After many hard goodbyes, a 14 hour plane flight and laughing hard at a placenta made face and hand creme, Alice and I have finally arrived in Abu Dhabi at the Nunan residence. Although the flight was very tiring with babies crying, economy seats not allowing much comfort and minimal sleep, Etihad airways did provide some amusement with Disney animation 'tangled'.
Yesterday provided a very nice day, being extremely sunny with no clouds to be seen. However, in Abu Dhabi no clouds can be a dangerous indicator for hot weather. For all Australians reading, that doesn't mean 30 or 40 degrees, no, Abu Dhabi summers give a solid 50 degrees! But yesterday the temperature was approximately 30 degrees I think. We've been told that we have come at the perfect time.
The sunny sky was not the only nice surprise when arriving in this country...When I walked into the Nunan kitchen, there sitting in front of me on the counter was a bowl of bananas! Yum Yum no crisis here for bananas. Sorry Australia!
Alice and I did fairly well yesterday in staying awake trying to get used to the time zone here. We made it to 8pm before crashing, and we both unfortunately woke fairly early this morning, waking at 4 and 5 am. Luckily though we both had ipods and were able to fall back asleep until 7 :30. We have already done a few things here... The Nunan's are of course extremely accommodating and trying to sqeeze as much of Abu Dhabi and Dubai into our short meezly 5 days here. Yesterday, after the girls, Xavier and Paul went to work, Alice and I had showers then headed for a walk around the 'compound'. The Nunan's live in this compound of houses that look exactly the same. I am rather interested at the architecture of the building, however one tends to get bored seeing it repeated over and over in this concrete city (there is a major lack of plants!). Although on our joyous adventure walk we did pass a house with its own original crannie on the window sill which gave me much pleasure in looking at.
Our walk took us to the compound's local boulangerie, club house (equipt with pool, gym, sauna, Jacuzzi, spa that we can all use) and supermarket. It seems that this compound is especially built for Europeans...their supermarket has vegemite...! Which I suppose is good for us Australians, however doesn't say much about the culture here.
We walked back to 1A house 13 and just chilled out for a while. It was really nice to finally just have a bit of a relax and not feel guilty about doodling, sitting and just not really doing anything. IT WAS GREAT. We sat on their roof and soaked in some sun.
Later on, we picked Tam and Liv up from school (they finish at 1pm on Mondays) and we went to the Emirates Palace. Now, I dont think I have seen anything like it in my life. It was what you would expect a palace to be though...big green gardens with luchious grass that no one walks on (but everyone wishes they could), fountains that stretch for miles, big stairs, amazing architecture of a BIG building, big portraits of supposedly great leading people (I think here the guy is called the Sheik), big domes and exhibitions of what Abu Dhabi was like back 30 years ago which practically a desert and some camels and what it wanted to be (its hoping to build a louvre in Abu Dhabi... they tend to copy a lot of the 'bigs'. Maybe the vegemite does say a lot about the Abu Dhabi culture afterall). Oh and of course no palace would be without the essential gold made atm
Today, me and Alice went to the club house and had a good work out before kicking it back at the pool with Clancy the horse and thinking about how we are going to Dubai this afternoon...you know, just dropping over! :) Super excited.
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