National Day

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I know it’s been a while since and I’m sorry. I think I’ll begin with saying that I have my license thus finishing off the mountain of admin I had to do once out here and jumping over what I thought was the final hurdle, I’ll explain all later.

Teaching has been going really well, except for a crazy lesson with the grade 8’s. They just wouldn’t respond to any instruction and spent most of the time running around chasing each other and laughing at the chaos. Eventually we got them all sat down and taught them about the police, as a lot of kids don’t even know what a policeman looks like over here. Concurrent with that we have been training a group of volunteers to carry out a rifle drill parade for the UAE national day celebrations within the school. The kids have picked up the training really quickly and worked hard for 3-4 hours a day, 3 days straight. The day came and I witnessed something completely abnormal for a school back in the uk, kids and teachers celebrating the forming of their country and taking pride in the celebrations. The kids marched on and did really well, minus a few timing mistakes but hey, recruits have done worse. They were really proud to do it and got a lot of cheers and applause when they marched off, so a great success in my eyes.

So the day was going really well, and after the celebrations and buffet with some food I can only describe as ‘interesting’, we made the journey home. About half way into the journey the car in front of me slammed to a standstill and I unfortunately had to try and do the same bearing in mind I was travelling at 160km/h, I managed to keep the car from skidding and moved onto the hard shoulder to avoid slamming into the back of the car in front. However the car behind me failed to do the same and ran into the back of me and forced me along the barrier, there were 13 separate accidents all in that moment. Anyway to cut it short, I waited an hour and a half for the police to sort out a report for me to take away to the hire car company, and got an exchange without hassle, happy days. Eeerm no, next day the hire car company called me up and said that all the damage to the car wasn’t in the report and that I would have to take the old beat up car and get the report amended, which involved driving it to work with the boot tied down. Again cutting it short, it took 5 hours and 3 different police station visits to get a guy to take two photos and add them to the existing report. Nightmare. However as its national day, I now have 4 days off and plan to enjoy some sun, sand and sea aaaannd as I have just been paid I think I may invest in a rather large TV. There are some national day celebrations starting at midday tomorrow until 2am, with live Djs and plenty of booze, on the beach of course. Watch this space for a report of the day’s activities.

So all is well, and I’ve got used to driving on the crazy roads and avoided giving certain drivers certain finger gestures, and calmed myself by shouting and swearing from the comfort of my car. Marathon training is going really well and I'm on track for the standard I want to be at come January. For those who don’t know, I'm entering in the Dubai Marathon in January and the RAK half marathon in February (I know it’s backwards). I'm running the RAK on behalf of a charity named Gulf for Good and thank you to all those who have given me sponsorship money, and would appreciate all the help I can get. I'm off for a run now before going out on the piss, I mean sociable drinks with work colleagues......

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