small blog improvement

If we may direct your attention to the right column of the page, you will see the newly added Quick Links section. From there you can go to our picture page, as well as some other places: Matthias (Fiver's brother) has started a blog to document his move to Weener in the North of Germany, have a look. Every now and then we may add other sites, let us know about yours.

Matthias (Fiver's brother) has started a blog to document his move to Weener in the North of Germany, have a look. Every now and then we may add other sites, let us know about yours.

Mirrorball Camel

Oh, no, not another camel!

But this is special, really. The last of the camels are displayed at Dubai Internet City, the free zone that houses Oracle, MS, Canon, IBM, all that. This one has replaced my previous favourite. It is just too glittery.

(Dedicated to Jason and all things glitterball)

Hygiene is King!

This is a clean place! There is wiping and polishing and mopping and hoovering and sweeping going on here at all times.

On the occasion of the first visit from the cleaners here are some observations on cleanliness in Dubai (and hot climates in general?).

When our belongings were unpacked, we found that we had imported a huge amount of Ipswich dust. Luckily Crown sent us a cleaner as part of their excellent relocation service. A young lady spent 4 hours hoovering and wiping to make the place spotless. Anna was most impressed with the fact that when she was finished she went around every room again to check that she hadn't missed anything.

The company who provides our porter service also does cleaning, so we signed up for a twice-weekly service. We were expecting a similar thing to the Crown cleaner, but instead found 5 guys at the door last Thursday. They blitzed the place with mops and dusters, cleaning the bathrooms, straightening the furniture and polishing the glass table tops. Every room we went to to escape the cleaning rush we got in the way of some other busy person. Incredible!

Dubai's buildings seem to be designed to make window cleaning necessary but difficult. There are creative uses of glass sheeting, with strange angles and hard-to-get-to corners. Still we regularly see guys in baskets hanging off cranes to wash the windows. The other day we walked into the living room to see them disappearing down the outside walls.