It’s freezing in Abu Dhabi and the Taxi Sat Nav system is unique, but useless!

Not much new today at work. Still massive internet problems. More fantastic arabic food for lunch, which was great. My work is quite dull, but it needs doing a lot of drafting letters, biogs and reworking documents, so I will blog on other more interesting stuff.

I mentioned air con yesterday. Thanks to the air con the title of this entry is a 100% accurate! I am already sick of the air con. It's everywhere, in all the cars, offices and rooms. Despite being in a country that has an outside temperature of well over 30 degrees I am constantly cold!! Everyone has it blasting out. I've barely needed my deodorant!

I've even tried turning off the air con in my hotel room, but like HAL in 2000 AD it has a mind of its own and just starts up again, with an added humming noise that sounds very threatening. I have found a reasonable solution, by opening the balcony door the cold air blows out the window. If I sit on the balcony the cool breeze in the warm night air comes from my bedroom and not outside!!

In other more exciting news the taxi driver who took me home today told me it was his first day on the job. I could tell he was new as he used his indicators and left more than 5 inches between his bumper and the back of the car in front. But most telling was that he was using a tourist street map to guide him, which sat on the passenger seat. He spent more time looking at that, than the road, nearly causing several accidents! Tourist map = worst sat nav ever! He still managed to get hopelessly lost! I've been here 3 days and had to give him directions! He even stopped to allow pedestrians to cross the road. They looked very shocked, as normally they have to run for their lives in some sort a very unfair British bulldog game. In fact, it took him so long I wrote most of this blog entry on the journey. Even when he reached the hotel vicinity he managed to drive us on to the slip road for the car park to the shopping mall next door. In the end I had to abandon the cab and walk the final 100 metres. Give me the dangerous lunatics who get me home in 20 mins rather than the new guy who takes 45 mins!!!

And finally, I hit the gym again today and took off three minutes from yesterday’s 10k treadmill time – result!! I sense a personal competition coming on. The treadmill was going so fast by the end of my run that it was rattling and vibrating quite loudly. I could see those around me on the other treadmills looking on quite nervously, as I pushed it to the limit. Need to break the time again tomorrow.