Hello, anyone still out there? I figured it was time for another revival of this blog. This time the impetus is that I've moved to Abu Dhabi for a couple months for the project I'm now working on. The client I'm working for is Etihad Airlines. I figured that folks back home might appreciate my posting about the experience.
And an experience it has been thus far. Not all good either. Some of you will have heard this story, so apologies for the repeat. After a long tiring flight to Dubai (I can never sleep on planes), making it past passport check and gathering my luggage I'm on the way out of the airport. Someone from staff stops me and starts questioning me. Has me follow him into a 6X6 room, the door to which he locks as we enter. I was strip searched, pants off and all (and I mean in the Brit sense of the word). Every single item was taken out of my luggage and inspected. Uncomfortable as I was after that it wasn't enjoyable walking out of the airport into the outdoors and it feeling like I had just walked into a sauna. Not the most enjoyable welcome my first time in a new country.
Perhaps it didn't help that a had a huge ring through my septum. And to be fair, there was a driver waiting for me once I got outside, and I started out at a pretty nice hotel in Dubai.
Since then it's been looong days of work plus 1 hour commute each way from Dubai to the office. Barely had time to catch up with the world outside of the time spent on work. I was supposed to move to a new hotel in Abu Dhabi on Wednesday evening. However, somehow the client forgot to book my room (even though according to the Project Manager it was all taken care of). So having had to pack up all my luggage and haul it with me on-site Wednesday morning, I then had to bring it back and check back into my initial hotel for an aditional night. Which ended up being paid for on my credit card, and I really hate submitting expense reports...
Luckily the following day my new hotel room was actually sorted. So Thursday evening I took a taxi from Etihad offices to Le Meridien hotel in Abu Dhabi. Le Meridien is in the Corniche area of Abu Dhabi, and the hotel is right on the beach. The weekends in the United Arab Emirates are Friday/Saturday. However, I didn't get to do any exploration on Friday because I had to spend alot of time on work :(. I don't know that I'll do much exploration away from the hotel today either, we'll see. There're quite a few restaurant/bars and couple clubs connected to the hotel itself.
This brings up an interesting point that many of you may not know. You can only buy alcoholic beverages from hotels or businesses associated to hotels. You can buy alcohol for home consumption from liquor stores, but only if you have a liquour permit (which I don't have, not sure how difficult it is to get one). My understanding is that the permit still limits the amount you are allowed to spend per month, so you gotta ration the beers :P. Beyond this, I've heard rumours of little liquour oases in the middle of the dessert where you can purchase to your hearts delight, but then just hope you don't get pulled over heading from there back home...
So today is the first official day of Ramadan (the new moon was observed last night). This means that from sunrise to sunset there is no eating, drinking or smoking in public (actually pretty much nothing goes in the mouth, e.g. no chewing gum). This is a time of fast for the Muslims during Ramadan. This doesn't mean it's not possible for me to eat/drink during the day, note I said
in public. Many restaurants, for instance the ones here at my hotel, will draw opaque drapes over all the windows and entrances and still be open for business during the day. Most businesses in general operate reduced business hours during Ramadan. I believe this is partly due to the fact that people don't have the energy to work full days when they are not eating or drinking.
I was delightfully surprised that there is a TimeOut Abu Dhabi, so I've started to pick through there to find things to do. Thorntree UAE unfortunately seems to mostly be focused on Dubai, and all the people I know out here are based in Dubai. Well, let's see how this adventure goes!
Don't know precisely how many beers I drank, but I can say it was a lot. Whenever I get to the state that I'm buying rounds of shots for everyone I know that it has been a good night. Unfortunately I missed last call when I went to get a round, so we actually missed out on the shots. Probably a good thing. Though they wouldn't give me shots, they were still willing to give me beer, so I bought one of their cylinder beer dispensers. I love these devices! If you've never had them before I'll give a quick description. It's a double cylinder, one inside the other. They fill the inside cylinder with ice and the outer cylinder with beer. So your beer stays cold for quite some time, even in the muggy Dubai heat. There's a nozzle at the bottom of the cylinder that you use to dispense your icy cold beer. I suppose it's a bit like a micro-keg or something. The first time I had them was when I was in Bangkok, Thailand a few years ago (pictured at right, 3 litres of icy cold goodness). There was this outside bar next to the mall that was serving Singha in these style dispensers. Then Wing Dome in Seattle started carrying them. This is the third place I've been to that has these dispensers. They're grrrrrrreat! The rest of the fellas had shisha, but I've already had shisha a few times over the last week so I held back on that.
