We had a busy weekend, and I took a ton of photos, so here we go!
The first photo comes from grocery shopping at Ibn Battuta Mall the other day. Good ol' Géant. I think I mentioned once before how the Special K cereal boxes in Dubai were half covered with a giant white sticker. If I didn't, I meant to tell you that the Special K cereal boxes in Dubai were half covered with a giant white sticker.
Well, quality control be damned, it looks like a few unstickered boxes slipped through. Got a fair photo of it, too.
Ah-ha, bikinis. The modest Muslims wouldn't like that!
But I didn't even notice until we got home that the box on the bottom right is an all red bathing suit. I wonder if that's some kind of other sticker, or specially produced box for Islamic and / or Quaker nations, or what. I'll have to check into it next time I'm shopping.
On the way home from grocery shopping we tried to go a tricky side road. Liz calls this "a Ninja move". I call it kind of foolish, as we could get squashed by a giant steamroller or big construction-y truck, you know, one that I don't know the name of but my little cousin Evan who's like three years old does, making him more of a man than I am or will ever be. Hey, all I know is that I don't want to end up under one of those construction-y trucks. Whatever they're called.
So yeah, we went off-roading on the way home. We found the Jumeriah Village, though. Well, we found the construction site for Jumeriah Village, at least. It doesn't really exist yet.
But we got a few good shots of the Dubai Marina, which yesterday I had the Gulf News arial shots of. It's an amazing construction project, I'll tell you that.
These are all taken looking over Sheikh Zayed Road towards the Marina.
To get home from the Ibn Battuta Mall we have to cross Sheikh Zayed Road. In fact, to get there we usually take Sheikh Zayed, but on this day we did Liz's somewhat failed ninja move.
We ended up on this little access road that follows along parallel to Sheikh Zayed. I got a few good shots of some of the construction there. These are on the Ibn Battuta side of Sheikh Zayed, not the Marina and university side. I'm not sure what the name of the development is, I forget it. But I'm sure it has a fancy logo and text treatment, as they all do.
Pretty cool buildings.
Next we have to cross Sheikh Zayed Road. It's actually a good overpass, if only because it's a little higher and you get some perspective on the geography of the area. Sorry the cell phone camera lense is a little fuzzy, I hope you get the idea of where things are.
That's Sheikh Zayed Road below us. At points it's five lanes in each direction, but here it's four and four. The tan buildings in the center of the frame that are in the sunlight - those are the university faculty buildings, where we live. To the right you see the Hard Rock Cafe building (also tan, also in the sun). And behind it all in the distance is the Burj Al Arab - the fancy hotel that looks like a giant sail.
And lastly I have a photo of the overpass going from nowhere to nowhere that's currently under construction next to the Hard Rock. We talked about it in August (If you missed that story, see Hard Rock Adventure).
More than a month later, and it's still going nowhere.
That's pretty awesome.
And now, the real reason I had the photo roundup today - on Friday we painted our bedroom!
We got the paint at our local Ace Hardware. (Ace is, naturally, "the place", even in Dubai). The color was supposed to be "Simple Peach" but it turned out a little more orange that we had expected. But we still like it.
Also note: The bedspread doesn't match and will be replaced with something cool and fun and matching. Soon.
Of course we had to borrow a ladder from the school to get to the ceiling, and they could only spare it for one day (you'd think the university would have more than one ten foot-- er, three and a half meter ... ladder, but maybe not?). Hopefully we'll borrow it again next weekend and paint the living room. Look for photos next week.
Oh, and lastly the other week when we repotted our plants we had to buy a ton of soil, so I grabbed a few packets of seeds - parsley and chives. After a week or so of germinating, we got our first parsley sprout.
