More from Dubai

Well its our 4th day here in Dubai. Yesterday was our best day by far, however the girls did get car sick. There are speed bumps and round abouts all over the place which makes for a curvy, bumpy ride. We saw a couple of apartments and villas yesterday. Of course very different from the states, but also very cool. The villas all have walls around them with a small garden in back or in front. Makes you feel like your in a quiet hide-away from the world - sort of anyhow - the other side of the wall is your neighor and you can hear them. Picking where to live is far more important than the villa itself. Traffic here is very heavy most of the time so we need to find a location that will be good for Larry to work and the girls to go to school. One of the schools that we would like the girls to go to is going to move for back to school 2009, so we have to take that into consideration too. Its nice that Larry is moving here for a while alone, he can take the time to figure that one out before we have to make a decision.

Another challenge here is communcation. Yes, almost everyone speaks English, but first off it is British English so there are different words for things. Plus... well... hard to explain, you can just see that you are not being understood, so you stay it a different way and still get the same response. I am sure in time we will get better with our communication skills. And we all hope to learn Arabic. You don't need to learn it to live here, but it still would be awsome to learn.

It is time to get the girls up. I am letting them sleep late today. Larry went to the office to meet everyone. The girls and I stayed at the hotel to sleep and work on homework. We will meet up with Larry around noon to visit the American Academy of Dubai. This afternoon we are hoping to visit the soukes (I need to look up the correct spelling), it means local market.

Oh one more silly little thing. We will have to take pictures of the toilets here. They do have western toilets (which is a huge improvement - I was expeting to see the toilets that are holes in the ground with spots to put your feet while squating), but they still have hoses that you use to clean with. I can't imagine how you do that without getting water all over your clothes, the toilet and the ground. We'll have to practice that in our villa before trying it in a public toilet. Until then its TP all the way with this family! :) (Oh that means that you must travel around with TP in your backpack.)