Hello again..

What a day. By 9 am its already hitting 95* haha I have a new theory that since we have so many clothes on and its so hot that by just standing in the heat we may be able to lose weight. We'll see which happens first- heat stroke or weight loss. So far we've spent our day and a half wandering around the city looking for housing which has become the biggest joke we've seen. We found one place that we really liked but it turned out to be a scam. We met with some really aggressive real estate agents who it looks like we'll be using. The guy was from Palestine- we tried to score some points by talking about Shireen but it didn't get us very far :) I'll break down the quest in chronological order:

Saturday morning ( at 4 am thanks to jet lag) - the search commences. we call a million housing places at around 8.. only 3 actually answer their phones. Either way, the three that answer seem to have some good prospectives and we set up our time to go look

Saturday afternoon- we go to look at apartments- well it was supposed to be multiple but they only took us to one. The place was very well furnished and suprised us because the outside of the building looked like it was going to fall apart. The only downside was that it was extremely small.. but it was still the top of our list. We wander around looking at other buildings asking for vacancies but alas, no one has anything so we retreated to the Abu Dhabi mall to meet Anders and adjust to our new surroundings. While in the Abu Dhabi mall we found a Sweet Factory that had every candy Laila and Sabrina check the ingredients for everytime we go to the mall without gelatin! It was all halal haha quite possibly one of the most exciting finds in the last few days. However this excitement soon let do a meltdown in the mall as Shahin rubbed in the fact that we're not on vacation and I dont need to buy souvenirs for people. I also cannot find my benefiber here.. just some weird "natural tasting" stuff which Im choosing to leave for someone else. So far we've had our ups and downs...ups is that we blend in really well and I think we can fit into society well here. Down being that this is the only place in the world that a taxi driver will pull over, tell you he's hungry and hot and doesn't want to drive anymore. I was like excuse me? Haha, last I checked the job of a taxi driver entailed driving. This is where the standing in the heat comes in...we wait 15-20 mins to catch a taxi and usually end up walking in the end. A car has now become a priority for us.. big time.

Saturday night- we hung out with Anders which was nice.. first english speaking person we've encountered other than the doorman at our hotel. The night was fairly uneventful however since Shahin and I were passing out by 7pm

Sunday morning- Shahin wakes up at 4 and decides that I have to be up with him so we start looking for housing ads again. Today we saw 3 apartments. 2 were complete rubbish as our new agent would call it.. and the last one was nice but extremeley expensive for what it is. That's when we decided to go to the new agent who are actually running a business. The only problem was they informed us that anyone will to do monthly rent is subletting which is illegal and its pretty much all of a scam. Lovely huh? That information was confirmed by 4 other people we talked to.. joy haha

So that puts me at right now where we're pretty much waiting for people to finish their siesta ( these people leave for lunch at 12 and dont come back til 5.. must be nice huh?).. I've been craving pizza hut so I have a feeling we're going to just order in and crash early again. Housing is proving to be a much bigger challenge than we had realized. I think it comes from the fact that we're in a society that demands things now- like that commercial on tv where the girl orders the coffee and 2 seconds later wants to know where it is. Here everyone likes to take things a lot slower- I have yet to determine whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. While in the long run, it may be nice to live in a slower paced life considering we're so high strung, but since we want to finalize our house its definitely not a plus for us right now. On the positive note, all the walking has let us see the different areas and I've found some fabric stores and tailors and somewhere I can get my threading done. On the downside, everything looks exactly the same- every block is a copy of the other and so I can't remember where they actually were. Our walking adventure today left us looking like peasants by the time we got back to the hotel- something spilled on shahin ( he says it was water from and AC unit but anything falling from the building above us leaves me a bit suspicious) and I got so fed up with the sun I ended up wrapping my scarf around my face. Shahin wanted to make sure this picture was available for your viewing pleasure so here it is below. Hopefully I'll get some good pictures of the gulf at sunset tonight but that requires staying awake which im not sure will happen...

Anyways, we hope all of you are doing well and would love to hear from you.. we really miss having people we know in our life :)

<3 from abu dhabi - Ash