Summer in Dubai

Sorry my blogs have been few and far between after my first 5 employees started on June 1st.  It has been a whirlwind!  If I wasn't concerned about privacy issues, the blogs I would have on supervising an international staff would astound and amaze.  All-in-all it's been wonderful!  We have a great group of people who are really coming together as a team.  They're smart and fun to work with.  

Here's just a few tid-bits of more wacky Dubai.

·         Not sure if I've mentioned it before but, since most restaurants don't serve alcohol, they all have these long menu's of "Mocktails."  They serve cranberry juice & sprite (would be much better with vodka), lime juice (hello...add some tequila!), strawberry daiquiris with no RUM!  These drinks cost around $5 or more...and they don't have alcohol!!!  Can you say RIP OFF?!?!?!  We were at dinner one night and Chad ordered a diet Coke and they served it with a slice of lemon.  He looked at me and said "I'm surprised they don't call this a mock rum & coke and charge $6 for it!"  I'm surprised no one has thought of that here!

·         We had our workers come to our office to hang pictures.  There were THREE MEN attempting to hang 1 wall clock!!!  Enough said!

·         We went to Wild Wadi again this weekend.  WOW!  The people watching there is AMAZING!  Here are just some of the things we saw:

o   Many women wearing Abaya swimsuits!  Yes, covered from head to toe in swim material.

o   Many young "local" girls wearing leggings under their swimsuits

o   Some young "foreign/European" girls ~ 8 and under just wearing their bikini bottoms, no top and a sun hat!  Don't want to get sunburn!  :-)

o   Three men walking around together all wearing matching boxer shorts as swim trunks.  It's like they went to the mall on their way to the water park and picked up a 3-pack of boxers so they would each have a "swimsuit."

o   More than one young boy wearing briefs as a swimsuit!

o   Many EXTREMELY overweight women in 2-piece swimsuits!

·         Mitchell has adjusted very well.  We ran into a couple in the elevator and the man was wearing a Pittsburgh Steelers football jersey.  I pointed it out to Mitchell who promptly told the man he played "American Football" for the Steelers.  It's amazing how quickly you pick up new lingo.

·         Wednesday, June 29th has been scheduled for a UAE holiday since I arrived in January.  About two weeks before that, the government decided to be generous and move the holiday to Thursday, June 30th to give everyone a 3 day weekend.  Why they couldn't have figured out in January is beyond me.  Welcome to my world!!!

·         On the holiday we planned to meet some friends at the movie theatre to see Cars 2.  We had pre-purchased our assigned seats and were meeting them in front of the theatre around 2:15 for a 2:30 movie.  We arrived at the mall before 2PM to give us plenty of time to park and get to the theatre.  When we arrived we circled and circled and circled the parking garage and finally headed to the roof where we found a parking space about as far away from the theatre as possible, but at least there were quite a few spaces available.  When we left the mall around 5PM, there were no parking spaces in sight!!  It was like being at the Galleria on Christmas Eve.  I would guess the parking lot was at about 110% of capacity.  The extra 10% of the cars were just circling like vultures waiting for someone to leave.

·         We went to another movie on Friday, Transformers 3...don't waste your time or money!!  We had never been to that movie theatre before.  They actually had a person making crepes to order at the movie concession stand!

·         The weather here in Dubai is getting warmer but still hasn't felt "Houston Hot" to me yet.  We have had days pushing 110 but it hasn't been nearly as humid...yet.  The strange thing about the weather here is that it's typically beautiful, sunny and cloudless.  The problem is DUST!  This past weekend the dust storms were out of control.  We didn't spend much time outdoors but when driving anywhere visibility is horrible due to all the dust.  I was less than 2 miles from the Burj Khalifa and I couldn't even see it!  It's kind of like fog but never burns off.  It's been dusty for 3 - 4 days and it's expected to continue like this for at least a couple more days.  Strange!

We leave on Friday July 8th to go to Barcelona, Spain on vacation.  We spend a couple days in Barcelona and then we're leaving on the Carnival Magic on July 10th for a 7-day cruise to Monte Carlo and 4 different ports in Italy.  We can't WAIT!!!  I hope to have at least a little time to blog about it when I get back but I'm not optimistic!