dust + rain = mud

This weekend the wind blew constantly, well that's how it felt, bringing with it bucket-loads of dust from the desert; sand that is able to sneak through door seals and under windows and cover everything in a fine fine layer of grit. As "Life in Dubai" puts it, it really is the worst kind of weather. Our intrepid gardener cleaned the cars as normal on Saturday (not sure how he managed it actually in that), but he need not have bothered as all that dust, combined with last night's unexpected cloud burst, left the cars looking like we had been off-roading all weekend. The good thing is that at least the rain settled the dust, but this morning, in true Dubai fashion, the roads were flooded and it was chaos. Luckily some of the schools are on holiday today because of the Prophet's birthday on Friday, so the traffic was lighter than normal overall.

[sand on the car yesterday]

I head into my last month of temping now, and have agreed with my current boss that I will only work mornings for March. This is really because there is not enough to keep me busy for a full day, and I need to get back out there and find another job. Things have been rather slow in this area, I have applied for numerous great sounding positions online with the various job sites and company's own career portals directly, but I am not getting much traction in terms of landing any interviews. It is doubly frustrating when you speak to various people who tell you how hard it is to find good people and they are having to bring them in from other countries, and you start to wonder if the recruitment process or agents are the problem. Anyway who knows, but clearly I need to find a different approach.

Stu spent almost a week in Kenya earlier this month attending the EAFCA coffee conference and so I took the opportunity to spend an entire day with my girl friend, and we went ice-skating at Dubai Mall, which was a first for me (not the skating, just the location). I haven't been ice skating in years and was pleasantly surprised to find that I didn't land on my behind once, although it was a close call at times, especially as unsteady kamikaze kids fall in your path with no warning, and the odd newbie goes the wrong way into you. Nevertheless I really enjoyed it, the only problem was the rental skates, they are made out of a plastic so hard and unyielding that my ankles were bruised for days afterwards. We had worked up quite an appetite after 2 hours of whizzing around (okay she whizzed I chugged) so we went for a bite to eat. As we both fancied pizza we found a place over-looking the ice that seemed to offer this. However when it arrived it looked like no pizza I had ever tried before, more of a flat foccacia type bread with a topping and very little cheese. It was very tasty however so no complaints.

["pizza"]

After that we decided to visit Bloomingdales which had just opened in the centre, more importantly the Magnolia Bakery which is located in the store. The New York bakery is famous, and is apparently where Miranda and Carrie devoured cupcakes in an episode of SATC (haven't actually seen that one myself). I preferred their cupcakes to those from Sugar Daddy's, but my friend disagreed. Certainly we are spoilt for choice now with several cup cake bakeries opening up here, it certainly seems to be good business and I can see why looking at the prices.

[Magnolia cupcakes]

I managed to miss this piece of news until a friend sent it to me yesterday, but the Aquarium at Dubai Mall sprung a leak last week and parts of the mall had to be evacuated. The main thing is, according to the reports anyway, that none of the fish were harmed and the leak was repaired.

Have a good week!