Week two: moving in, maintenance, and taking a break

Very basic rental furniture was delivered August 15th (our 18th wedding anniversary!) and we officially moved in on Sunday (August 19th).  In the last 5 days I've learned a couple of tips for Abu Dhabi Villa newbies.  First, make sure that you always have water bottles handy in the cupboard (no need for refrigeration).  This water isn't for personal use, but to pass out to the maintenance guys who come fix everything that is broken.  This past week we passed out water to the AC guys, the phone/fiber guys, the internet guy, and the leaky sink fixer-upper guy (still not fixed...we will be giving him another bottle of water tomorrow).  I'm glad that I hoarded water bottles from our hotel stay and stashed them in the pantry.  Interestingly, when I asked them if they wanted cold water, they all said no.  They wanted "normal" water aka room temperature.  

Second, containers are necessary for all things.  I don't know how many times we've been to the store looking for some sort of container for organizing something.  The closets in The Villa are awesome in that they are big and spacious, however the shelving is equally big and spacious.  This is great if you want to pile your clothes 3ft high.  It's not great if you have little boys who already have a hard time with piles.  Ethan and I spent a few HOURS at ACE hardware store first converting all of our measurements into mm and then cutting 27 shelf pieces.  (In full disclosure, when we saw the wood selection and the largest pieces available for shelving were pine or MDF slabs about 2ft by 6ft, we had a little pity party bemoaning the lack of a Lowe's and a table saw.  The worker in training did a great job though, especially after he figured out how to use the stop.)  After adding the extra shelves and a bunch of containers and now the closets and pantry are way more functional.

Gold stars for the one who knows how many cm a twin size bed is.  This was another fun activity for us.  The basic shopping trips for towels, irons, microwaves, toasters, and sheet sets gave us all sorts of fun conversions to figure out.  I love google.  Incidentally, the sheets are sold individually and at AED 79 it is considered a bargain.  This figures to be about $21 dollars for a 300 thread count fitted sheet. (A sheet set with fitted and flat sheet plus two pillow cases of the same thread count is about $27 on Amazon.)  And, our 32 l(d㎥) microwave only came with a 24 hour clock.

This week is Eid Al-Adha.  Because of this holiday, all of the government offices and companies have been shut down for the week.  This is excellent because it means that Ethan is off work and we can do fun things together.  This is not excellent because I still don't have an Emirate's ID which means that I still don't have a driver's license, access to a bank account, or cell phone coverage.  Ugh.  It feels very yucky to have to rely on Ethan 100% for driving me places and setting up everything for life here.  I'm way too independent for this and it makes me sort of grumpy!  To give us all a break from "setting up The Villa" we took the kids to a huge indoor amusement park called Warner Bros World Abu Dhabi. The biggest bonus about this place is that it is air conditioned, the price is all inclusive (minus the food), and it is geared towards 6-14yr olds.  Not being amusement park aficionados proved to be a blessing because we went with no expectations.  *Just going on the rides was a big deal for my kids who never even went on the rides at the Alaska State Fair because I'm too cheap to spend the money on the tickets.  We got to the park early enough that only 2 of the rides were not working (one was fixed later in the day) and we got to ride on almost everything without waiting in lines.  Talis, Reuben and I met Batman.  We all shared a HUGE 8 person burger. Plus, Reuben got to be TAZ in the onstage show with Bugs and Daffy, which pretty much made his life complete.  His entire role was to spin and spin and spin as tornado noises and digital images in the background whirled cartoon set pieces around the stage.  It was as though the role was tailor-made just for him. Definitely a day to put down in the books.  

We took the kids to the indoor trampoline place at the mall another day.  It's good to get some energy out when it's too hot to go outside.  It turns out that it was too hot inside too as it was almost raining inside the trampoline park.  The condensation on the ceiling was so heavy that there were pools of water on the trampolines and pads, steady dripping from the beams, and workers everywhere with mops and buckets mopping up the "indoor rain."  Ethan made the comment that this will probably be the only rain we will ever see while we are here.  We still had fun and made a game out of dodging the drips.

School orientation is Sunday and school officially starts Monday.  Ready or not, here we go!