Friday, 27 July 2007

A weekend down by the beach


Its been the 'weeks from hell' since I came back from the UK and this weekend my habibi and I were having some quality time at the Al Hamra Fort Hotel in Ras al Khaimah. RAK is another of the emirates about 1.5 hours drive from Dubai. The hotel itself is large and spread out along the seafront. Lots of things to do, I had my first attempt at jet skiing which was so much fun, like a motorbike only wet, I have to work on my cornering technique but in a straight line going flat out is great! After that, we took a laser out for a sail and it promptly sank. A sort of shipwreck. One of the hotel staff came out on a jetski to check on us and asked if we wanted to swim to shore. He was scowling so much that I picked up that the appropriate response was 'yes' so we swam back across the lagoon to shore. Once we got back to shore, we sat under a beach umbrella on our own private piece of beach for several hours reading the books we'd both bought down with us - Colin's reading 'Living with a legend' by Bev Brock about Peter Brock and I'm reading a book on Elizabeth I by Peter Starkey.
Our room at the hotel was huge with a lovely garden terrace. On our trip back we took the Audi for a drive over towards Fujeirah. Lots of fun. Love that car.

Saturday, 21 July 2007

The world revolves around scones.


Better than nothing I guess:
Every morning I go to one of the coffee shops in BurJuman Mall to get coffee (no such thing as a flat white here, you have to ask for an 'Americano with milk'). This particular coffee shop is the only place in the area to sell scones. As you know, I am a total scone-aholic, keep your haute cuisine, there's nothing better than a hot, fluffy scone with jam and cream and a decent coffee on the side. My kids will talk of trips from Sydney to Brisbane which always had to go via Glen Innes to visit the Clocktower Coffee Lounge to partake of their ace cheese scones. Anyway back to the story, each morning I buy a scone from this joint in BurJuman. Each day they give it to me in a paper bag with a small pack of Anchor butter, a small pot of jam and a plastic knife and fork. Fairly early on I asked them to only give me butter and no jam but one of the guys told me it was 'company policy' to supply jam with every scone. As a result I now have a drawer in my desk that is full of little pots of strawberry jam stacked 3 or 4 high. Once I dared to ask them not to give me a fork every damn time and I tried to explain that I really only needed a knife. And what happened? For the rest of the week they gave me only a plastic spoon. Have you ever tried eating a scone with a spoon? So I admitted defeat and told them that a knife and fork was fine and since then all has been well in 'scone land'.