Home sweet home!

We now have a place to call our own. After much stress, research, and countless kms in three different cars, time was running out to find a place fast and I woke up today and thought to myself… Stuff it. I am going to hire a car and drive myself around Dubai finding my own damn place. And… at 4:30PM I did find that place. Suburb – Al Barsha. Just 10 minutes walk to Mall of the Emirates (that big-arse shopping centre with the indoor ski runs). I was stoked. There are few pics on here for you to enjoy. I was a bit happy with the camera and there are more pics on flickr – just click on any one of the pics in this section. I won’t explain in too much detail. It’s 2 bedrooms, two bathrooms, big kitchen, laundry, parking and other cool stuff. I like it. I hope Quyen does too. It’s about 25km from the office… (30mins without traffic).

If you click on the link below, it will open a pretty cool PDF map of Dubai. Our place is in D3. If you zoom in to that area at about 250% you will see on the left hand bit of D3 is Mall of the Emirates. Just under the text of the shopping centre name is a couple of yellow blocks - our place is in the bottom yellow bit. My work is in section F3 - on the other side of town. I will be commuting against the traffic which helped with the decision.

http://www.gis.gov.ae/en/downloads/pdfs/Major%20Projects.pdf

Deposit time….At the risk of having my name spelt wrong from me spelling it yet again… basically, the majority of people I have to spell my name to over here think when I say ‘A’ it is ‘I’ and when I say ‘I’ it is ‘A’. As a result, my name ends up being written as ‘IADIN’ when I spell it out aloud. I now hand them something with my name on it and tell them to write the name down on it. This guy today though takes the cake. I gave him my AMEX card with my name on it and he writes my name down on my deposit-for-the-unit receipt as ‘REWARDS MAXIMISER’. Yep. Rewards friggin Maximiser. I don’t get how he could do that either. But, pretty funny. I kept that piece of paper. Maybe I can start a scrapbook. Oh.