Week one in Abu Dhabi...

As you will notice from my lack of grammar and spelling skills we are still very jet lagged and sleep deprived.  We arrived here in Abu Dhabi last Friday evening on 20, August 2010 (getting used to backwards dates).  We have connected with quite a few families from facebook here in our hotel and created a nice social network already of teachers headed to Al Ain in the near future.  This is nice because I get to be surrounded by support and Gavin has lots of new kiddos to play with!  The hotel we are staying at is a the Rotana Beach Abu Dhabi and it is a beautiful 5 star hotel attached to the Abu Dhabi mall, which is pretty amazing in itself.  The mall is filled with exotic perfume stores, designer stores like Dolche and Cabana, Rolex etc.  There is a great food court as well that we visit every night that has Hardees, McDonalds, Subway, and also ranges in delicious foods from Iranian to Eastern Indian.  To keep on the topic of food the breakfast buffet here at the hotel has been amazing!  There is a whole spread just of delicous and decadent desserts, then there is veal sausage and turkey bacon, and random appetizers from vegetable cutlets to shrimp balls to shrimp spring rolls. 

I have had a bit of an issue with my entry visa as in I have not received it yet, which means that I haven't had my medical exam and cannot get my fingerprints done...inshallah it will all work out and come together. 

Two days ago we ventured outside of the hotel and mall area for the first time and took a taxi to the Marina Mall which has the Carrefour and the Ikea, another fantastic mall and loved driving around the city in the taxi cab.  The city is stringed in colorful lights readng Ramadam Kareem, which means happy ramadam!

Today we plan to venture out again and see Herritage Village which is the equivelant to an old town so we can learn a little bit more about the culture and then again to Carrefour (the fancy wal-mart) store.  We got some oldschool Nokia prepaid phones which make me laugh after being so used to our androids in the states...mike won't even text with it lol.