We moved yesterday. Up there, they say, stress wise, with death and divorce.
At 9 o'clock lots of little Indian men came into the house. 'There are ten of us', the main man said. This was only packers and didn't include supervisors (who did precisely nothing) and drivers (slightly less than nothing). Their numbers swelled to 14 packers by mid afternoon. At one point they formed a human chain shifting boxes and furniture much in the same way as I imagine fires were fought with buckets of water before the hosepipe was invented. This was moving Dubai style, and extremely impressive it was too. We contrasted it with our last move in the UK when two old overweight men, sans packing, loaded our stuff into a van for twice as much money.
When they finally left at 8 in the evening our house had been miraculously transported into the new villa. Although there are still a few teething problems, it's hard to imagine how things could have gone better.
We've also just returned from two weeks holiday back home in the UK visiting friends and family, all of whom did their best to fatten us up further. The weather was generally kind to us. However, once you have experienced summer in the UAE it is hard to take seriously complaints that 27 degrees is 'too hot'. When we landed at Dubai Airport on our return, at 1.30 in the morning, it was 36 degrees.
Most of our neighbours leave in slightly more impressive villas than we do...
Still, this is our (shared) garden. Not bad.
