Our first Ramadan journey finished on our way from Abu Dhabi airport 9pm Saturday: the news broke that the moon committee (something) said Eid (means celebration) starts tomorrow, i.e. Sunday. So the public holiday will be on until Wednesday. Eid Mubarak – have a great holiday 🙂

The last week of Ramadan I traveled to Europe, Central Eastern Europe, that is – Russia, Poland, Romania and Belgium.  Summer mode is on, but in the big cities I found it was too hot and too much of traffic and polution as compared to Abu Dhabi, even though in degrees it was around 10 times cooler than in Abu Dhabi. One thing caught my eye immediately was the old cars on the streets – basically all Eastern Europe is flooded with them. In Bucharest a common view is something like this…good luck getting out of the parking lot.

In Abu Dhabi, a 5-year old car is considered old. I guess it helps the issue of air polution. Maybe the sea surrounding the city also does. Even though I came back to the 37 degree warmth, it feels much better here than in the center of any city I visited last week. And I am not even talking about the air conditioning inside the buildings…

Anyway, Ramadan has ended unexpectedly, and we were told the first day of Eid will be a mega massive sell-off everywhere. We went to the Yas mall, second largest in region to Dubai mall. Oh. My. God….

We arrived at Yas mall at just over 10am, and we spent 6 hours in the mall. Guess how many shops we visited? Three. We spent 1.5 hours in Tommy Hilfiger just standing in a queue.

I was utterly annoyed to see some guy coming from aside and secretly giving a bill to the man at the counter to get into the line. We had an argument with both him and the cashier, and left the shop, while happy with goods, pretty exhausted.  I hate shopping!

But before we left we had to buy some furniture (that’s what we came for…), and we made our first purchase – the dining set from Malaysian oak with a cupboard. So next week when we move in to our new place in Saadiyat island, we will have somewhere to have a dinner on 🙂

Today we made another round of furniture shopping, and ended up with another Malaysian set – this time for the bedroom.  It was relatively cheap compared to anything we could get for the same price in Europe. Scandinavian simplicity with Asian material 😉

Our things from Denmark arrived to the port last week, and since I was away, we couldn’t get them delivered to our apartment. But this week we are moving them. I do hope nothing gets spoiled, especially the bikes. Yesterday while having an African dinner with our new friends, we heard a few stories of recent arrivals being a broken table, shoes in mold, damaged bike… would be a nightmare.

Otherwise, Ramadan has ended, which means more active day life will be back again – restaurants, coffee places open again everywhere. The funny thing, though, is that me and my husband got so used to fasting that, quite frankly, we only ate at 4pm today for the first time, with no trouble and urge beforehand. So, I guess, we learned something from that Ramadan month after all – we don’t nearly need as much food as we are being advertised into eating.