DXB Brinkworth

After eight months living abroad we finally took our first holiday. On October 17 We headed home to Australia for four full weeks.  Work had been quite hectic leading up to this. My manager is still unsure how I managed to get her approval for this amount of leave.  It was quite simple really, quietly mumble the request while she was distracted talking to someone else, and just take any of her body language as a positive response.

The flight from Dubai to Australia is a long one - wind-assisted and direct it’s still 14 hours.  I scored some big brownie points and let Elle take the business class seat, while I had the kids in economy. The plane was so full we had no choice, despite us deciding to forego our contractual business class seat to sit altogether.

On my own it was a little worrying to think of the large number of hours for a five year old and a baby to fly, but it really did go quite quickly. Myles and Lewis were an absolute dream. Lewis, our baby beefcake, is now 12kgs which means he’s too heavy to go in the bassinet to sleep, but not light enough to want him sitting on your lap for almost a whole day.  It started with some humour. Myles always took a lot of interest in the safety card of each aeroplane.  He’d study it for 10-15 minutes, each side, and ask lots of questions if there’s something he didn’t completely understand. Well, this time it was Lewis’s turn. To keep him occupied, I handed him a few different cards from the seat pocket, and Lewis started reading the safety card intently. Myles noticed this, and gave some classic 5 year old big brother advice, “Lewis, that’s a sad, sad, story”.

I managed to get a lovely neighbour from the UK named Pam who was very helpful when things got too busy. She didn’t have to do too much, but it was great at times such as when Myles decided to go to the toilet more often than normal. The novelty of the small toilets was too much for him.  He also suggested he needed to brush his teeth numerous times after they gave him a tiny toiletry set.

The cabin crew were really good to Myles, and they clearly enjoyed his company. This was despite Myles earlier showing no loyalty to our beautiful Emirates airline, and buying an Aer Lingus airport set. This is the second time he’s done this. When they flew to Dubai he came proudly displaying the same airport set with QANTAS insignia.

Elle did a stint in economy, which allowed me to at least get some business class tucker and watch a movie.

And before I knew it, we were in Brisbane to start our holiday.  My brother picked us up in our X-Trail, and we had a go at driving on the other side of the road again. Funnily, it’s harder to change back from left-side drive to right-side drive, than it was to originally change over. We had to modify our driving considerably from how we’ve learned to drive Dubai for fear of getting locked up by Queensland Police.

We got to my parent’s place where a huge Welcome home banner got our immediate attention.

We deliberately made very few concrete plans in case any of us suffered badly with the effects of jetlag. In the end there was nothing major,the kids adapted particularly well. Before we left, Lewis was napping four times a day, and eating at every other opportunity. The six hour time difference just means meal #3 lines up with maybe meal #1, which he has had no complaints about.

The only thing scheduled for our trip was my graduation ceremony on the 22nd of October at Monash University in Melbourne. This left us about a week of hanging around Burpengary to relax into holiday mode. Which did take a little while.  One thing that helped though was trying to complete a cryptic crossword for the first time. They really a nonsensical form of torture. Their baffling effect focuses all your thinking on just how unintelligent you are - a great way to forget the stresses of work.  Eventually I probably got a quarter of the clues, and that’s where it was left.

Myles (and Corey) with one of his bream

We were quite fortunate to have my brother take Myles & I out fishing in his boat on his day off.  The location was Scarborough, and with Corey living less than 2 minutes from the boat ramp I correctly assumed he had sufficient local knowledge to make it a successful trip.

Myles & I talked it up in the car about who was going to catch the most number of fish.  Obviously I supported his totally unrealistic goal to catch the most number of fish, but put little actual thought into it coming true.  It didn’t take long to learn that Myles was a superior fisherman to me, with is probably not too surprising.  But landing more fish than Corey - the keen angler - and LARGER fish as well was quite unexpected although a great result for any five year old.  The results were Ryan 1 fish, too small. Corey 3 fish, all too small. And Myles 5 fish, 4 of them HUGE enough to eat. Which we did that evening. Thanks Corey!

And after a day and night in Melbourne the travel plans were to spend two weeks in Tasmania, then one final week in Queenland before flying back to Dubai on the 12th of November, which is approaching at the speed of light.

Ryan Adventures, Family news Australia, Brisbane, Corey, fishing, holidays

Late last month Elle and I took advantage of my parents coming to Dubai and jetted off to Germany for a long weekend on our own. Despite appearences, it wasn’t just for a dirty weekend, there was actually some purpose to the trip. I’ve set a goal to complete the “Big 5″ marathons of the world, and decided that Berlin would be a good place to start.

The trip started off on a sour note, when we got bumped from our scheduled flight due to the extremely busy Eid long weekend rus of passengers.  For the uninitiated (like we were), the break of Ramadan means public holidays so a lot of people make the most of it and travel. 

We managed to get on a flight later in the day, but had to change our plans as we missed our connecting flight from Munich to Berlin. We ended up arriving in Munich at around 9:00pm and then had to find a hotel for the night. We got completely confused by the train ticketing machine completely in German, so we decided our best bet would be to get a taxi to Munich to find a hotel. we probably should have done more research, as we discovered once we were in the taxi and on the road, that Munich city is actually quite a distance from the aiport and hotels are scattered all over the place.

The taxi driver tried to discourage us from trying the nearby hotels saying they would be fully booked due to the Oktoberfest.  His suggestion was that he drive us 55 Euros away, and then take us back to the airport in the morning - after another 55 Euros later.  But we insisted he stop at the Sheraton so I could see if they had room.  The lady at reception looked at me strangely and said, of course we have vacancies.

Something else surprised me at reception.  In Dubai pornography - anything close to it - is strictly illegal so you just don’t see it at all.  However, when I was standing at the hotel’s front desk, staring right at me was the cover model for Playboy completely topless!  I don’t think I’ve been overly interested in such images since I was 17, but having this strange sight was extremely distracting.  Quite a Europe welcome.  A similar thing greeted us in the rooms, where the TV had 1 movie channel and 4 adult channels.

The next morning we caught a flight to Berlin and managed to hit some random buttons on the ticket machine which spat out a ticket enabling us to catch a bus into the city. After asking a friendly policeman for directions, we eventually located our hotel.  We stayed in the Mercure de Charite.  With the terrible currency conversion between the UAE Dirham and the Euro it was disappointing to find that Charite didn’t mean we were staying in a shelter for the poor and destitute.  Actually we found the hotel through the marathon’s web site according to the distance to the start line - which was just perfect.

I had a few worries going into the marathon.  Most of my training has been through the summer period with frequent and mandatory water stops, so I wasn’t sure I had done sufficient distance training.  My concerns became reality at around the 25km mark when my legs started cramping terribly.  I was on track for a reasonable time until this point.  But with all the stops I saw all my goal times pass me by.  In the end I realised 4hrs was at risk so I really had to knuckle down.  Towards the end I felt terrible agony.  Everything was telling me to stop, except for the million+ spectators. In short it was an amazing experience.

Folllowing the race I was hobbling quite a bit.  I met up with Elle on the steps of the Reichstag where I had to sit for some time.   The Corona helped a little.  The walk from the finish line back to the hotel probably took 10 times longer than it did that morning. I slept extremely well that night. 

We missed a day in  Berlin before the race due to the missed flight, so we decided to change our plans a little and try to see a few of the sights the next day then hit Munich and the Oktoberfest later in the day and night.  We did the Reichstag Dome tour, a look around Brandenburg.  Then we left the big smoke for the largest palace in Berlin at Charlottenburg. The whole area was beautiful, and something definitely worth seeing.

We caught the underground back to the airport and made our way to Munich.  By this stage we were seasoned veterans at buying tickets in Germany, but we didn’t need to.  A very friendly German guy gave us a tip that the tickets were priced so they were cheaper as a group of 3 or more - which he had the ticket for already. We got out of it for free, although we gave him 10 Euros anyway.  He was a lovely guy and kept us entertained the whole way.  We knew we were onto a good thing when he mentioned he works at the airport in IT and “it’s shit”.

Unfortunately my limping got worse, so we found our hotel and crashed.  Any thoughts of hitting Oktoberfest that evening were dashed by the allure of a nice warm bath.

We had plenty of time at the airport so I trialled all the local beers on display to try and compensate for missing Oktoberfest the night before.

The w’end flew by, and we arrived safe and sound in Dubai late on Tuesday night.

Ryan Adventures, Newsworthy Berlin, Germany, running, travel

I was without internet for so long, that once it was connected I forgot what it was I missed about it.  But I am now able to blog with some sort of regularity, I just have to get back into the rhythm.

As always, we’ve found a lot to keep us busy.  Let’s see how much of the past three months I can remember.

Moving to Tecom
We finally moved into our “permanent” Emirates accommodation in Tecom - Al Barsha.  There were many trials and tribulations in finally getting here, but they’re almost all forgotten now.   And besides, the delays I had were nothing compared to some of the guys before me.

Now it’s all finally happened, I can’t remember all the noteworthy events.  With the internet and TV connected, I can say we’re as settled in as we’ll ever be.  There was a few sad moments when we left our former apartment in Deira. Both Myles and Lewis had grown quite fond of our security guy, Manoj and our cleaners Sathi, and Kargenny.  Due to a mistake in translation we also called him “Clinian” for some time without anyone saying anything.  We’ve dropped in a few times since for a chai (local tea), which has made all parties happy.  In fact the first time we visited Manoj again he said plainly to me, “Please don’t forget me sir” which I could never do.

In Tecom it’s been nice to see other families around, and even most of the cabin crew have been great.  Myles has certainly started making an impression.  I took  the kids up to the pool area last week, and there was a lady and her daughter.  We got on well, and shared our room numbers so the kids could play together.  As we were getting out from the pool the lady had just finished saying it was nice to see other kids around when Myles headed back into the pool, yelling to me “I have to footy snot”.  With this he proceeded to lean down from the pool deck so he could blow his nose in the water - metres from the lady’s daughter.  It was amazing that they could see the funny side of it.  At the time I couldn’t, I was too busy looking for a large rock to hide under.  Myles and I had a good chat following this about proper footy snot etiquette.

Elle and Jo upstairs have taken some initiative and started a facebook group for the families of Tecom.  We probably had 40-50 people attend. It happened to coincide with Myles’s 5th birthday so he had a captive audience to help him get through his birthday cake.

School
We finally got a place for Myles to attend foundation school. He had been enjoying nursery, but approaching five he had the opportunity to step up, so from the 7th of September, he’s been a student of Regent International School. It was an interesting process.  When I first arrived in February I started calling around the different schools, and each and every one claimed to be full, and they had huge waiting lists.  Regent just happened to be the closest school to our apartment, it had all the prerequisite things on the web site we were looking for, and they had plenty of spaces.

Like most schools, Myles had to undertake a brief assessment. It turned out the lady was just looking for any learning difficulties or personality challenges. She tested him by drawing the outline of a car and getting him to put the wheels on, and to colour it. She may have started to worry a little when he proceeded to add a thin vertical line of each and every colour she had.  I can almost visualise her curious expression at him not simply colouring the car simply.  In fact, and she went on to ask him why he was doing it that way, which Myles had an instant reply “It’s the Rainbow Sheikh’s car”.  Classic.  Weeks earlier we had visit the Rainbow Sheikh’s free car museum - which clearly left an impression.

Internet connection
All I’ll say is, I shall never complain about the quality of telecommunication companies or the care they provide in Australia again.

Visitors
It has been good to have some visitors from home come stay with us.  We couldn’t really do it well in our last place, but there’s more than enough room now.  In August we had my brother stay, and early this month we had my parents stay for nearly a month.

We didn’t do too many things out of the ordinary, but it was good to give them both a taste of Dubai.  Corey especially so. He got to see a common site (not really) of a brand new Lamborghini dragging off a brand new Ferrari down Jumeirah Road.  It was something to behold, even for the BMW police car that was parked on the side of the road at the time.

Ramadan
We experienced our first ramadan period. It was certainly different to not be able to drink or eat outside during daylight hours.  But the time went extremely very quickly. We attended a few Iftars, which is the large buffet meal Muslims typically eat to break the fast.

Metro
As per their plan, the Metro was launched on the 09/09/09  for VIPs.  The day after it was for the rest of us, but it was too busy when we tried to catch it.  Unfortunately they’ve had a few teething problems.  In fact there was a story published that the metro had a glitch one night during Ramdan which prevented people from breaking their fast.  It was a nice story that some people apparently divided up the bags of shopping they had to share with their fellow Muslims.

The metro’’s a great way to travel though.  It’s hard to believe how quiet it is.  Once our local station opens I’ll consider catching it to work each morning.  I’ve tried it once on the way, and there was a 30 min delay.  And on the way home twice there have been similar holdups. Probably a good reason to leave it a while to get over these hiccups.

Ryan Family news, Newsworthy accommodation, Corey, school, Tecom