K6 UAE

On Friday the 24 and Saturday the 25, we went camping in the desert. Our day started with an interesting trip to an archaeological trip to a grave site and some caves. There's us hiking to the graves. The lime green speck is me! Mom going to the viewing platform above the visitor center. Us looking at the archaeological site. Then we took a trip to the MLEIHA, ARCHAEOLOGICAL CENTRE  which is a whole story about how this part of the UAE got inhabited. There was a museum with a bunch of ancient jars, spearheads, beads, necklaces, bracelets, camels, horses, and other weapons. They also re-created a grave with a horse and a camel. After that we went to our camp site! At our campsite, we went on a evolutionary based rock/plant hunt. When we got back it was already dark! Lots of torches and lanterns surrounding our campsite Then, we ate dinner that the Mleiha people cooked for us. We had a Arabic BBQ which was olives and br...

There weren't many traditional hints here that a major American holiday was coming up. No frost or turning leaves, no cornucopia decorations. We only found one grocery store display, at the British grocery below our building: It was heavy on jarred gravy and canned jellied cranberries. But no turkeys or stuffing!  Which is just as well because when I finally did find turkeys, a ten-pound one was selling for about 75 USD.  Which seemed a little high. And, while Jason and Eliza did go for a 5k run this morning, there was no festive turkey trot with cinnamon rolls at the finish line. No televised parade or American football game. And no extended family around. So we decided on a slightly non-traditional Thanksgiving celebration this year. Thursday is just another work/school day here, so there weren't many people out. But Jason took the day off and we took out a boat from the Emirates Palace Marina and boated over to a mostly empty island.  We had to hike our picni...

There are hardly any old cars on the roads here. Even all the ubiquitous Toyota Hilux trucks here that the laborers drive are in pretty good shape. And this is not to mention the super cars and the sports cars that we see on a daily basis. One Friday recently Jason and I were driving near our house and found ourselves in the middle of a huge group of Maseratis and Jaguars, Lambourghinis and Ferraris, and other sports cars, just driving down the freeway. It was like a super car club was just driving together down the freeway and the lone Mustang in the group looked pretty sad. Not to mention our little Pajero. It is a common occurrence that when we go to a mall or dentist or anywhere we regularly have to park between a Porsche and a BMW. (Watch the door dings, kids!) Or we might be following a Maserati or a Bently through our parking garage.  Henry barely looks out the window when I say, "Hey! Is that an Aston Martin?" That's life in the UAE. We live "off ...

Halloween is spreading across the globe. Especially when you live in an apartment complex with lots of western expats in a country with a lot of western expats. The weekend before Halloween there was a big scavenger hunt at one of the malls here. Kautz Kids won mall gift cards there and got a bag of candy! Our apartment complex, Al Zeina, threw a whole Halloween party at the park on actual Halloween. There were games, contests, bouncy house, food trucks. But the Kautz kids preferred to ditch their costumes (it's still totally hot out) and climb palm trees instead. A few weeks ahead of the big day, there was a sign up circulating on facebook, where people who would be handing out treats to the little trick-or-treaters could sign up and on the big day there was a printed sheet of the participating apartments. So the kids knew exactly where to go. We had four kids still interested in dressing up. Eliza was "Life" (handing out lemons...and sugar), Henry was a ro...