The kitty in the picture is my kitty. His name is Duster, although he is more often referred to as Fluffles, Fluffbucket, Mr. Fluffikins or Fluffmuffin. Husband rescued (read: paid a ridiculous amount of money for) Duster from a pet shop and brought him home as a surprise for me, because we are finally able to have a kitty in our home. Finally, after almost a year of moving all over the place and never staying in one home for very long, we’ve settled. (For at LEAST a year or two. Better than nothing, eh?)
After one long and tedious house hunt including exciting sights of cockroaches, scary elevators, extremely badly placed kitchens, *very* large families living in *very* small apartments next door, dreamy rooftop terraces and obscure “water filtering machines” taking up entire rooms of the apartment, we finally found our place and moved in about a month ago. Yes, I know, I’m slow to report these things. Bad journalism on my part, but then husband is the editor, not me.
We’ve even had guests already; first husband’s brother and a week later my parents. Hi mum! Husband and I are kind of boring in our everyday life when it’s just the two of us (and we like it that way, thanks) but when you have guests, you have to go and do touristy stuff. Right? Right. So we did all two (out of three) Major Abu Dhabi Tourist Attractions: a desert safari and the Grand Mosque. The third option would be Ferrari World, but we didn’t get to that. Shame.
The safari was, in all honesty, very cool. You get driven out into the desert by a friendly Indian driver, who starts out the day by stopping at a camel farm. Here, you can see camels. I took a picture of camel butts, just for you. Heheheh.
After the camels, you proceed to wanting to puke out your guts by driving on and over sand dunes like a maniac: dune bashing. I actually did not get sick at all, because I’m awesome like that, and neither did anyone else in our car. I got told later that several people in other cars did get sick though. Weaklings. After the sandy roller coaster, you are dropped off at a camp in the desert. Here you can get your hand decorated with henna, put on traditional Emirati garb for that perfect “look at us respecting the local culture” photo, have “traditional Arabic coffee” courtesy of Nescafe and smoke shisha, along with a barbeque dinner. Interestingly, there was also a belly dancer. This is interesting because belly dancing is pretty damn far from “local” culture, but I suppose it’s what tourists expect when they come to the Middle East. Egyptian and, for example, Iranian culture are, after all, entirely the same thing as far as they are concerned.
Still! Sometimes it’s fun to do stupid touristy stuff, even if you know it’s about as authentic as a plastic model of the Burj Al Arab. Now the guests have all left again, and we’re slowly moving into “omfg it’s so hot I can’t move” – summer. Thankfully, I have always been good at keeping myself busy.
