A Birthday and an Amazing Mall!

This was a good week! I do have two significant things that happened that let me know I'm not just here on vacation: I finally received my residence visa! It is good for four years, and lets me leave the country and come back! Larry and I went with a representative from Exxon to the immigration office. We took my passport and my application for a Residence Visa. Then, after bloodwork and a chest x-ray, our part was done. Then, Bahaa (Exxon Rep) had to take the paperwork to the American Embassy. About five days later, I have my visa! You must get your Residence Visa to stay longer than 30 days. The other event was a sad one: my allergies caught up with me! I have not had a stuffy nose for the last five weeks! After a beautiful morning at the beach...so calm and clear, the "sand" blew in, and my allergies were back!

This weekend was fun! We celebrated Larry's birthday! We are somewhat limitted on cooking utensils, so we decided to make "mix" sugar cookies instead of a cake. We made icing with the vanilla that we bought at the spice souk! What fun! We opened the pod. Inside, it was like a black paste. I scraped it into the icing and it separated and became all of these tiny black seeds! It was similar to the look of "vanilla bean" ice cream. Anyway, the cookies were good! 


Saturday, we went to the biggest mall in Dubai! Now, I am not a shopper, so usually do not get too excited about a mall...if you've seen one mall, you've seen them all in my opinion. :) HOWEVER, this mall was very different! I wanted to go because they have an aquarium inside the mall. They hold the record in the Guinness Book of World Records for the largest one "sheet" of plexiglass for the aquarium. It was beautiful, and had a tunnel you could walk through to see the fish all around. They also had a small aquatic zoo. Each day, and mostly in the evening, they have huge fountains very similar to the Ballagio in Las Vegas. They were beautiful as well, with music included! The mall sits next to the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa. We plan to visit that another day, and eat dinner to watch the fountains...that is another day though! Back to the mall...the mall was very upscale! We rode the Metro Rail and entered on the lowest floor. It was full of shop-after-shop of beautiful Muslim dress. There were black burqas with all kinds of trim, and dresses that looked similar, but were gorgeous colors. There were also shops for men's Muslim wear. The rest of the mall contained all kinds of stores...they were on floors according to the type of store they were. It was very interesting to "people-watch" there. We saw many different nationalities taking pictures just like we were. Then, we saw people that looked like this was the mall they used to do their regular shopping. We noticed the clothing worn by customers was more upscale as well! :) 


I continue to appreciate and enjoy living in Dubai! When we arrived, I knew that we would be "ex-pats", but really had no idea what that would mean except that we were coming to another country to work. I assumed all "ex-pats" were working for oil companies, and that there were a handfull of us. I was so wrong! There are "ex-pats" from all countries, in all walks of work. Some come in to work for companies doing construction, some to work in nail salons, restaurants, maintenance, housekeeping, taking care of children...everything! I have heard that only about 20% of the people living here are Emaratis. 


So, as we enjoy the country, and learn more and more...we continue to take One Step at a Time, thanking God for the opportunity and adventure!