The usual day just hangin' out on the beach, lunch in the beach bar and we have noticed that the number of guests in the Hotel is starting to shrink as people are being repatriated.We decided to have a change this evening and went to the local mall called Ibn Battuta Mall
and there is about 275 shops and 50 restaurants and many stand alone stalls selling everything from plastic slip on shoes to i-Pad's. You can also buy a motorcycle or a stuffed toy horse, the range is amazing, see link for more info http://www.ibnbattutamall.com/We decided to have dinner in Tony Roma's who serve good steak and ribs, here they serve beef ribs and not pork, I wonder why. You can only get alcohol in Hotel restaurants in Dubai and not in any other outlet and to purchase booze you have to register at an government controlled outlet and provide ID each time you purchase anything.
So most locals go to the Hotels restaurants for entertainment but you have to remember that there is a 'ZERO' approach to drinking and driving in this town. One glass and you are over the limit and if caught jail beckons and so Taxis do a roaring trade as do the companies who will send along a driver to take you and your car home. One silly western lady, a visitor to Dubai, this week drank to much booze and went to the police to say she had been raped and was promptly arrested for being drunk.There has been chaos at Dubai Airport over the last couple of days and thousand of tourists are hoping for a flight to get home. Emirates have started using Airbus 380's to Europe in place of the smaller aircraft just to get people home. BA now appears to be operating to Dubai normally again with 2 flights per day and tomorrow we shall find out if we are to fly or not.
Just prior to going to bed we watched some of the great debate with the three party leaders giving their all. Brown was terrible in my view whilst Cameron was appearing to have difficulty keeping his temper with what Brown was saying. The Libdem leader also put on a good performance but this is easy when you you know the questions in advance and have time to practise the answers. We only watched about 20 minutes of the event and its so staged as almost to be pointless. I would love to see them in the boxing ring together and then lets so who wins. The clean Mr Clegg is now getting covered with tar from many sources about his personal expense claims, three kitchens in 18 months, flying on the cheapest airline to Brussels then claiming full fare BA prices,they all ought to be hung drawn and quartered the lot of them.
The reform I would like to see is the number of members being reduced radically to say a maximum of say 50 or alternatively one per county and then pay them a lot more but overall costs would go down and no stupid expenses like the past. There is no chance that a decent government with so many people with different personal interests will ever help the people of this country. If I wasn't going out in the caravan later this year I had seriously thought of standing for PM,
