Ok so I feel bad….i am lying to you all with false promises of monster updates etc, when I just seem to spend my evenings swimming and going to bed! Where is the time going?

So following the Ed Birthday weekend my body took a battering…..SOMEHOW (and I blame aircon) I managed to get a cold…..i rode it for a day and and Wednesday I just felt too rough…..i spent the day in bed surrounded by all the cold and flu drugs I could lay my hands on….Jean was fab…she played nurse maid….just spent the whole day sleeping….well I was woken once by a call organising what was happening about the Arabic wedding we were going to attend on Thursday night…..assuming I felt better that is…….
Thursday (15th Nov) I felt better….was in work and made arrangements to pick Stu and Katie up at NGS around 7pm…….OMG how bad was the traffic….OF ALL NIGHTS……
A former colleague from the secondment was getting married and had invited us all to attend at a hotel in Sharjar……now at the best of times Sharjar is a nightmare to navigate…..try adding rush hour into the equation and your basically in for a VERY long journey.
I didn’t get to NGS till around 7:45 as SZR was a total cluster, and it didn’t improve from there! We barely got to Al Nahda and Weimin called…….he reported to Stu that he had been on the road 2hrs (straight from work) and still wasn’t at the hotel…..WE HAD ONLY JUST LEFT NGS!!!!!!!! So Sharjar Traffic…its not like Dubai traffic, It doesn’t move very fast at all……in fact with my trusty Navigator Stu……we didn’t take any wrong turns we just took 2 hrs to get to the Hotel….Katie Stu and I rushed in to find a table with Choon Seng and Weimin. But the wedding hadn’t started yet…
Chatted and caught up with everyone, and Scott managed to find his way there…..Louise and Jim managed to get stuck on a slip road and end up back in Dubai….but they got to the hotel about an hour later……
The hall had a massive red carpet down to a dance floor and a stage beautifully decorated! Salah and Rasha came in surrounded by female relatives (I assume) with a young girl walking in front…..there were cameras everywhere, including on a massive boom…..then the celebrations started….it was non stop music, dancing and they even had salsa dancers……was pretty cool…..they walked around the tables and said hi to everyone and then around 12:30 the doors opened to the biggest Buffet I have seen for a long time……the thing was…we were all starving….not knowing what to expect and having little time to get ready after work we didn’t have tea….and you cant exactly get a beer to fill you up….A) it was an Arabic wedding and B) sharjar is a dry emirate….but by that time I was passed eating…..got a couple of small plates and sat up the other end of the hall talking to everyone…..
I had exclaimed earlier in the night that there was no way I was dancing sober! BUT!!!!! Salah and Rasha came to the table and asked us all to go up……we all looked at each other and waited for the first excuse but it never came…..they did say we didn’t have to …but I thought, we had just driven there…lets do it….so we charged the floor! Was pretty cool….have to say I don’t ever remember dancing and actually having control of the shapes I was making…..but it was getting well late and the lack of alcohol induced adrenaline didn’t help so we all split….i took Stu and Katie home and got back to greens around 2am.

So refreshing to wake up on a Friday and NO HANGOVER! Decided to hit the beach for the day with Stu and Katie….people watching and swimming…the water was pleasant to swim in…not to cold!.......lots of kids on the beach and one of them unfortunately lost a bucket…HMMmmmmm Stu and I had an idea….lets create our own Atlantis (there is a hotel being built on the palm!) so we collected the bucket from the water and had a quick look around for a wailing kid (who may have lost this attractive bucket that we were about to play with) and scuttled up the beach to prepare the foundations!
Several mix designs later we found the right consistency of sand to start our creation…………well it has been years since I made sand castles!........
It got to a pretty impressive height….but a few to many damaging structural crack got Stu’s goat and he booted the sands castle to the ground!.........it was fun for an hour or so! (photos are with Katie…just trying to work out how to send them to me…)

Saturday there was no Dragon boating….it was soooo foggy! So I just came back to the flat and chilled till the sun appeared and lazed by the pool!