Category Archives: Travel

The birthday week

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It’s DH’s birthday – a big one! The actual day was on Tuesday, but as it’s a nice round number it’s turned into something of a birthday extravaganza.

Last year, the day passed in a bit of a blur, because of a medical drama in our family. DH’s lovely brother, who also lives in Dubai, returned from Africa with flu-like symptoms that turned out to be malaria. He came to stay with us while he recovered, so while all this was going on – and I was busy swatting gnats just in case (despite being assured by the hospital there was no risk to the boys) – my attention wasn’t really on birthday celebrations.

This year, I promised myself I’d make up for it, so in dutiful wifely fashion, I’ve been busy organising a birthday DH won’t forget. I think I’ve just about managed to pull off a three-part celebration that’s taking up most of the week:

PART 1: (the day) Presents at silly o clock, before school and work. Then Bab Al Shams, a desert resort located in the middle of absolutely nowhere, for a late-afternoon swim and dinner. We’ve done our fair share of camel riding in the Middle East, so we lounged in the pool and watched tourists clambering on the camels, shrieking as they were pitched forwards at the start (camels use their knees to get up and down). It was quite comedic.

Bab Al Shams Desert Resort & Spa – not too far from where we live and very, very nice


PART 2: (the weekend) We’re taking the kids away, to Ras Al Khaimah, one of the seven emirates of the UAE, for more swimming and more desert. The resort, the Banyan Tree, looks amazing and we’re staying in a ‘Bedouin-style tented villa’. It’s not a tent, I did study the website photos carefully to check, and I suspect it won’t be the ‘oasis of serenity’ it’s advertised as once we arrive. I also just found out my boss is going there this weekend.

PART 3: (the piece de resistance) Using a ‘buy one, get one free’ voucher in the Entertainer, I’ve booked a ride on a seaplane. I may yet bottle out.

Of course, no birthday is complete without cake. Baking is not my forte so I ordered one from Bakemart. I wasn’t sure how it would turn out and fully expected something like exhibit A. So was very pleased with exhibit B, despite the squashedupwriting!

Exhibit A: On facebook (from Walmart in the US)


Exhibit B: Happy birthday DH!

Our ‘snow day’ in the Middle East

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Within hours of my first son’s birth in Minneapolis, the ground started glistening as though a fairy had sprinkled dust over the entire city.

No, I wasn’t still high on the cocktail of drugs. It was the end of November and a blizzard had set in, covering everything with a blanket of thick white snow and turning the houses, with their undisturbed snowy roofs, into works of art.

We drove BB home from the hospital – very gingerly – in a snow storm and during the first two years of his life in the midwest of America, there was snow and ice on the ground for at least four months each winter.

Yet, of all this, BB remembers nothing! Despite my valiant efforts to bundle a wriggling, obstinate toddler into an all-in-one snow suit (I honestly think it would have been easier to dress an octopus) and drag him along on a sled, he has no recollection of the fluffy, white stuff.

LB has never seen real snow and so it was with great excitement that we set off last week to the top of a mountain range in Lebanon. Our goal was to build LB’s first ever snowman and so carrots were grabbed from the kitchen, jumpers stuffed into the back of the car.

I have to admit I was sceptical: it was so hot in Beirut. How could there possibly still be snow, I wondered? The temperature remained warm even as we climbed higher – our slow ascent through 1850 metres monitored by my DH and his Dad who, being pilots, checked the altitude on the car’s GPS at every opportunity.

Songs were sung, wrong turns taken, then, low and behold, we suddenly saw snowy peaks! Real snow pasted on the already-stunning scenery like icing sugar.

In Lebanon, you can surf the sea and ski all in one day! Snowballs were thrown, of course – despite the lack of gloves

The winding mountain road led us to a ski resort called Faraya, closed now for the season but beautiful nevertheless. Beautiful and cold.

Straight out of the desert in Crocs and with a constitution that means they shiver in the refrigerated section of the supermarket, the boys whined at first – but after wrapping LB in a pashmina and donating DH’s socks to BB (who knew we’d need winter clothes in the Middle East?) we set about building our snowman with cold wet hands.

A glamorous Lebanese lass climbed on a snowmobile – driven to the very edge of the snow so she wouldn’t get her bejewelled black-suede boots wet – and set off at speed clinging to her boyfriend. If she can do it, I can too, I thought – and so I hopped on the back when the boys went for a spin.

Precious memories were made, but I have to admit one of the most memorable moments was a conversation in the car on the way up:

“Have you ever seen snow before?” my mother-in-law asked the boys.

“Yes,” they replied, nodding their heads earnestly.

“Where? In England? America?” she prompted.

“Nooo. Dubai,” corrected BB, as though it was the most obvious answer and you’d be a ninny to think otherwise.

And then, “Will we see penguins on the mountain Grannie Jane?”

Ski Dubai (our ski slope in a shopping mall and home to the most-pampered penguins in the world) has a lot to answer for!

Why every mum should go to Beirut

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I came to the conclusion this weekend that every self-deprecating housewife of a certain age needs to take a trip to Lebanon.

Lebanon combines world-famous cuisine, legendary nightlife and beautiful scenery

If nothing else, the stunning mountainous scenery, views of the sparkling Med, mind-blowing history, laid-back atmosphere – and, I should add, standing in the shadow of buildings peppered with bullet holes – will make any household worries feel a million miles away.

A night out in vibrant Beirut – fast becoming the region’s party central – mingling with friendly Lebanese locals will knock 10 years off your age (until the next morning at least). You might even come away thinking you’ve discovered the Paris of the Orient – enough to put the spring back in anyone’s step.

But there’s more. If, like me, you can’t put your finger on the exact moment, but you know that the wolf whistles started petering out a while ago – probably shortly after taking up the mantle of motherhood and just before you realised you wake up with a crease across your face that’s there till noon. If, like me, you’re a little bit worried about a big birthday just round the corner, then you really need to experience what I did this weekend in south Beirut.

We’d driven there, dodging maniac drivers, from my in-laws’ home in the mountains above Beirut to buy the kids bikes. I knew we were entering Hezbollah-land – a part of Beirut where if there’s a problem, you don’t call the police, you call the militia. And I knew we’d arrived when we spotted a missile by the side of the road.

Which I decided to go and take a photo of for my blog.

Honks from Hezbollah: I'll take my honks where I can!

So, while my father-in-law, DH and the boys looked at bikes, I went a very short way up the road to get a good picture – and realised that the background noise of car honking had suddenly become even louder. Not only that, but the men driving the vehicles were grinning at me, motioning to me and one driver, at the wheel of a tyre truck, even pulled over and tried to catch my eye.

Feeling a little unnerved – and more than a tiny-bit pleased (it’s been a while, as I said!!) – I went back to the bike shop and told DH what had just happened.

“I got honked – at least 10 times! Did you hear?”

“Really?” said DH, looking up from adjusting the handle bars on a Spider-Man bike. “Are you sure they weren’t taxis?” he laughed.

True love, eh!

Okay, so some of them were clapped out, smoke-billowing taxis looking for business, but in a part of town where anything goes – where there’s not much you can do to attract attention – I’m pretty sure I proved that a shapely blonde housewife taking photos of a missile is a traffic stopper!

Silent Sunday: Boys’ toys

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Yes, that's snow, not sand - and that is my 6yo about to go skidding up a mountain on a snowmobile in Lebanon this weekend! The antithesis of many people's image of the Middle East, laid-back Lebanon is mostly mountainous with ski resorts to boot

Europe meets Texas

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When you’re on holiday, do you ever imagine yourself living there?

In my mind, I create a fantasy, parallel life in which I’m shopping in the stores I’m browsing as a tourist, eating at the same restaurants and, somehow, have an instant circle of good friends from the local area with kids who get on like a house on fire with mine.

All this is imagined in the knowledge that the chances of us actually moving there are about the same as being relocated to the moon (actually, this is really tempting fate – DH’s job means we could end up anywhere).

Whether I do this because, being an expat, I’ve developed a case of geographical schizophrenia or because, sometimes, it’s fun to dream, I’m not sure, but I found myself at it again last week in Bavaria.

Europe: You literally trip over history at every turn

Munich – I could so live in this beautiful city! The culture, the centuries-old architecture, the chic stores, the weather – it was all so refreshing.

And not shoebox-small like you sometimes imagine Europe to be: from the beer served in one-litre mugs to the huge pretzels and the XXL wiener schnitzel (veal escalope) that covered my entire plate, I could really see why Americans love this region of Germany.

Europe meets Texas, no less – way down south and with locals dressed up in traditional clothing to boot!

The autobahn – yes, this is the way to travel, I decided. Despite making Dubai drivers look like slow coaches (no speed limits for long stretches and cars doing 180km/h, no kidding!), it was so ordered, so disciplined. Such politeness.

And the vehicles on this cleverly engineered highway (no tyre debris in sight!) – the Audis, the BMWs, the Mercedes. A bit of Vorsprung durch Technik and Germanic efficiency looked very appealing.

I didn't go so far as to imagine cartwheels!

But my fantasy life moved to a new dimension when we reached the Bavarian Alps.

The lush green, grassy pastures and snow-capped mountains took me right back to one of my favourite childhood books: Heidi.

Wrong country I know, but if you’d spent the past four years living in the desert, I’m sure you, too, would have conjured up images of running up rugged mountains with young Peter the goat-herd – to the sound of babbling brooks and Alpine birdsong.

Amazing what fresh, mountain air can do for you. Just don’t get me started about The Sound of Music!

"The hills are alive..." Tra-la-la-di-da...

Pilot thinks planet is oncoming plane

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If you’re afraid of flying, click away now!

Air Canada's mid-air drama over the Atlantic: Is it a bird, is it a plane? No, it's Venus!

Still reading? Well, you know that mid-flight feeling – you’ve been in the air for a number of hours, passengers are resting, catching a movie or reading quietly. The cabin lights are dimmed. Every now and then, a flight attendant brushes past.

Imagine, then, that there’s suddenly the most terrible turbulence. The plane is in a steep dive. Your worst nightmare actually happening – terror unfolding as the aircraft judders towards the ocean.

Passengers not wearing seatbelts – many of them asleep – are slammed into the ceiling and overhead bins. Laptops go flying.

When the plane levels out 46 seconds later, the passengers and flight attendants who bounced off the walls are left nursing injuries. You can hardly believe your luck that you’re still alive. Little do you know that a US military plane has just passed underneath – too close for comfort.

No, I haven’t been watching too many episodes of Air Crash Investigation, a programme that has me gripped a little too often. This is based on news reports of an incident that took place over the Atlantic Ocean on an overnight Air Canada flight from Toronto to Zurich on January 14 last year.

At first, it was blamed on ‘severe turbulence’, but what actually happened has just been released.

It seems a sleepy pilot, who’d just woken up from a 75-minute nap, mistook the planet Venus for an oncoming plane and forced his jet into a steep descent – nearly causing a collision with the real plane flying 1,000 feet lower.

The first officer, who was permitted to nap on transatlantic flights, had been awakened by a report that the US Air Force cargo plane was approaching at a lower altitude. Confused and disorientated, he saw Venus and thought it was the other jet heading straight towards them – hence the terrifying dive.

In the co-pilot’s defence, Venus was surprisingly bright that night – a groggy pilot could easily have mistaken it for another plane, say astronomers. Not only does the planet ‘not twinkle’, it looks like a steady, white spot of light in the sky – more like a lantern than a star, and very similar to the headlight on an airplane.

Every time my DH goes to work, I always tell him, ‘Don’t land in water’ – not that I think he ever will (I never worry about him flying – I honestly think the drive to the airport on a 12-lane highway is more dangerous, and, besides, my fears tend to focus on more subliminal things like a crashed tanker sending our compound up in smoke). But by calling out these words, it’s a sort of knock-on-wood precaution, I guess.

Next time, though, I might be tempted to add, ‘And don’t forget darling, Venus doesn’t twinkle (and nor will she come into the cockpit to serve you coffee!).’ Don’t you think it would help if I had my very own Swarovski diamond to illustrate the difference, eh, DH? After all, they practically grow on trees in Dubai!

Silent Sunday: Postcard from Bavaria

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Reason #1 for loving Europe: Oversized beers served by Fräuleins in frilly dresses

#2: Teeny, tiny two-seater cars - the likes of which I wouldn't drive round Dubai in a million years!

#3: Crossing the border into Austria - and straight into a blizzard (the joy, after all the sand storms we've had)

#4: The Bavarian Alps - seen the next day after the weather cleared up enough to put the roof down on the car (still chilly though, brrr!)

#5: Fairy-tale castles that look like this when shrouded in cloud and scaffolding ...

... and like this if we'd gone on a sunny day