Eid Mubarak

Eid is the celebratory period immediately following Ramadan. The kids got 11 days off school and Nick got a nice 4 day weekend. The holiday is comparable to Thanksgiving in that people generally spend a lot of time with their families and even more time at the malls shopping. Many of the expats use the weekend to explore the coastal resorts or Oman but we were too late in the game to get a reservation anywhere decent so we ended up exploring Al Ain - a small town about 90 minutes from Dubai. Al Ain is a relatively modern town with plenty of western influence but it is more Arab than Dubai. It was much more like the Middle East that we envisioned when we first considered moving over here. There are even a few restaurants in town that serve only Emiratis.

We started off by visiting the Palace Museum...basically an old Arab ranch that has been kept relatively intact. The grounds were really pretty and there was a nice display of paintings of all of the local rulers...or as I call them "Rosy's boyfriends."

The boys had a great time exploring all of the different rooms and trying out the couches on the floor. They were also particularly fond of the gun and sword displays.

Many of the rooms had bars in the windows so the boys had fun pretending to be in jail.

After the museum we drove to the top Jebel Hafeet, at 4,300 ft. it is of one of the UAE's tallest peaks. There were a lot of people at the top and we were lucky enough to park next to a bus full of locals who were proudly dancing to some really bad music. It was quite entertaining. Although it was nothing like the mountains back home it was nice to be at elevation again.