A Quiet Week.

Welcome once again to Simon's Desert Blog! This week was, as the title suggests, a quiet week. The first of those I alluded to in a previous post where my life here is becoming more mundane and regular.

I did however make my first venture to my clients' offices, shown below.

It seems over here that a villa in the middle of nowhere makes for a great office of a 1.5 billion Dirham project (approx. A$500 million). It was also my first experience of Middle Eastern road rage, which consisted of flashing lights to indicate that 30km/hr over the speed limit wasn't enough, and when I finally made the turn I was looking for (and the reason I wouldn't get out of the lane), a middle finger in the side view mirror with a curt toot of the horn to ensure I looked. Anyway, back to the offices. Here's the stunning view across the street, I think you'll agree we can all be jealous.


It still strikes me as weird that it is so common practice to build houses and such out in the middle of the desert, and that they are all built at different times and people are prepared to live next to an empty site or building site for many many years. Most of these developments seem to take years and years to be completed, and are not sold or built in any particular order. I'm sure they are divided into stages and such, it just seems so higglety pigglety to me.

Below is a view from the office back towards Dubai Marina. Dubai Marina is another huge development under construction south of Dubai. There is a multitude of tall buildings going up there, and it's where most of the fancy beach side hotels are. One of the developments with the Dubai Marina is the Beach Residences, some 30 or so 40-50 storey apartment buildings, most of which seem to be very close to completed. I've been told that they are mostly vacant, with investors and the developers willing to hold empty buildings until the market is prepared to pay the rents they're asking. Considering the MASSIVE amount of stock they're holding, it's probably a good thing, the market would plummet if it was all released cheap... The only other thing of interest this week (apart from the radiator on my rental car leaking, and it taking me an entire afternoon to locate the bonnet release in the Peugeot 206) is that I bought a guitar. This guitar in fact.
http://www.hofner.com/gab/en/phpshop/43/page,shop.product_details/flypage,shop.zupf_flypage/product_id,169/category_id,83/
I got the lacewood model. It's beautiful and reasonably priced. I'm very happy with my purchase, despite the fact that in the hard case it didn't fit in the boot of the car!!

So there you have it, another entry completed, and yourselves further enlightened.