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Saturday, September 22, 2007

Wednesday, Friday, Saturday...

WEDNESDAY:
Mark was home over his weekend. That gets a tad confusing... Dubai's weekend falls as Friday/Saturday, Friday being their Holy day (Sunday). In Saudi the weekend falls Thursday/Friday, Friday still being the Holy day. So, for work, since he works mostly in Saudi he follows their weekend and flies home on Wednesday nite and leaves again Saturday morning, early. Its weird but we will adjust I suppose. Anyways, he was home this weekend, we had a nice weekend.

THURSDAY:
We finally got our boxes this weekend!!! I was able to track them down at one of the local post offices. They don't use actual addresses here. Everyone has a P.O. box located at the respective area Post Office and these PO Boxes only receive letters. They will however, if the package is addressed correctly, store you package and put a notification in you Box regarding the parcel. We were not aware of this and had no PO Box listed and no contact phone number, simply the physical address of Mark's place of employment (not good enough). I use the term 'physical address' loosely, Dubai does not have addresses in the way we know them. They don't really use street names or north, east, south, west that I've heard. Everything is done by landmarks and occasional building names but mostly just random business landmarks. So, our packages actually arrived in Dubai on the 7th, we did not track them down until the 17th or 18th and were not able to get them until Thursday the 20th. They just sat in storage for 10+ days... sat, drop kicked, whatever... They look to be in pretty bad shape too, we have not opened them yet since we will be moving this weekend and don't want to have to repack. We have our fingers crossed that I did an excellent packing job. :)


Good thing they stamped FRAGILE on them!

Luckily I had reinforced most of the corners with packing tape.

I should have reinforced the entire box.

ehh - live and learn...

THURSDAY NITE:
We walked over the Marina one nite for dinner, here are a couple of pictures I snapped. I'm still working on mastering the nite-time shots.





The lights on the right is the Marina Mall that is being built with a good size parking garage.


THURS, FRI, SAT:
I've had an ongoing saga with my phone. I'll spare you the gory details but after hours of blood sweat and tears the defective one is finally on its way back to the States. The end of the story is Tmobile has an extremely pleasant staff of customer service reps but their procedures are retarded... I lost a few small battles but ultimately won the war!! Congrats to the good guys!


FRIDAY:
We took it easy, we went and saw Harry Potter 5 on the IMAX. The last 20 minutes were in 3D. It was pretty cool. I think that whole movie saga would do well in 3D. It was during the day so Ramadan rules were in affect, no food or drinks in the theater and it was FREEZING! It was so cold that even Mark made numerous comments thru-out the show.


What else...
OH! I drove for the first time this weekend. I don't think I've mentioned it before but we have a temporary rental car until our Honda Accord arrives. We have been blessed with a super snappy (insert sarcasm), electric blue, Chevy Avao. This car is terrible! It is supposedly a newer model but I'm calling BS. Its not that bad I guess to look at but it has about 2 horsepower and a fire extinguisher under the driver's seat. We can no longer put the thing in "Park", we have to put it in "Neutral" and pull the Emergency Brake. If we put it in "Park" it gets stuck and takes an undetermined amount of time for it to unstick. hahaha - The moral of the story is I have been released to drive at will and no longer am resigned to taxi's. It doesn't matter much right now though, with Ramadan in full swing I have no desire to go out accept for the occasional grocery store run. Its not too bad, they drive like maniacs but not that much worse than Houston; vehicles float from lane to lane as they please with no real warning or concern about others on the road. The constant road changes and giant 'roundabouts' are the worse of it. (I don't operate on Windows so I don't have access to a lot of the blog features and enhancements, one of which is installing hyperlinks into my text so you'll have to copy this link yourself of connect directly from my "LINKS of INTEREST" above on the right) How Roundabouts work: http://www.th.gov.bc.ca/popular-topics/roundabouts/roundabouts.htm

SATURDAY:
Mark left this morning at 5:30a. He arrived fine and worked all day. He sends his love...


I went for my evening cup of coffee at the neighborhood ‘Central Perk’ tonite. I was pleasantly surprised to walk in and see two women chatting over a cup. In the week or so that I’ve been going I’ve never seen another customer in there. I congratulated the barista who has been making my coffee for me – expressing to him my concern of possibly being his only customer. Much to my dismay he tells me that tonite is the last nite… “WHAT?!?!” Just then my eyes focus and I realize that the tables were not outside, some of the wall décor has been taken down, the food display is empty, there are no specials written on the board… Upon further conversation he tells me they are closing until Oct. 10th. There just isn’t enough passing traffic to keep business up. He is right; they are in a poor location for public display and a bit difficult to get to. I made comment of that to Mark after the 1st nite I had found them. There is a lot of road construction in the area and with Ramadan killing the daytime sales and lack of advertising on any scale killing the rest I’m shocked they are going to open back up at all, well lucky for them they will. Unfortunately, this doesn't work out for me; I have 5 more days at our current location before we can move and the one highlight of living here was finding this caffeine loaded, iconic oasis… now what am I going to look forward to in the evenings?!

Well that's about it for me for tonite - I'm tired and need to lay down.
Have a good weekend!
Jen

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I think the night pics look great!

That sux about your boxes. You can bet at least one thing got broken!



S

jakulin5 said...

Thanks!

Yeah - I imagine so, oh well... hopefully we'll find out in a few days.

Anonymous said...

Hey guys!!!
I'm so glad you sent me the link to your blog again! I lost it somehow!
Wow! It seems very city like, but it looks very pretty too.
Hope all is going well now! haha
I'll email you!
Love you guys!
Brooke