Busy Week

This week has been pretty busy for me and I've been getting out a lot.  On Monday, I joined some friends for a Canadian Thanksgiving dinner at the Palm Sport Resort.  It was a nice setting with red being the theme and little Canadian flags here and there.  Unfortunately, the food was somewhat lacking.  Great turkey but bizzare stuffing and no pumpkin pie.  The Halloween party will be there later in the month so I have to look into getting a costume made up.

From left to right; Sharen, Serge, Louise and Julie...I'm in the window/mirror

I also locked myself out of the apartment on the way to the dinner.  I hadn't put an extra key anywhere because I hadn't found a safe spot yet so I was stranded out in the hallway when I came back from the hotel.  Interestingly, the procedure would normally require me to call the police who would verify my occupancy and then sign a document allowing a locksmith to break in for me.  This apparently takes hours so I was relieved when the handyman from the college came with his tools and banged away until we got in.  He replaced the lock for about $30.  I now have a spare key in my purse and another one hidden away so that shouldn't happen again. 


On a happier note, I went to Abu Dhabi for the Film Festival this weekend. 

Cotton Candy in a cup from our gas station stop on the way to Abu Dhabi

I went with Patreshia, Tania and Lisa and we stayed at the Hilton which was on the beach and within walking distance of the main theaters and a huge mall.  We spent our first morning at the Emerati Palace Hotel looking at the incredible fixtures and art.  There was even an ATM for buying ounces of gold. 

The Palace

The gold ATM...seriously!!!

The view from the palace

There was also a museum in the Palace and we could see old pictures of the city as well as future models of an incredible plan to make Abu Dhabi the Culture Capital of the world...it's pretty impressive with a whole island devoted to museums, aquariums, galleries and performance halls.

Abu Dhabi beach in the 1970s

Abu Dhabi beach now

A future cultural center

We hit the film festival later in the day.  It was fairly well run and I had bought my tickets online.  I saw two films which were worth mentioning.  The Cave of Forgotten Dreams was a 3D look at a cave in France that has the oldest known cave paintings.  What amazed me about this was that the artists had used the curvature of the rock to emphasize movement and musculature of the animals.  The 3D imaging really made this clear.  The other movie I saw was City Dark and it was fantastic.  It was about how we're loosing the night sky due to light pollution and it dealt with the emotional to the physical and everything in between.  It was fantastic and, I think, as important as Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth.

The others saw more artistic type movies so we had a lot to compare over our meals and drinks.  I also got some shopping in so I now have my boots and a backpack for my trip to Nepal...I can't wait.

From left to right; Patreshia, Lisa, me and Tanya at the Hilton lounge in Abu Dhabi

This has been a bad week at work.  We had a big meeting about holidays.  It was bad news on the holidays and then there was an email giving more bad news about housing allowances.  This, compounded with a freeze on wages this year has really soured a lot of my co-workers and everyone is grumbling and talking about leaving.  Not the greatest environment for me to be starting in and it seems like it might be an indication of future trouble for the colleges and the country.  To add insult to injury, my boss insists that I give up one of my weekend days next weekend to sit at a conference.  

To end this on a positive note, I'll show you a picture of a restaurant I went to last week.  Great butter Chicken.



We aat outside in the back, under the palm trees and ate our dinner on lounges...very cool!!!