Weekend

Friday Brunch at the MORE Cafe at the Dubai Mall. Glorious outdoor seating directly at the foot of Burj Khalifa.

This weekend I was reminded of the Counting Crows song "Round Here." In Dubai people seem to stay up much much later on weekends than we ever did when we lived in Boston. "Round here we stay up very very very very late." Both nights this weekend we were out until 4am. I don't recall a night ever staying up that late in Boston (let alone out) besides New Years Eve 2004 when we searched for a taxi for 3 hours before basically walking back to Jared's 1st apartment in Boston on Colliston Drive in Brighton from Government Center. But here, it's pretty much a weekly occurrence that we're out really late at least one night of each weekend (usually not both as we were this weekend), but definitely a change in our lifestyle.

On Thursday night, we grabbed quick Indian take-out before going to our friends Melissa and Dom's "for a drink or two"... Well, the drink of choice for the evening was Redbull + vodka, so I should have known we were in for a long night. We hadn't seen them since they arrived back from a 2 week trip to Australia for New Years so we caught up and looked at all of their pictures from the trip (which included a 5 day camping trip into the middle of rural Australia, pretty awesome actually) and watched a couple episodes of an Australian mobster tv show (think The Soprano's Aussie-style) called "Underbelly." When we got bored of that we broke out the Wii Beatles and Rock Band Karaoke and had sing-offs for another couple hours... Needless to say, hyped up on Redbull, we didn't get home until 4am.

Then on Friday, we decided to recover by eating McDonald's fries as an appetizer to going out to brunch (McDonald's fries have become our crutch here. Have a bad week? McDonald's fries. Feeling hungover? McDonald's fries. I think it has something to do with the fact that very few things and specifically food are really consistent here and pretty much nothing tastes as good as it does at home, with the one exception of McDonald's fries...). After our brunch under the Burj we decided that the only viable way to spend the rest of our afternoon was to sit in the dark and, therefore, went to the movies. I made Jared see "It's Complicated," and had to bribe him with not only popcorn but the future promise to see some terrible and traumatizing horror movie with him.

After our movie we vegged before getting ready to go out again. Our friend Dijana was having a birthday celebration ala bar and club hopping. So we went back to Mel and Dom's for a couple drinks before (bring on the Red Bull!) and then went to meet Di and our other friends at the Cavalli Club (swanky designer bar, I was majorly under-dressed, as usual here). We had one drink at Cavalli before heading to the Atlantis Hotel on the Palm Jumeirah to go to the Sanctuary Dance Club. The dj (named Scumfrog [!]) was playing techno so Jared was in heaven. We stayed until the Club closed at 3am before taxiing it home. By this point I was completely exhausted! We will not be having a duo 4am weekend again for a long time.

If we didn't need to sleep in and veg on Friday, we definitely did on Saturday! We slept in fairly late and then got up and went to McDonald's for a second time that weekend and engaged in a self-loathing lunch. To make ourselves feel marginally better after we decided to explore and try to find a new beach we had heard about down by the Burj Al Arab, called "Russian Beach."

After driving around for a little bit we finally found it, and spectacular views of the Burj Al Arab (dubbed the "World's Only 7 Star Hotel"... another place we'll be taking our visitors in March!). We went for a long walk on the beach...

Jared looking super-psyched that I wanted to take his picture...

It was so much fun to find a new beach since we've pretty much been just going to the same beach since we got here, and great to get outside and do something healthy after our bender of a weekend. We will definitely have to take visitors to this beach, truly unbelievable views.

One of our two roast chickens... For the record, Jared objects to this picture because it doesn't look nearly as pretty as they did with both birds and veggies in the roasting pan.

After our walk we headed to the Carrefour (French Super Walmart basically) to stock up on groceries for the week. One of our New Years resolutions (among the typical, get healthier, lose the holiday pounds, etc) is to cook one new food or recipe every week. We cook at home a lot (or rather, Jared cooks for me at home a lot), but at times we tend to get into ruts of just cooking the same things over and over again (namely, our favorite things: grillables and comfort food). So, last year we started this New Years Resolution and had a lot of fun trying new things, plus it's a great excuse to actually open and use the 30 some odd cook books we have. We decided to do try it again this year (even though all but 4 of our cookbooks are back home in storage).. And so far we're off to a good start!

My first week back to Dubai, Jared surprised me by making a delicious homemade bread pudding for dessert (the ultimate winter delicacy). This week we decided to try a recipe for Roasted Chicken with Vegetables out of my "Real Simple: Meals Made Easy" cookbook. We do roasts all the time, but it's always fun to try new suggestions. This one was delicious with lemon and fresh herbs (we used rosemary, thyme, and parsley) used to season the bird. We also decided to roast not one, but two chickens, since all the chickens here are so puny (not like our hearty American chickens that have been pumped full of hormones) and so if we wanted enough food for leftovers we decided to do two. A lovely and ironic end to our weekend. My new New Years resolution is to have more tame weekends...