Abu Dhabi

We have a massive day of travel from Kathmandu on the 20th of May.

We leave Kathmandu for New Delhi where we have a six-hour wait followed by a flight to Mumbai where we wait for another four hours. We arrive in Abu Dhabi at about 3am in the morning. Rachel is waiting for us and together we get a taxi back to her apartment.

We are all relieved to be staying in a home for a few days and Rachel has been communicating with us about menus and home cooked meals that she can make while we’re there. She has been living in Abu Dhabi for almost two years, working at the American Community School and the family staying is pretty novel. I’m sure that feeling will pass fairly soon.

Driving from the airport to the apartment we can’t get over the wide empty roads and the opulence everywhere. Whilst we were expecting it, the reality is so different from India and Nepal and we are still on high alert in the back seat. Apparently, beeping your car horn is illegal here so at least it’s a quieter ride. We are travelling at about 120km an hour which is a little unnerving but people are driving in their own lanes, which is a comfort.

We wake up the next morning to this crazy view. No one is in the park because it is already too hot, but it’s nice to see some green.

The apartment is like a little oasis and it is comforting to find that Rachel, as she always does, has made a beautiful little home on the other side of the world.

When she first got the job offer, the fact that she got a $12,000 furniture allowance to spend at Ikea was enough to make me want to move to Abu Dhabi. However, I can see that there are some pretty major compromises, the most obvious being the strangeness of living in a totally manufactured environment with no natural source of water and a climate where it is too hot to be outside for half of the year (and let’s be realistic, an apartment furnished entirely from Ikea might seem more like a 1950’s sitcom but I remember a time when Rachel was also exited enough to show me pictures of the casserole dish she was going to buy).

Our first day is spent eating a variety of food from Rachel’s fridge and drinking NZ Pinot Gris which Rachel had sourced from a local Western food store.

The most anticipated part of our stay is a planned trip to Yas Water World on Sunday. A lot of living here, seems to be focused around malls, theme parks and beach clubs.

I feel slightly sick thinking about it because I hate upsetting my inner-ear equilibrium. I don’t imagine that after paying about $10,000 to get in, I’ll be allowed to just lay on a deck chair sipping on a cocktail, although the private cabanas which the fancy folk can hire, are looking like more my cup of tea. Perhaps I’ll get a birkini and make my self scarce.

It ends up being an extremely fun day and I manage to fulfil most of the kids’ expectations of “action mum” even though I think I’m going to die a few times. I even manage to keep my bikini top on which is more than I can say for the woman who shares our giant inner tube on a trip down the slide. Her surgically-altered nipples are making a less-than-subtle appearance before we’ve even begun our descent. Perhaps she was too worried about losing her eyelashes to worry about her top. There are some strange aesthetics in this part of the world.

We have a home day while Rachel goes to work the next day. It is the first time that we have access to a washing machine so we are pretty exited. There is school work to catch up on and travel plans to organise for Egypt.