K6 UAE

Happy birthday to meeeeee... Well, the title kinda says it all! I am ofishuly... ficcaily... Oficcia... The third birthday person in the UAE! I'm 13 now, and I turned 13 about a week ago, so sorry for the yuuuge delay (read: procrastination). Let the narraration begin! So I turned 13. Big whoop. It actually didn't feel any different waking up to be 13 that it did waking up as 12. I'm just sleepy, bored, and severely wanting to take out my sleepy-boredness on my alarm clock, which I had set for 6:30 last night, thinking that I should enjoy as much as my birthday as possible. I was wrong. Anyway, I'd actually like to start my birthday tale on the day we actually celebrated it, which was the 25th, not the 30th. You see, Dad had (another!) business trip on the 30th,  so he wouldn't be around then. So we decided to celebrate it on a weekend, and mega-style. First thing... we went go-karting. Except this place was like, pro. They made you wear...

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...