Mom's exciting visit to Dubai

Less than a week after the boys left, mom came to visit for a week. And the day before she arrived, the humidity arrived. Talk about bad timing. In all the time I was there, the period of humidity was the longest when mom was there.

She arrived and an ungodly hour on Thursday morning and left at a just as ungodly hour Friday a week later. And I'd hardly driven the monster truck (how it felt like to me at that stage) and not on my own. It's all well and good to drive a monster truck, everyone seems to magically move out of your way, seeing as your car will smash their cars to smithereens and there'll hardly be a scratch on your car. Tried and tested..

However, I soon got into the hang of things and apart from Sheikh Zayed Road in rush hour, or the Mall of the Emirates (MoE) junction at any hour, I seemed to be doing quite well. Even stuck to the Noggie way of backing your car into any parking space and thereby making it loads easier to get out again.

The first problem arrived when I picked mom up at the airport and noticed the left front tire was slightly lower on air. So I decided to keep an eye on it. Two days later it looked like it was even lower, so we searched out a petrol station with a working air pressure thingy and found out there was hardly any air in it. The other tires were 34psi (or whatever it's called) and the said tire was only 12psi. I filled it up to 34 and retested the next day, and it was back down to 25psi. So off we went to find a place to fix it.

Found a place, and the guy who owned it was very friendly. They got the tire off and found the problem. A huge screw was lodged in the tire towards the edge. After mush deliberation, S was in Rome and unavailable, I decided that the best option was to buy a new tire. This was the same day mom and I were meant to go to Sandy Beach and snorkel. So we got slightly delayed, but decided to make a break for it as soon as we got back home, and to stop at Ibn Battuta to get the rest of what we needed.

There I made my biggest mistake. Instead of backing into the parking space, I drove nos in first. Seeing as it was a weekday, there were hardly any cars there, and because I was still getting used to the car, I parked far away from the entrance, where there are fewer cars. Backing off I completely missed a bright red Toyota Corolla and bumped it. The Corolla got a few scratches and bumps, whereas the Prado didn't have a scratch. The only thing we noticed was the the paint on the bumper was coming loose, but that might have been from an earlier damage that had not been fixed properly.

Things work differently in UAE and any bumps or scratches have to be reported to the police. And there are camera's everywhere, so running off is not an option. But I'm too nice anyway, and called the police dutifully. I had problems understanding what they were saying, and they had problems understanding me, so I ended up going to the police station in Jebel Ali. I just had to find it first, which is not easy. But got there in the end..

Once there mom had to change. She was wearing a singlet, and seeing as your not meant to show your shouldres in muslim countries, that was not the best thing to waer. The police proceded to call the owner of the other car and get them to come to the police station. After waiting for an hour or so, they arrived, and although I had said quite clearly that the fault was mine, the police thought that the other driver had bumped my car and run off. Having cleared that up, everything moved along quite smoothly and after about another hour we were on the road again, heading for the east coast, many hours delayed.

When we got there it was dark, and so we decided to wait with swimming in the sea until the next day. We made beste friends with the cats there, they were really friendly and would sit and fuss on your laps, at least the females did. The male ones were just noisy and kept a distance. The next day we headed off bright and early, but when we go to the waters edge, the water looked oily. Turns out there had been an oilspill further down the coast and there was a very thin layer of oil on the water. This didn't affect the fishes, and you could swim, but getting the oil out of your clothes and hair was apparently very hard. So we decided to give that a skip, and lounged by the pool for a few hours before heading back to Dubai.

We did, howevre, have a really nice time there, and we skipped driving through Oman and Wadi Bih on the way back, didn't fancy another return trip over those mountains :)

At this point going to the beach in Dubai wasn't such fun. The water was warmer than bath water, and cooling off was not going to happen. We did try to go to the beach in the morning, but it wasn't much better. I'm not one for lying on the beach, it's just too boring. So we did a few other things. We went to Souk Madinat, once to look around, and once to take a trip on the little boats around the resorts surroinding it. There was even a sea turtle splashing around there. All we got to see of it was one of the flippers, but that's more than I've seen before. We also went to MoE and Ibn Battuta a few times. More of a relaxing week really, rather than trying to cram loads in.