Desert life, desert camp...

Alright, so we've been bad about updating. What, pray tell, have we been up to that we've been too busy to blog???

Well, we are still living at the Liwa Hotel. There are certainly perks to living here, such as how the resident population of the hotel increases by about 1500% on the weekends. Although we may be slightly disgruntled at having to share "our" hotel with these upstart strangers from Abu Dhabi or wherever, it's also nice to have a few visitors.

Quite a few of the people in Madinat Zayed will come up to spend a Friday or Saturday afternoon up at the Liwa, taking advantage of the pool, the work-out room and the alcohol policy. It's the best/only place if you're looking for a beer and a burger in the Western Zone. (I will add that it is by no means the worst place to live in general, and the privelage gets more pronounced as we see other visitors travel a long way to get the pleasures of the service, the buffets and lounging around the pool, as well as the beauty of the surrounding desert) This past weekend was no exception, with a variety of visitors coming out to play in the sun.

One group of people from MZ invited us along to the dunes. They were planning on staying the night just off the road to the Moreeb Dune (about 25km from the hotel), and asked if we'd be interested in coming out just until the sun went down and we could then come back to the hotel.

As soon as we arrived, helped set up tents, and had cocktails in hand, we were invited to stay the night, if we so wished. Although we didn't want to seem the freeloader, we quickly decided that we'd rather stay than leave.

The sun set, the campfire was built, music and laughter filled the air and a small BBQ was even brought out (It's a braai my angel. When there's boerewors and kuirering around the fire involved, it's a braai... oh so much delicious meat!). At one point, someone saw something scuttle across one of the mats we were sitting on around the campfire. Could it be a scorpion? A snake? Nope, our little visitor was the cutest desert mouse in the world. His eyes were huge, his fur was soft, his tail was twice the length of his gerbil-ish body and he happily ran up and down our arms and through our hair before hopping away across the sand. Apparently, desert mice like Doritos.

One thing that we were looking forward to in this new desert life, and one aspect that disappointed us when we first arrived at the Liwa, with its well-lit parking lot just outside the window, was the stars. We had expected to go out star-gazing every night and instead found that, besides light-pollution, dust in the air or fog made it so we could only ever see 3 or 4 stars in the sky.

Not so with the camping.

Out there, with no light except the fire and hidden in a valley of dunes that shielded us from any other road lights or vestiges of civilization, we were treated to an incredible display. A million constellations (all in the wrong places, says I... and at four in the morning when I opened my eyes to the streak of the Mikyway lying just above the lightening horizon, they were all the right way up again... told you so) marched over us as the night went on.

No matter how hot it is during the day, the nights are always cold in the desert. We had been lucky enough to have been given a tent and a sleeping bag by our happy hosts, but once the wind picked up in the middle of the night, the violent snapping and rustling of the material made it pretty much impossible to sleep. Deciding that it was only an hour or two until daylight anyway, we knocked the tent down, climbed on top of it (so that we weren't just laying on sand) and fell back asleep, but not before a few more minutes of star-gazing.

Once the sun came up, we broke camp and everyone scattered back home before the heat of day could knock us out. Apparently, in a few weeks, it will be "too hot to camp". And yes, it has been getting hotter and hotter here. The newspaper has already reported that it's hit 35 degrees - which is a new record for springtime here (and they're predicting 40 by the end of the month). I guess this means that we can look forward to a very very hot spring/summer.

The heat is actually not too much of a bother, since the aircon runs 24/7 here (except in our environmentally concious hotel room). Leaving school at 2:30pm, with the required long sleeves (sometimes 2 layers on top, to be sure that I'm covered completely from neck to wrist to ankle) and extra scarf and such, is like walking into an oven.... but that's really not too bad. Yet.

The worst weather this week has been sandstorms. The sky is yellow-orange and visibility is nil on the road from Liwa to MZ. My computer is full of sand from using it on the hotel balcony, where sand drifts like snow along any horizontal surface. It blows across roadways like a blizzard and makes your skin and teeth feel gritty. Don't even ask me about what you find on the end of a Qtip. No chance of star-gazing these days.

I'm still enjoying my job, but it's 100% different from life in Korea. Instead of spending hours on msn chat or blogging away, I have very full days, with barely a chance to check e-mails.

Last night, Ty and I joined a group of ex-pats at our first Arabic lesson. Today, I spent the day regaling/torturing my co-workers with my terrible Arabic skills and/or showing them how well/terribly I can write my name, which looks like someone tied a pen to a drunk snail and sent them through a maze....

That's all for now, thanks for reading and we hope to update with a few of Ty's incredible adventures in a few days.... trust me, his life is far more interesting than mine!!! (on some days... BUT I definitely have nothing to complain about)