January | 2009 | Living the Travel Channel

Archive for January, 2009

Kitty fun

January 8, 2009

When I arrived at work yesterday one of the campus cats was laying on the mat in front of the door, so I stopped to pet her. Now that the weather is cooler, they actually have fur and are more pleasant to pet. In the 120F summer heat they shed to the point of being almost hairless.

A short time later I was sitting in my office and I heard her meowing. They tend to have very big voices here, so I thought “Wow, I can hear her all the way inside the building.” Then the meowing got louder and I, being brilliant, put two and two together and went looking for her. She had just entered the periodicals room and was roaming around to investigate. So, I talked to her and picked her up telling her we should take a walk outside where she belongs. We headed for the door, but one of my coworkers had called custodial to come and remove the cat, so I tried to hand her off to him, but he had NO idea how to handle a cat and she was soon loose again. I thought that she would now give us a chase, having been handled roughly, but she laid down on the floor and rolled over, so I was able to pick her up and take her for a walk away from the entrance of the library myself.

That was my big excitement for the day.

Posted in cats | 1 Comment »

Christmas trees

January 1, 2009

The Christmas tree at the Dubai Mall (which is still up, by the way) is gi-normous, as these three pictures show.
The color of the lights changed before I got all three pictures taken.

Here you can see the tree at Festival City.
As you can see, you can ride the escalator through the tree. Weeeee!

I’m not sure when the trees will be taken down. Some had “Happy New Year’s!” banners draped on them. Maybe they will add hearts and cupids next. January and February are the “Shopping Festival.” Like they need a shopping event here.

Posted in Christmas | 2 Comments »

Burj Dubai, fog, traffic patterns

January 1, 2009

Here are a series of pictures of the Burj Dubai (world’s tallest building) as we get closer to it. Our original intention was to go to Festival City – one of the many malls – but if you miss your turn-off, you are up a creek. It is often easier to just change your destination than to try to get back on the path to where you originally wanted to go. So, our destination changed to the Dubai Mall.
These pictures were taken at dusk and, yes, there is a significant amount of pollution, but this was also the evening of our foggy day (see previous entry) and there was still a significant amount of fog hanging around. Warm and foggy, imagine! In fact, we had to run the windshield wipers because it was condensing on the outside of the windshield and making it nearly impossible to see to drive.
The frame of the building has reached its highest point, now they are just filling it out. They haven’t announced exactly how tall it has turned out to be, yet.

Posted in Burj Dubai, Dubai traffic, fog | Leave a Comment »

Various and typical Dubai sites

January 1, 2009

Driving down Sheikh Zayed Road is like driving down a canyon.
This construction site has 15 cranes. We’ve counted them multiple times. We’ve decided that the philosophy is that they don’t want to have to move them, so they install enough to cover the entire construction site at all times. Considering that a few months ago a crane on Sheik Zayed road fell over, it is probably a good thing that they are not moving them about. (By the way, no one was hurt by the falling crane, which is an amazing thing, since that is a heavily traveled road.
Great advertising. “Big Tasty – It’s big and tasty!” One thing I am very glad of — we have not seen the creepy Burger King in any advertising here (although we don’t have cable, so maybe he is here.) KFC has a questionable looking chicken mascot making the thumbs up sign (with his wing???). He apparently thinks it’s great to be your entre.
The guys in this picture were painting the cross walk stripes with a bucket and a brush in an active intersection. That is typical Dubai!
I think the Picadelly Hairdressing Saloon speaks for itself. There are a lot of saloons here. We find the use of that word amusing. They are always gender specific. No unisex here. You can see into a gents saloon, but the women’s saloons always have opaque windows. It’s hard to wear a veil and get your hair cut at the same time.