conference/Expo. Christina is going to attend the conference too (probably tax deductable) and I've volunteered to be left at a local watering hole for the duration, although I doubt whether I could last the distance. I'll have to find something else to do earlier in the day and hit the watering hole later in the afternoon ... maybe I can go shopping at one of Dubai's numerous malls.

Hope you are well.

Robin
for Robin and Christina

College Mid-Year Holidays

G'day

Here in Topsy-Turvy land (Northern hemisphere, winter in January, different culture etc), the mid-year academic holidays occur in January. So, on Australia Day we commence our two week break before the second semester begins in early February.

We have decided to travel to Muscat, the capital of Oman, our neighbouring country and do some camping. Although we've been into some of Oman, we haven't been to Muscat, so this is a good opportunity to do it. Friends who were there recently said people were swimming, so it's obviously not a Canadian winter.

We've reached the half-way point in our contract. It's hard to believe we have only been here 18 months as so much has happened. It will no doubt take some settling in when we get back to Oz given the relatively higher costs of living ... we won't be able to dine out as often, that's for sure. Just the price of diesel will kill us.

On another note, I've had some trouble emailing people with Bigpond email addresses so I'll be checking email bounces soon with a view to rectifying the situation. This might involve my transferring my email addresses for blog subscribers to an alternative email provider. Either I, or the Emirates ISP I use isn't popular with Bigpond. If you are a Bigpond subscriber and want a Gmail account for your email, send a message to me at emujoeATgmail.com (change the AT for @) and I'll invite you to set up an account. It's a much better service than anything Telstra has and it's free. It's much better than Hotmail and Yahoo as well.

Hope all is well at your end as it is here.

Best wishes

Robin
for Christina and Robin

PS: Our new business at http://www.download-audios.com is slowly increasing its sales and when we advertise in Australian news media soon, it should increase much more. There are some great books so I've got to make sure I don't spend the profit buying my own stuff.