Christina Heads to Thailand

G'day

Christina flew to Bangkok yesterday and will have met Meredith and Tory this morning for a short holiday at Bangkok and Phuket before flying into Abu Dhabi where the latter will holiday with us for a few weeks.

Meredith and Tory spent a couple of days at Perth enroute to visit Tory's "other" grandmother.

Summer is approaching and the weather at present is absolutely great here. Our complex now has a pool and a fully functioning gymnasium which are free to use if you provide copies of your photos, passport, rental agreement etc etc. Nothing is straightforward here. Interestingly, for a place with an almost unheard of crime rate, everyone is suspicious and businesses don't trust anyone. I'm not sure whether the crime rate is low because of the stringent processes and procedures to prevent it, or whether it's just low.

To a large extent I think the crime rate is low because 90% of the population is expatriate, courts mete out tough justice and if you are an expat part of a sentence is deportation. Workers are on such a good wicket here they can't afford to get the flick.

As an example of punishments, a British guy 30 felt an Emirati women's bum with his hand at the airport recently and his penalty was 3 months detention and a 3,000 AED fine (A bit over $1,000 dollars AUD). Can you imagine what the penalty would be in Australia ... $75 and a 3 month good behaviour bond.

Our visitors will be able to suck in the nice weather and use the pool while I'm at work earning a Dirham or two. However, I expect the summer heat to arrive quickly now and by May, days with 50 degree heat will be normal.

Christina has been doing some voluntary work at the Al Ain Women's College helping the English staff and seems to be enjoying it. Apart from a craft group, committee membership on the Emirates Natural History Group, the rest of her time is spent sewing this or that and most recently, planning our mid-year trip to several of the European countries.

Other than that, we both appear to be in good health and are still enjoying our stay here.

Hope this finds you and yours well too.

Best wishes

Robin
for Robin and Christina

PS: My latest website is at http://www.web-names.ws

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