An Evening Out!

I spent the morning at the pool in Lucy’s complex. It’s a lovely pool, not big, surrounded by a terrace and it is right over the marina and the promenade that surrounds the marina. There’s always something to watch: joggers, people on electric scooters, boats going up and down…..

Lucy was up early to go to the gym on the ground floor for a spin class and then she worked from home today, so we had lunch together.

I need to clarify something about the Ladies Days which I’ve taken part in during the last couple of days, because I can tell I haven’t been clear about them, leading to a misconception. They are not “women only”. Indeed there are men there either singletons, as part of a couple or with other men. It’s a Ladies Day purely in terms of the special offers to women on that day. So for instance yesterday I paid 55 aed for the day to includ entry, facilities and lunch. If Bob had been with me, he would have paid 75 aed for entry alone and no lunch offer. There tend to be more women in attendance on these days because of the offers and also because there are more women unemployed here as “partners” than there are men in the same boat. But it is very much open to everyone.

Tonight marks the start of the weekend here, so Lu and I had made a plan to go out tonight. We had dinner at the Al Fanar restaurant which is a very traditional Emirati house that specialises in seafood. As well as the restaurant they have a little fish market an shop attached. It’s built and decorated to resemble the sort of ramshackle place that would have been found on the banks of the Creek back in the 1930s….. there are a lot of old artifacts and bric a brac that you can buy – brass pots of all types, a Singer sewing machine…. all sorts of stuff. As well as the main room there are private dining rooms all around the perimeter, some of them set up in regional style with cushions on the floor and a low table for eating. We had a seafood platter to share – garlic and lemon baked mussels, langoustines, blue crabs….. chips, garlic bread. It was all delicious and plenty of it. The platter was about £20. On Sunday and Tuesday nights they do an “all you can eat”. Hmmmm…… I can eat a lot of crab…….

After that we went to the Dubai Marina Mall and had a good shop explore. Its a really nice mall, more British sized than the huge ones like the Dubai Mall or the Mall of the Emirates…. I got some oud perfumes which I love and some oud for burning as incense. I also bought loads of lovely smelly things in Bed and Bathworks. It’s cheap here, like in the States. We haven’t got one in the UK and you get gouged for their products on Ebay or Amazon.

We went to the cinema in the mall and saw Shang Chi: Legend of the Ten Rings. Very entertaining and with excellent special effects. Nice cinema, with gaps between booking groups.