Abu Dhabi adventures

I flew up to Abu Dhabi late Wednesday night on the RBA flight out of here. Going through Brunei airport it was full of buckets, because it was raining (as it is often in the evenings!) and the roof apparently leaks, quite a bit. Mind my surprise though when I arrived to the Dubai airport, and it was also full of buckets..! It was 15 degrees, and RAINING there too when I landed! Very unusual.

A pre-ordered limo driver picked me up, and it took exactly 1 hour to get to Nathan's hotel, from the Dubai airport. Super convenient, easy and not very expensive either. Great solution for in the future, if guests arrive in the middle of the night.

Thursday morning we woke up to grey skies and wet surroundings. I didn't mind, it was nice to be able to wear a cardigan and a scarf. The view from Nathan's hotel room is rather lovely, over the golf course and the sea.

We had quite a few jobs on our list of to-dos for these few days.
We started out by picking up a hire car, then set out to look at a few houses, and drive around the different areas to get a good feel for the place.
We also went to sort out Nathan's uniform, pick up his "Alcoholic License" (yes, that's what it's called!) and visit the bottle shop. Nice!

We also visited a few schools and hopefully (cross fingers!), we've found spaces for both the kids in an American school! There is space for Linnea only in one of our preferred schools, so we were debating for a while whether to put her in that one, and hope for Lucas to get a space there too next school year.
But in the end we've decided to have them move and go into a new school together. It feels better to have them both start a new at the same school, for their sake.

In the afternoon we drove downtown to see the Corniche and to scout out the big Marina Mall. Very impressive. A quick walk around there, sorting out a few shopping musts, and then back for an early night at the hotel.

The following day the view from the balcony was a bit more sunny and bright. You can see Ferrari World and the Yas Marina circuit in the distance:

We had a day of IKEA ahead of us! Yay!
We spend quite a few hours there, looking at different things, discussing different options. As we've sold everything here, we need everything again! IKEA is a good place to start, to get the basic things. I joined the IKEA family club and we had a 'fika' of course.

After few more house visits after IKEA, we were ready for another mall. I still needed to find a couple of specific things. And check out where we had a quick snack! At the Swedish burger joint Max (previously existing only in Sweden, Norway and Denmark) is now established also in the UAE, with 6 restaurants in Dubai and 2 in Abu Dhabi - how cool!

On the Saturday we saw more houses, from 10am to 4pm, with a quick lunch break down in the marina by Al Bandar Marina. So gorgeous!

I was getting picked up at 2.30am for my flight back to Brunei, out of Dubai again, so in the afternoon I had a quick nap - and then it was steak night at the hotel. I had the best steak I've had since... since I don't even remember! It was SO good!
It was served on a hot stone. I haven't had it served like that since the many excursion dinners at the French "Lava stone restaurant" in Fuerteventura, where I used to be a tour guide back in the day.

We ended our evening toasting to having decided on and paid the deposit on a house!
But more on that in another post!