December Edition

Hello everyone, Happy Holidays! We're getting ready to go to Washington, we leave very early in the morning....of course I have left the writing of the gazette til the last minute, but at least I'm not worrying about what is left to do! I did make a pictoral tour of our house and neighborhood, hope you enjoy it!
We're starting from outer space...if you zoom into a map of the middle east, you'll see, on the tiny tip of the Saudi peninsula, the country of the United Arab Emirates, and there you will see,"Papo & CayCay's house" I'll try to enlarge it, but you might need a magnifying glass!

My house is all decked out for Christmas, which seems like a waste of time until you realize that decorating has helped me get a little Christmas Spirit in my heart, which helped with the youth activities we had at church. To the right of the entry is the living room, and the office is on the left.

This is the entrance,and to the right is the living room, to the left is the office. Of course, Heidi and Schatzie feel they own this sofa!

Going down the hall, we get to the kitchen, which is so big, we weren't sure what to put in it...then we discovered there was no pantry! IKEA is very popular here, and for good reason; we were able to get a nice cabinet for a reasonable price.

The other side of the windows is where the pool may be found...eight "villas", or condos, share a pool.

Unfortunately the entire front yard is smaller than the kitchen, and that is the big sacrifice we made to get the location, convenience and price we were able to negotiate for this villa.

Do I seem to have a fixation with this picture? Perhaps, but this shot shows the street and our neighbors as well. The bus shown here brings the construction workers working on the house down the street. One thing not seen here is the slums or beggars common to most countries. The reason is that the workers are given "bachelor rooms" out of town and are bussed in. It has been mentioned to me that conditions in these apartments is pretty bad. More on that in a future post!

This is around the corner from our house and shows how the custom here is to put up a wall to camoflage the construction site. Another cool custom is to offer water to strangers. This is pretty upscale, as its refrigerated, but most houses have a faucet outside that anyone can use if they need it. The picture below is the neighborhood mosque and the other picture demonstrates how they keep the grass and flowers alive. They have permanently installed irrigation. It will be turned on continuously when the weather begins to turn hotter.

Bet you've never seen a picture of the Mall of the Emirates from this particular angle before, right? That thing sticking up is the ski slope, and at night it lights up...very pretty. This is one of the landmarks that we use to navigate our way around. The other shots are of some people out side the market. I wanted to show some of the contrasts between the traditional and modern that we see.

We had a great activity at church...we made gingerbread houses for table decorations for the Christmas party at church, which was great, until we had to store them for a week in the humidity. The repairs were successful, and it was a great party!

We have really enjoyed telling our friends about our adventures here in Dubai, but it seems weird not to have to write about the year in review...we're sort of reviewing as we go along! Waldo has had some great projects going at Ford, which I will let him write about when he has the time, or when he has time to tell me enough about it that I can write about it!So we pause for a moment, to wish you a wonderful Christmas and a great New Year, and we'll write again as soon as we can!

Love, Cay

Rick has opened up a web site in which some great savings may be had. He works at Overstock.com, and this is his website: www.dealosaurus.com

It's pretty good!