Dubai delights!

At first glance, Dubai is very hard on the eye. We arrived at 5:00 am on Wednesday morning and were greeted by what looked like the biggest building site on earth. Everybody warns you - but nothing can quite prepare you for your first impressions. Dubai is a mixture of modern, glitzy, scy scrapers, cranes, bull dozers, sand and diggers. Josh was happy - we were a bit shocked.

We checked into our hotel - Le Meridien - right on the beach and next to the Dubai marina and I went into the office for the day while Kimbo and the boys explored the hotel and beachfront. I had the interview and came home with the job in hand but still not convinced why we would want to move here?

The next day was all very different. Our relocation agent picked us up and gave us a full tour around the suburbs. People clearly have a very good lifestyle in Dubai. We saw 4 different villas in both established and new parts of the city. Our clear favourites are the older resdiential suburbs of Jumeira and Umm Suqeim. They offer large villa's (stand alone houses or in a "compound" the equivalent of our town house complex) and have everything you could want for the boys: the beach, water world, kiddies clubs and nurseries, shops and malls, restuarants, coffee shops, doctors etc etc. Josh swimming in the Arabian sea, with the worlds only 7 star hotel, the Burl Al Arab in the background.Our lasting, first impressions of Dubai will be how cosmopolitan it is (people from everywhere else make up 80% of the population), how child friendly it is, the buzz and energy (it is a city "on the make" and everybody is getting in on the action) and how crime free it is - it is just not tolerated. All in all, it is a bit of a mixture of London and SA, albeit in a desert at 40'!

Flying Emirates was great. Everything was first rate - Josh even enjoyed his own business class seat so he could watch Bob the Builder. Talk about setting a dangerous precedent that may come back to bite us when we do our future trips around SA in Translux...?! To top it off, Jacques Kallis and Kingsley Holgate were on our flight home. They asked for photos with us and, whilst inconvenient at the time, we obliged in good spirit...

Josh with his Dubai camels and swimming at Le Meridien, again...!