HO HO HO MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!

HO HO HO MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!! Sending you all our best wishes and lots of love over the holiday season! We hope you all have a wonderful Christmas and enjoy lots of good food and holiday cheer!

We cannot believe we have been here in Dubai for 8 weeks now! Time has flown!! I suppose that is because we are keeping very busy and keeping ourselves entertained from nights out to more exploring of Dubai and the UAE!

One of Mark’s mates who he met while living in Whistler, Luke / ‘Weeman’, was here in Dubai deciding if he wants to move over here as well. We met up with him and did another ‘Brunch,’ but this time it was on a Monday night. It was again all you can eat and drink…..so we consumed lots of Italian food and our drink of choice was margaritas and tequila. Our rounds consisted of 6 margaritas and 6 shots….well that was until I had to wave my white flag and switch to some wine. Luckily Mark had Tuesday off work (for one of the public holidays), it was a major duvet day, which was a given after all that tequila.

We decided to have a low key weekend and had a nice dinner date to a very very good Sushi restaurant that Mark found. They have the proper California/American style rolls that we have missed dearly! On the Friday we spent a long day at the beach and just relaxed and soaked up the sun and listened to the peaceful waves. That evening we went to a BBQ at one of mark’s co-workers villa. They had 2 huge bbq pits with 1000s of chicken satay kebabs….they were so delicious and I think mark and I ate half of them.

I decided it was time to no longer rely on the unreliable taxi service here and get a car!!! We rented a car for a month, and we may extend it from there depending on my job situation. I got a wonderful Chevy Aveo…..yeah you probably have never heard of it, cause it is so spectacular! Actually, it is just a 4 door Honda civic size car, and it isn’t that bad at all. It gets me from point A to point B!

Since I got the car I spent the week driving around to all the hospitals and clinics to turn in my CV/resume, hoping for a lab tech job in one of the hospital labs. This driving around allowed me to see lots of different areas of Dubai and realize how confusing the road system is here, especially cause the half the roads aren’t finished yet. The area we live and the marina area are all brand new and very nice, but once you get to the older parts it is weird to see how different they are. Some apartments and hotel-apartments are quite run down and look very very crowded. Mark compared one of the areas called Deira, to streets in Hong Kong, the way they were all lit up with neon signs and tons of small shops next to each other. All that was missing was Bulldogs Bar (For those that know it)!!!

I have also been consistently applying to jobs I find in the classifieds and on other job websites, and have actually been hearing back from some companies now. I declined one job off that I was given, for it just didn’t seem right and there was no room for growth. I also have met with 2 recruiting companies, which are going to assist me in finding a job! It is a very hard time to find job, because of the holidays and because the economic downfall has begun to hit here, but we are staying positive and something will come up very soon! :)

After doing lots of driving around I had to fill up my tank of gas…..it is so ace here because they fill up your car for you and they wash your windows while you sit in the car, and gas is SOOO cheap. It cost me 50 Dirhams, which is about $13.00 or 9 pounds, for a full tank!!!

This past weekend, Mark’s company had a big Holiday Party for all the Senior staff members. It was at this huge mansion that is one of the Sheik’s weekend homes. It was amazing, the garden was as big as a football field, if not bigger, and the part of the house we went in was a side game room type house which had a sunken dance floor and a DJ. This particular Sheik also owns a few hotels in the Jebel Ali area of Dubai, so he just hired his hotel staff to bring out a huge buffet of every sort of food you could imagine. It was like being at another Friday Brunch, and you know what that means….free flowing drinks as well. I think mark and I stuck to the bubbly, since we haven’t had it since the wedding and we missed it dearly. Well that was until the next day, where Mark had another Duvet day, I think there is a pattern here with Mark and the free booze and the next day. lol

One night this week we decided to make the drive to Abu Dhabi, which is one of the emirates next to Dubai and is the capital of the UAE. There was the annual Motor Show Exhibition (a bit like the one at the NEC in Birmingham) in the convention center. I fell in love with the latest Range Rover Sport and Mark saw himself driving a Nice Big Hummer down the crazy roads in Dubai!. I think we both picked out at least 5 cars that we are getting next….after our sexy Nissan Tiida and Chevy Aveo! :) There was also lots of concept cars designs for the future!

Watch Sky Travel's Video about Abu Dhabi here:http://travel.sky.com/inspiration/hotTipCityBreaks/1219046506860_316

To get into the holiday spirit even more we have been doing our Christmas shopping, and have been doing lots of running to hope it will help with all the food and drinks we have in the next week. We also purchased our 10 pound turkey for Christmas dinner and all the rest! We are looking forward to cooking the big meal for the 2 of us for our first married Christmas together! We are quite confident everything will go well, but if not we have pizza delivery on speed dial.

We have all the plans set for when the Foden’s arrive on the 27th. We are so very excited and are going to have a fun and busy week with them. We’ll tell you all about what we are doing in the next update.

We hope you all have a very very merry Christmas and holiday season! We miss you all, especially during the holiday time! We will definitely not be seeing a white Christmas here, Thursday is going to be 82*F (26* C).




I made a Christmas wish for you:

For a holiday full of pleasure,
Friends and family all around,
And memories to treasure.
We wish for you a Christmas filled

With joyous holiday cheer;
We wish you a Merry Christmas,
And a very Happy New Year!

All our Love Always,
Erin & Mark
xxxxx

In Dubai is Rudolph a Camel???

Hello All,

We hope this finds you well!! And that you are all enjoying the start of the holiday season!! First of all we want to wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving! We hope you all had a lovely time with your families/friends and we missed celebrating it with you all!! We have so many people and things that we are thankful for!! Mark and I were going to make a big Thanksgiving dinner, but it is kind of hard to make for only the 2 of us. So we decided to head out for a nice meal instead. We went out to a very nice Mexican meal at Le Meridian Hotel in the Marina to Maya….the same restaurant is also in San Francisco and New York (http://www.modernmexican.com/mayasf/index.htm) and we were very excited about that J Our friend Salam joined us for this meal, for it was her birthday and we wanted to celebrate that as well!

We found out this week that Mum and Dad Foden, Sarah & Simon are joining us in Dubai, right after Christmas and for new year! We are very excited for their visit and have started lots of planning for when they are here!!

We had a relaxed weekend last weekend and had a fun bowling and arcade night with the two other couples from Discovery Gardens. Then had a nice day at the beach on Friday and brought stuff to BBQ for lunch. We bought a disposable bbq, some burger patties and Richmond sausages and enjoyed a relaxing time in the sun.

We wanted to head to the Dubai Rugby 7s last weekend, which supposedly is the biggest party weekend of the year here. It is a rugby tournament sponsored by Emirates Airlines, 16 (I think) rugby teams from around the world travel here for the tournament. (http://www.dubairugby7s.com/) The stadium is full of expats and people that travel here specifically for the tournament and there is tons of booze and food stands….it is a 3 day tournament….so 3 days of parties. We didn’t join in the parties or tournament this year, but next year we plan on purchasing tickets ahead of time so that we can join in the festivities.

Since we have television with all the Premier league games we were able to watch United beat City last Monday….which was brilliant to see the self-proclaimed “Biggest Club in the world” get taught a lesson by the Best Football Club in the World!! Come on United!!!

Tuesday was National day here in the UAE. It is a Public Holiday celebrating when the Emirates became united 37 years ago. (http://emiratesupdate.wordpress.com/2007/11/12/significance-of-the-uae-national-day/) All the nationals are very very patriotic and wear scarves that look like the flag and decorate their cars with the green, red, white and black. There were quite a few parades and again huge firework displays for 3 days in a row. “The fireworks display along the Corniche (in Abu Dhabi) is to be the largest fireworks display ever done. One full hour of fireworks launched from a whole bunch of different locations over the Emirates Palace and the surrounding Arabian Gulf waters.” Mark had to work as they have a big deadline to meet before Christmas so didn’t take part in the celebrations, but we watched the fireworks in Abu Dhabi on TV and they were pretty spectacular!

Our friend Laura was celebrating her 27th birthday this past weekend so we went out to a nice Chinese dinner with her and her boyfriend. We then made our way to an English pub – The Red Lion!!, where we felt like we were back in England, and then to a nightclub called the Rattlesnake. The Rattlesnake is known for the Prostitutes / Hookers, who flourish there, but apart from them (which were quite entertaining to watch) the bar had a great live band, and Mark and I were very excited when they played Summer of ’69!!

The weather hasn’t been the best for the past few days. It is still relatively warm 72-76*F (22-24*C) but has been quite humid with sporadic rain. I guess the average rainfall for December is around 3-4 inches, and in the past week there has been a lot more than that. Since the country is not used to the rain there are no drainage systems and therefore all the roads flood very easily, which creates havoc. We don’t mind the rain, but we are keeping our fingers crossed it stops by the time the Foden’s arrive in a few weeks!

We spent Friday a little hungover, but we decorated our first Christmas Tree together! Lots of fun and we found out that Mark cant tie knots very well! All we need now is the Fairy on top!

I had a Job interview on Thursday for an Administrative Assistant ….. got the job offer, so now have to decide if I should take it as something to keep me busy until a better opportunity arises for me. Unfortunately I have not had any other luck with other jobs yet, but trying to be as patient as possible about it.

Mark been working the last few Saturdays and will be working the next few public holidays in December. Work is very busy for him and he is now starting to help with The Dubai Mall project as well as his own project, because of the deadline and need more brains working on it. But since he is working extra now, it means he is able to take off from Christmas Eve through the new year!! :)

We hope you are all doing great and hope to hear from you soon!

All our Love,
Mark & Erin
Xxxxxxx

Some pics:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2215114&l=98626&id=6402232 (of the Atlantis Fireworks from a few weeks ago)

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2215119&l=db894&id=6402232 (some pics of the floods/lightning that occurred)

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2217055&l=55fa0&id=6402232 (arcade/bowling/dinners/our christmas tree)