Abu Dhabi, an update

This is a strange view of our hotel apartment I found on the hotel website (its neater than our place) Its taken from the servery from the kitchen out into the dining area. We dont have a spiky plant (thank goodness) and we have a big flat screen tv instead of the one pictured. We have two actually, there is one in the bedroom too.

Bert and I have both been here for two weeks now. Bert has been travelling back and forward between Australia and the UAE for 8 months now and it's been exhausting. Working in two time zones in countries that have different weekends pretty much means he has been working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Add to that a liberal dose of jetlag and its an unhealthy mix.

I came here in August for a few weeks and despite the brutal heat at that time of year I liked it here.

So here we are, living in a hotel apartment in the centre of Abu Dhabi. This has been an easier situation than arriving and needing to find somewhere to live and be out on our own. For example the simple act of posting a letter, I just ride the lift down and hand it to the concierge.

We haven't had the battles getting telephones and the internet connected. If something goes wrong I pick up the phone and dial 1 and tell reception to please sort it out.

We have a small kitchen, with a microwave and two burners and today we bought an electric frypan and are now preparing a few basic meals at home to cut down expenses. But even then its still easy, I grilled some steaks the other day, and made a salad and called room service to deliver a serve of chips.

We have a washing machine / dryer combined. This has proven to be quite a challenge. The only way to dry appears to be cooked to a crisp, so we have clothes in varying degrees of dampness sitting on the window sills.

Bert has the use of a car here, its just a toyota corolla but its got excellent airconditioning which as you can imagine is vital. He spends a lot of time reading car magazines and looking at car showrooms and cannot decide which car he wants when we finally get settled here and his contract kicks in.

The biggest challenge so far is parking, and grocery shopping. Very few things look familiar, so it all requires a lot of label reading to work out if I'm buying a can of tuna or yaks eyeballs.

The hotel has three levels of underground parking. By dark all of the carparks are full and the boom gate wont open, so Bert drives around looking for a park, which is near on impossible. I will take a photo of the streets around our hotel at night to explain this. It's a narrow road, but every night there are two rows of cars in the centre of the road. As well as on the kerb on each side.

I read a post from someone here who described parking as "rockstar parking" where you just drive to the front of whatever building you want to go to, and get out and leave your car where it inconveniences every other passing car. Its a perfect description of most Abu Dhabi parking.