Belal's Many Personalities!

We captured Belal's multi-personality attack on camera. We will use this as evidence in future should anything happen to us in the middle of the night while we sleep! You have been our witnesses!

Vermicelli Spring Roll Salad

Now that the weather is hotting up as we head into summer, it will be great to eat a meal without sweating!

Rolling the spring rolls made me think of home when I would help my mum make them. Those were the good old days! Next time I will have to con Aidan into being the head spring rolling boy.

I have learnt if I dont want to share a particular dish with our flatmate Belal, just tell him its got pork in it, even if it doesn't.......muhahaha.......evil I know but my tummy takes priority over anyone else!

Finally We Have Eaten Belal's Famous Egg Dish!

After living with us for 3 months and hearing much about Belal's famous egg dishes that he learnt to cook in university as easy survival food, he finally cooked it!

On this lucky day we were to sample Belal's culinary twist on the humble omelet. Watching him prepare the ingredients was mesmerising, you could tell this man had perfected the craft of cooking using eggs as the main ingredient for a number of dishes to minimise the cooking time.

The gourmet ingredients consisted of egg, spring onions, mushroom, tomatoes, butter, milk, salt and pepper. But it was the finesse in his wrists while whisking the egg white which gave the dish as weightless sensation in your mouth…..but we won’t spend too long pondering how he got this perfected vigorous wrist action otherwise our appetites will be lost!

The only advice we can give you is patience is the key to sampling this fine dish. If you are fortunate enough to make Belal’s acquaintance, in order to experience his fine culinary skills you must be patient and he will bestow it up on him his own time.

Come and Work in Australia!

I’ve noticed the classifieds in Dubai have a lot of advertisements encouraging people to go live and work in Australia. We on the other hand, have come to Dubai to live and work only to see advertisements encouraging us to return back home and work!

We have all heard on the news back home some Australians choose not to join the workforce due to benefits provided by the government……we won’t discuss that controversial issue any further. And we know about foreign labour forces being brought into the country to fill vacancies. But it really highlights the issue when you go overseas and see advertisements encouraging people to move to and work in your home country.

Australia is a beautiful country and it had great labour laws to protect working people compared to other countries where people are willing to work for next to nothing. I guess it just goes to show how much of a “Lucky Country” we are, some people are provided with enough to not have much incentive to get out there and find a job.

When Is Hump Day During The Week?

Back home we would all shout hooray and start talking about the weekend when we hit hump day, also known as Wednesday. Here is Dubai it occurs on Tuesday, so it seems as if hump day comes prematurely.

We are still haven’t wrapped our brains around that concept yet. Maybe that’s why time seems to fly so fast in Dubai!

Wendy, Aidan’s mum, said it was the first time she’s heard anyone refer to the middle of the week as “Hump Day” after looking at our blog entry. When I explained to her the meaning behind the term, she exclaimed “Did you make that story up Winnie? That’s so funny!”

I wish I could take credit for it but some poor over worked bugger thought of this very apt term.

Kingdom of Saudi Arabia - Trip #3

Well, here I am on my third trip to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). I have waited this long to blog about it as I wanted to get a true picture.

Oh, and I have one eye on my screen and the other eye looking out the corner to an airforce dude with an AK47 over his shoulder.

Each trip I have had to KSA I have spent two nights in the capital city, Riyadh. The days are long due to the prayer times and closures of everything so often through the day. The main point of me coming here is to visit stores. These are the shop/shopping centre hours – 7 days a week:

OPEN from 9:30AM to 12:00PM

Then close for prayer times

Re-open from 4:00PM to 6:00PM

Then close for prayer time

Re-open from 6:30PM to 7:15PM

close for prayer time

Re-open from 8:00PM to 11PM

So as you can imagine, it is a very long day to knock off a few shopping centres. By the time you travel between them, they are closed. Everyone must leave the shops and shopping centres. All the lights are switched off, doors locked. Generally, the car parks are outside or damn hot in the basement so you have no choice but to just chill for four hours in a restaurant or outside in a sandy park.

All in all though, KSA is really interesting!! So far I have been to Riyadh, Jeddah and Dammam. The latter two are coastal cities (different ends from each other) and are much more liberal and home to more westerners than Riyadh. Security is very tight around all of the cities and there is an interesting picture to paint while I type this blog at the King Fahdiya airport in Dammam.

Any major landmarks (hotels, shopping centres, govt buildings) have VERY tight security. All of the cars going to the drop off points or the carparks have an under the bonnet check, a boot check and one of those mirror on wheels things checking out under the car.

Once past this point, there is a tank with guns pointing down. Now, I don’t know about you, but for me seeing this for the first time I didn’t get the point. There is more to a car then the boot, the bonnet and underneath. There is a lot of storage space in the dash area. I best stop there.

All of this security aside, Riyadh is very different to Dubai. It is very low-rise, with the two tallest buildings pretty much the only two buildings over 10 levels – and they are massive! Kingdom Centre and Faisaliyah Centre are the big bastards.

Interesting story is that Kingdom Centre opened on September 12, 2001. one day after you know what.

The centre has a huge arc cut into the middle of it and the celebrations to open it involved jet fighters flying through these holes. The opening date of the building had been planned since the first whole had been dug 3yrs beforehand.

Interesting??

Pitter Patter Of 5 Little Feet!

As of last weekend we have become the proud parents of 5 little baby tortoises. We wanted to liven up the house with the noise of little feet so off we went to the pet store on Emirates Road. They had a great range of pets, from fish to bearded dragons, birds, frogs, mice, snakes, rabbits, the usual dogs and cats but the highlight were massive land turtles approximately 60cm long!!

Aidan would have liked to get another snake, there were beautiful red snakes with black markings – coral snakes I think they were. But the buggery was the pet store only sold live mice at Dhm20 (dirhams – local currency) each, equivalent of AUD$6.50 and didn’t sell any frozen mice - back in Australia we could have bought a packet of frozen mice for that price!. The snakes were reasonably price but it was going to be damn expensive to feed them.

In the end the active little baby tortoises swimming around in a tank caught our eye. We were excited to hear the noise pitter pattering little feet around the house, well actually little tortoise paws. The price per baby tortoise was Dhm75 (AUD$25), now we knew they were giving us the inflated expatriate price and if we headed down to Satwa (a non-expat suburb where you can find most things) it wouldn’t be so pricy.

To Satwa we drive and eureka!! We discovered a row of pet shops that sold baby tortoises at the price of Dhm25 (AUD$8.30) for 2. The nice salesman put together a set up kit for us which included the tank, pebbles, large rocks, light and food – dried shrimps. We bought 6 tortoises but unfortunately 1 didn’t make it after 2 days.

Aidan was most happy that they didn’t make any noises but to our surprise, they are busy at night time rearranging the décor in their tank by moving pebbles around. We’ve notice they have an established hobby, building the equivalent of human pyramids – they are constantly climbing on top of each other.