End of Work Week 1

On Thursday this week Dan, Lindy and I went and had a meeting with Finance. They are located in a building in Dubai Internet City (DIC). For those of you who don't know, Dubai is sort of divided into areas not unlike Toronto. The difference being though that they name the various areas after their function. The office I work in is in Dubai Media City and we are located in the CNN building.



Anyhoo .... we made the jaunt to DIC which is only about a 10 minute walk. 10 minutes doesn't sound extreme but it was very hot and like most of Dubai there are only sporadic sidewalks available along the route. So it's far more harrowing than it sounds. We were rewarded at the end though because the building we went to is the sparkliest building I've ever been in. I don't mean that the marble gleamed. I mean that it was shot through with some glittering substance that made every surface twinkle and flash. There is also a boat theme to the building so the boardroom has little portholes and such. Very surreal. Lindy felt like she was in a 70's disco.



In the sparkly building we met Todd who is one of the managers. He's brand new and seems to be completely on top of things. Very offputting when you're expecting the person you're meeting with to be solidly on Dubai time but in a good way. Once we were finished in sparkly land we went and had vegetarian Indian food in the next building which was awesome and made Lindy who is the resident veggie very happy.



Last night we gathered to have a drink in honour of Bob, another Torontonian, who was celebrating his birthday. We played a game called Apples to Apples. If you've never played this you should. It's a hoot. It works like this - everyone is dealt 7 cards and on each one is a name, Place, action, event, era, object, animal or phrase. There is a second deck of cards that has a descriptive word on it i.e. ridiculous, cheesy, saintly, normal. So one person is the judge and they flip over the top card on the descriptive deck and then each player puts a card face down on the table that they think fits with that word. The judge gathers the cards, mixes them up and then picks the card they like best and the person who put it down wins that round. We had some truly sick things put down like for ridiculous someone put down Anne Frank which won the round. When you've had a couple of drinks this is an awesome game!



Today was Friday so Lindy and I decided to spend our first weekend day at the public beach. It was awesome. We paid 5 AED each which is about $1.50 CAN and then went to a beautiful beach with crystal blue water, white soft sand and not too crazy a crowd. It was lots of fun. I would upload a pic but you're not allowed to have cameras on the beach. In fact, a few men were arrested last week for sitting on a wall and staring at women at the beach sooooooo .... you get it.



After the beach we went and celebrated Bob's birthday again. This time we went to a Lebanese restaurant in Century City which is beside Irish Village. The restuarant has a great big patio with big comfy chairs where folks sit and eat and smoke Sheesha. By proxy, I had a lot sheesha tonight. We had a lovely time and I got to meet some other folks who've been imported for the festival. Camilla who works as the assistant to the executive director and Daniel who puts together all of the publications. Both very lovely Brits! The restaurant kindly gave us enough food to feed a village or perhaps a small country and a lovely night was had by all.

It was a great end to my first week.

Dubai temp: 33 degrees