KTMusings

Nothing like getting Christmas cards out just as I'm leaving town for a week :) I posted my letter here (click on it to get a bigger view), along with some of the pictures that correspond with my news. And check out my Dubai adventures below. Here's wishing you a very merry Christmas and a blessed 2009!! January - I volunteered with Big Brothers/Big Sisters and was matched with my 9 year old "sister" Talaisha: March - Quinton Daniel Rude arrived on 3/24. I got to spend a weekend with him and got in some quality nap time: May - girls' weekend in Phoenix: May - Dana and Ryan's wedding in Minneapolis: July - 5 year reunion weekend in Milwaukee: August - fun in the Dells with Meg, Dan, and Quinn: October - visiting the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville: October - Sister (plus Quinn!) weekend at Dana's in Minneapolis: November - Thanksgiving at Dana's: December - fun at a Marquette game:

Atlantis had it's grand opening the night we left Dubai. We missed the fireworks, unfortunately, but apparently they had such an outrageous show that you could see them from space! Article here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27829151

The 16 hour flight wasn't much fun, but I managed to sleep for 5 hours or so at the beginning, so that helped the time go by a little more quickly. I had a middle seat this time around, which was a pain. After getting through customs and immigration, and a short layover in Atlanta, we were in Detriot with a very short layover before heading to Madison. No delays anywhere, which was great! The only problem was that my bag decided to stay in Detriot for a while. I got home and was all set to take a shower (after being up for 38 hours or so (I kind of lost count!) it sounded great) ... and then realized I turned off my water heater while I was gone. So I had to postpone the shower a few hours. And my bag still isn't here, but I did get a call that it made it to Madison. So hopefully in the next few hours I'll have it dropped off.

We wrapped up our last day onsite (Thursday) a little early so we had the evening to explore some more before we went to the airport. We realized how quick of a walk it was from our hotel to DHCC - it seemed so much further when we drove every morning. Here's a shot of one of the buildings there. On the far left through the archway is their new data center. I got a tour on Thursday and it was really impressive. DHCC sign and logo ... and more construction: I felt like I was in London when I saw this bus! We spent the evening at Wafi mall - it's not nearly the size of the Mall of the Emirates, but there was a huge Emirati population, which was nice to see. They had lots of high end stores and then in the basement was a really elaborate layout of souks (markets). We did some shopping down there and then had dinner. I had the Egyptian equivalent of a casserole - rice, lentils, pasta, tomato sauce, and fried onions - it was fantastic!!! And we had a great view - the resta...

This morning we got a tour of City Hospital in DHCC. It just opened 3 weeks ago and only has an inpatient census of about 12-20 patients currently. They are targeting a high end market and you would not believe how gorgeous the place is! They have a VIP floor ... which actually just means, if you can afford to pay out-of-pocket (anywhere from 7500-20,000dh ($3k-8k) per night!) you can stay in an elaborate suite. The first two tiers of suites were like 5 star hotel rooms with a living room connected to the patient's room. The royal suite was incredible - the patient's room, office, huge living room, 2 bathrooms, and another living/dining room with chandeliers and a dining room table that seated 10. And you get a private chef available 24x7. They also had a spa / work out room / sauna / pool available to the VIP guests. Crazy. I did get some more pictures of the construction in DHCC and a nice shot of downtown. Here's the view of the University Hospital (aka the big hole) an...

Some of the UH team took us out for dinner tonight. We went to a restaurant right on the river and had a great view of downtown. The weather here actually was a little cool tonight (I was glad I had my suit jacket with me), but I keep reminding myself I'm flying home to snow tomorrow! The bright lights you see on the left are at a soccer field - there's a big soccer tournament going on over here. The UAE U-19 team won the other day and the Sheikh gave each of them 500,000 dh (~$130K) and a house! The team from Iran is staying at our hotel and are quite noisy. This is my only decent shot of the skyline from tonight:

We had to watch the Staff Meeting Monday night in our hotel. They had a streaming video feed for us ... which never actually came through enough for us to see anything. And the sound continuously cut out. The internet latency over here is horrible, so it was a torturous two hours. Anyway, we did get excited when we gathered that they were showing UH's intro video - here's the group gathered around the laptop (even though we couldn't really see anything, for some reason we all huddled up :) and cheered!):

We have lots of work to do this week, but a couple of us needed a short break tonight and took a cab up to the Westin near Palm Jumeriah for dinner. We ate at an Italian restaurant at the hotel that was absolutely fabulous! Scott took some cool pictures of the city at night; I'll have to post them when I get copies. From our table we could see out towards the Palm - the new Atlantis resort was all lit up! The Westin itself was GORGEOUS (a couple pics from their website): Earlier in the week I'd been scoping out Palm Jumeirah online - I did pick out my favorite floorplan from here: http://www.palmjumeirah.ae/ Now, when I actually have enough money to afford to hire someone to be my maid and make use of the maid's room in the house, I may think about actually buying ... :)

We toured a clinic and outpatient surgery center in DHCC (Dubai Healthcare City) this morning. There was a great view of the construction in DHCC, but also a cool shot of some of the buildings. I like the outdoor patios - these are near the waiting areas.

So remember when I wrote about our desert safari? Look at the front page story in the paper here today: We read the story and this picture below is of the actual camp we were at Friday night! Also check out this other front page story ... if you read the details you'll see that there were 47 accidents, 16 injuries, and 2 deaths on the roads due to 6.0mm of rain.

No exciting news today. It was weird getting ready for work knowing everyone at home was getting ready for Saturday night on the town ... I guess this made up for the great feeling of starting my weekend while everyone was in their Thursday morning meetings! Not sure what all else we'll get to see here; tomorrow night we have to watch the staff meeting (on at 8:30pm over here), Wednesday night the UH team is taking us to dinner, and Thursday night we leave, so that just leaves Tuesday night. We may try to get out to Palm Jumeirah for dinner at one of the restaurants at Atlantis.

Today a few of us took a cab out to the Mall of the Emirates ( http://www.malloftheemirates.com/ ) - a very nice, very large mall ... complete with its own indoor downhill skiing area! Rachel and I went to Ski Dubai - for $50 you got ski rental, jacket & snowpant rental, and a 2 hour lift ticket. The coolest thing was the lift tickets - they were actually proximetry key cards that you wore in a little pocket in the shoulder of the jacket, and you skied through a turnstile before getting to the lift and it read your card and told you how many minutes of your two hours you had left. The hill itself had really only two runs, though the lift let you off halfway up for new skiers. They also had a bunny hill and lots of snowy play areas for kids where they could ski or go tubing. There was also a massive jump with a big blowup pillowy bag to land on. It was very odd to have the lift attached to the ceiling (painted sky blue), plus there were several fake fir trees around. There was a cut...

So today was the first day of the weekend and all week we'd all been looking forward to our desert safari trip to go dune bashing. We got picked up at the hotel in the afternoon - don't we look excited? A shot of the downtown skyline on the way out to the desert: After driving for about 40 minutes, we stopped at a small convenience store to use the bathrooms, buy water, and let some of the air out of the tires of the Land Rover. Then it was off the road and into the desert! After driving just a ways, we got out to take a few pictures, then we went out into the desert plowing up and sliding down the sand dunes. There was a whole caravan of vehicles from the tour group (there were a few vehicles not associated with a tour, but it looked like a lot of people who do this on their own find a different area to go - and I don't blame them - there were tons of tours out there!). I captured a pretty anticlimactic part here, but it gives you a bit of an idea. It kinda felt like driv...

So tonight after work we decided to get dinner and then go out to the souks (markets) in old Dubai. It's the start of the weekend here (they work Sun-Thurs), so we figured we'd have plenty of time to explore and everyone assured us they'd be open until at least 11pm. We went to dinner at Lemongrass - a restaurant someone told us served arguably the best Thai food in Dubai. And since Dubai has some amazing food ... well, it was great Thai food! We then took a cab across the Dubai Creek to the old part of Dubai. He left us off a ways away from the souks so we started wandering that direction and found some streets busy with locals. And LOTS of bright lights and signs! Some interesting names/signs on the stores: After making our way further west, we found the spice souks! Everyone had spices out in front of the booths and invited you in to their little storefronts to barter. A couple of the girls bought some things at one of the souks. Only about 4 spice souks were open. The...