Kitties First Bubbles

Per Granny’s request, here is a record of Oliver and Bert’s Christmas gift. Had to split it into two parts.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas, everyone. We aren’t doing anything too spectacular this year. Christmas tends to sneak up on us here. I fully intended to get decorations up and have a festive December, but it just didn’t happen. Our artificial Christmas tree is still in the box and the box is under our bed serving as a support to keep the bed from sagging. It is stuck there until we find a substitute. I fully intended to get some shopping done and ship presents home, but that didn’t come to fruition either. With Paul working all the time at his “part-time” job and me spending weekends struggling to make a dent in the housework and laundry, shopping just didn’t happen. Christmas eve we did manage to get to a mall and shop for presents for each other, but that is the extent of it.

I got up early this morning because there was lightning. I went to the living room to watch it with the cats. The storm was actually north in Sharjah, so the lightning and a little thunder was all we got here.

Daddybird is still sleeping and we are waiting patiently for him to get up so we can open presents. We got a bubble blowing machine for the cats. I can’t wait to see how much fun that turns out to be. Hopefully, it will entertain Oliver when he gets in one of his yowling moods.

Daddybird: “Merry Christmas!”

Kanga: “Happy Holidays!”

Bert: “mew”

Oliver: “MAH-WOO!”

Cabinet

Prior to the cats coming to live with us, we kept our clean towels on open rack shelving. As you can imagine, our clean towels were not so clean once kittens came to stay, especially since we had to shut them in the bathrooms until they got used to each other. So, we now have a lovely painted cabinet to keep our towels out of the reach of cats.

Restaurant Signs

I took a walk during my holiday break to gather a few pictures of the signs that are amusing due to spelling or images or business name choice. First is the Exzotica Restaurant which is a Russian restaurant.
It had the ever present chef image. He is labeled “pectopah” and I had to do a little research to discover that is the transliteration for the Russian word for restaurant.

Here we have the Fast Food Restaurant and the Fast Meal Restaurant which are about two doors down from each other.
Below is the Generous Visitors Restaurant. I’m not sure if this means that they are generous to visitors or they expect visitors to be generous.

Happy Cat

We ate at a Turkish restaurant which had some of the best freshly made bread we’ve had, yet. There was one piece left so we brought it home just for Oliver. He can be quiet and happy. He just needs the right toy.

Notice how my camera’s autofocus has trouble dealing with a white cat on a white background?

Cat comparisons

We have another new favorite restaurant. This one is on Al Muteena street not far from our apartment. It is a Arabic food restaurant, but our waiter is Tunisian and loves to practice his English on us. He is very interesting and amusing. He gives us a hard time if we don’t come every few days. He counts and tells us if he knew where we lived he would have come to check on us. Our first time at the restaurant I tried to order “fool” which is a bean dish, but he told me “No, no good…Egyptian…you don’t want.” So, I guess I’ll never get to test it for myself. Not that I’ve had enough fool to know good from bad. I also ordered an avocado shake for my drink. He was taken aback by this and warned me that it is a “strong drink.” It turned out to be heavenly. It is an avocado smoothy with a dollup of cream and blanched almonds. Yummy! I finished it off and he was impressed by that. So, now I don’t have to tell him what drink I want. He knows.

Like all restaurants with outdoor seating, this one had a stray hanging around to clean up any scraps. This is the healthiest street cat we’ve seen. From a cursory examination, it appeared to be a female, although she must have been spade.
She had a sweet little voice, so we we dallied with the idea of exchanging Oliver for her. But, upon interviewing her, we found she lacked certain qualifications. She doesn’t play fetch. She probably wouldn’t let me cradle her like a baby.

When we got home, we gave Oliver the new toy we picked up at the pharmacy. (Yes, we get our cat toys at the pharmacy because he likes gel toe cushions.) He entertained us greatly reveling in his new toy. So, we’ll keep the noisy little knothead.

Oliver the Loud

So, when we complain about Oliver, this is what we are complaining about. He does this at any time of day or night. No real reason other than he is bored and wants to be entertained. Even his playmate Bert gets tired of him and goes off to hide from him, especially when he is acting like this. We have tried “water therapy,” (by which I mean squirting him with a water spray bottle) and he does not make the connection between being sprayed and being noisy. Distraction or locking him in another room are the only working responses to date. If it weren’t for the thick concrete walls of our apartment building we would have been thrown out for noise disturbance by now.

Naif

Here is a fun example of driving through Naif. Naif is a crowded neighborhood not far from where we live. There are lots of little shops, lots of little winding, narrow streets, lots of jaywalking pedestrians, lots of men pushing carts, and one amazing example of parallel parking. Enjoy!

(This was not our destination, but getting there was half the fun.)

Location, Location, Location

The rule of thumb that the three most important things are “location, location, and location” doesn’t play out here. In America, businesses are rarely placed near their competitors. The thought is to be the only supplier of your goods or services in the area (unless you are Starbucks and the aim is to be on every  corner).

Here, businesses are clustered together with their competitors. I think it comes from the tradition of souks, such as the gold souk, spice  souk, or fish market, where all the suppliers of a particular product are together in one area. The picture below is just a few blocks from where we live. There are 10 rental car offices in the picture. There were more, but I couldn’t get them all in a single picture.

Happy National Day!

Thirty-eight years ago today the United Arab Emirates came into being. It existed prior to that, but it was referred to as the Trucial States and lacked a centralized government.

We recently visited Shindagha (a second time) and toured the house of Sheikh Saeed bin Makhtoum al Makhtoum (grandfather to the current ruler of Dubai) which is a very nice and educational museum. We highly recommend it. They have a nicely displayed collection of photographs, coins, currency, stamps and documents.

Large homes of this period are a series of rooms around a courtyard. Three, possibly four generations lived here at one time. This house fell into disrepair, but underwent a detailed and thorough reconstruction in the 1980′s. The structures with the poles sticking out of them are wind towers which funnel any breeze from any direction down into the house as a form of early air conditioning. This particular area is right on the coast, so there is a fair amount of breeze, even in the hot months.