Catch Up

It is time for a well overdue update. Usually I have blogged at the weekend about the previous weekend. However I never got round to writing about the weekend of 28th/29th April as on 5th/6th May when I would have written it SAT WAS HERE!!! And frankly I wasn't about to spend time on the computer when I had the wonderful chance to spend some time with him.

So, a brief update on the weekend 28th/29th: On Friday after a bit of a lie in and a chilled out morning in the apartment listening to MTV I spent the day by the pool reading a book about Geisha.

On Saturday I did some work from home for a couple of hours in the morning and then I went and had a skiing lesson. There were 6 of us altogether, except that 4 were total beginners and myself and a girl called Asma had both recently done 'Ski discovery' so we were taken off separately for a lesson. Our instructor was Laura from the UK who had just arrived to take up the job of ski instructor in Dubai. She was brilliant, really good at explaining techniques and encouraging. Full of a whey hey personality though which in everyday life I find a bit off putting but seems to be great to have in a ski instructor. I did really improve during the lesson and by the end I really felt I was getting the hang of at least the idea of skiing and was happily skiing from the top of the nursery slope contolling my turns (plough not parallel) and my speed (plough or parallel). On my 'Ski Passport' I am almost at the end of beginner. They said one more lesson for practise and I would be at the start of level one and able to go by myself on the main slope.

In the afternoon I went to another shopping Mall called Ibn Battuta, named after a 14th Century Arabian Explorer. The artchitecture within the mall's 6 courts reflects the most influential places Ibn Battuta travelled: China, India, Persia, Egypt, Tunisia and Andalucia.