Holyrockthrower: Present and accounted for.

  Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Saturday, March 10, 2007

Don't worry, you guys.  I'm still alive and well, but a lot of stuff has been happening to me recently which is why this li'l pod has been dwindling-to-inactive for the past ten or so days.  Between my own internal battles, weird parties, getting stranded by the bus system, meeting up with Kim, and not going to Abu Dhabi, I haven't had the chance to write it all down.
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...And now that I've written it all down, I can tell you about meeting up with Kim and Alex for a second time, at the Mall of the Emirates, and how I missed the snowboarding trip.  But the story of that actually begins earlier the previous day with Oman.

Now, what's Oman got to do with it, you ask?  As well you might!  Plans here shift like sand dunes...and so did my plans to go to Abu Dhabi today, when an American friend of mine got the brilliant idea to do a border crossing into Oman.  I say "brilliant idea", and I say so sarcastically, because he forgot that we needed an international driver's liscense to rent a car.  SO--I called off Abu Dhabi yesterday, and waited for him to get the car.  Around ten in the morning, he called to tell me he couldn't get a car and was going by bus instead.  By that time, it was too late to go to Abu Dhabi and still do a reasonable amount of stuff...so I went out to Dragon Mart on the opposite side of town.

My mistake.  Kim called saying she was on the way to Mall of the Emirates, and what makes this suck so badly was that she was staying in the neighborhood next to Dragon Mart, and had only just left.  So I had to catch three separate buses back to my starting point, then catch a taxi to the mall, by which time three hours had gone by, and the ski/snowboarding trip was over and done with.

Ski Slopes of Dubai

Curse that.

I met everyone at a cafe, and they proceeded to tell me every gory detail of their time on the ski slopes.  I said, "Don't tell me any more, because I'll commit suicide, because my life isn't worth living now that I've been to Dubai and never once been on the ski slopes!"

And isn't that just too bad?