I have been totally terrible in updating the blog of late and for that I apologize.
It has been a manic 2 months since the rugby 7s…..let me try and enlighten you in what has been going on…….Trust me it has been Stressy…..
Basically Jean and Chris were getting ready to go back to NZ for their 6 weeks holiday and Steve was due to arrive in less than a week (6th Dec). I was aware that the pressure was on to find accommodation. J&C had been so good to me by letting me live with them but I wanted to let them have their family home back!
Many people had suggested to me that the way forward was to share a flat with someone…this however is illegal here as it is classed as co habiting. Cutting a long story short I discussed with some mates and I had a plan of how I was to get my accommodation before J&C came back…..and a plan was hatched.

Steve arrived on the 6th to start 1 month of job hunting…this proved a really difficult exercise….many places just simply not responding or sending signals that they were interested but then not actually following through. For the fun side of his trip I had to make an itinerary….i want to do a number of things while he was out…notably something for Christmas and new year…..but ever looming over my head was this damn accommodation issue!!!!
I had already tried to view accommodation out here with very little success. So the prospect of trying again was daunting. Basically looked on Gulf News classifieds and rang around a few places….saw some apartments in Barsha and they were pretty nice but the consideration was the distance from work. I was already commuting from the greens to Wafi and the traffic on that route was a nightmare and pretty unpredictable. Same goes for JBR near the marina. Then it came to my attention that for the same price I could get a villa in Mirdif as get an apartment in these places….so my attention turned….found a nice new place….basically did the deal with the guy mid December and had to wait for Eid, Christmas and new year to pass before finding out that actually they were a bunch of robbing bstrds…….yep…….we had been caught in a scam…….FKRS……sorry about that outburst but when you have lost an amount of cash to some unscrupulous muppet it kinda leaves you a little sour!........................

Anyway…..back to the drawing board with the accommodation thing.….meanwhile steve was having a mare with the applications….turned up to some joke of a walk in interview at the airport. Basically turned out to be an unorganized maul with guys literally screwing CVs in balls and hurling them over the fence…..sufficed to say he didn’t hear anything from there…..
Back to my itinerary I decided to get him out to a few touristy things during his stay…we went to the ICE bar at Times square mall which can be compared to sitting in a supermarket warehouse freezer….I used to work for Waitrose and the similarities were uncanny….in fact you even got given the same coats that we used to have to wear when picking stock!!!. We went to Ski Dubai which was a crash course…… literally….Trying to reacquaint myself with the white stuff…. and quadding, not to mention the odd trip to the beach for a bit of tanning.
Christmas day was nice…got up went to the beach for breakfast and then headed to the Grand Hyatt for Lunch…..Traditional lunch….was nice however marred slightly by the inept service from Dubai Taxi who’s control centre staff and taxi drivers seem to have a different idea of how long two minutes is compared to reality. In fact it was 58mins different from reality meaning I had to drive in the end….but the food was sooo good…
New year was spent at the Park Hyatt with two friends (Lou and Jim)…..to our amusement on turning up we were given wrist bands that stated we were on an alcoholic package and we were hurded to our “area”……..there was a hogmany party in full swing with loadsa kilt clad men running around…..i was going to ask “THE” question but bottled it…(I had already found out the answer at the 7s really”…the food was a brunch type buffet affair…really good, and the fireworks were amazing….in fact I thought we were being mortared….
The end of the night was spent on the dance floor with Lou while the boys stayed at the table on doubles….somehting that steve later regretted…..SO DID I AS HE USED MY BLOODY PARTY HAT AS A SICK BOWL!!!!! I had decorated it as well! Swine!

Soon the 6th Jan arrived and Steve left for blighty….he had to go back to finish up packing the house….i had a couple of weeks before J&C returned to find a new abode……(I wasn’t being kicked out, but I made them a promise…..).
Anyway, I hit it running…..I viewed so many places and jumped out of work at lunch to rush to various parts of Dubai…a mate was supplying me with ads, and I followed them up….eventually through a stroke of luck a place came up in mid January…... 2 bed plus study…..bonus….but having been burnt once already I was gonna be bloody sure this time that I wasn’t going to be messed around a second time…….to be fair the lady was really good…..and after a few maintenance issues were resolved I sorted the contract out just after J&C got back…(16th January)….It was good to see them all again, they looked all refreshed from their break.…..and the kids, they seemed to have grown up lots since last I saw them!