Keep the Door Closed.....

...for your comfort of course! this is on the door in my room onto the balcony. It is hot here but it is a nice dry heat with a good wind - but not always!

The day started with not much to do (so we thought). We called into the local architects' office to see if we were needed today or if they wanted to meet with us and guess what - they didn't call back. We assumed that they were too busy playing catch up looking at our drawings. While that may have been true to some degree this all came as a shock to their boss.

So Eric and I sat at the Columbia Cafe and worked out an alternate drawing for the Marina design and drew it up in CAD and rendered it in Illustrator. Pretty chill.

This is a view into the main lobby of the Rotana Beach Hotel from the table I was working at..

and this is a view back into the Columbia Cafe. I drank a few coffees and when we were done we went over to the pool and had a salad for lunch. I had a tuna Nicoise salad, but not nearly as good as the Ahi Tuna one I had at "The Cottage" the other day with Geddo.

After that I went and got my suit on and went to the pool to swim a few laps - i didn't have much time so after a few I made my way back to the room to get dressed for dinner. Arsany from EHAF - nice Alexandrian architect Anaghonostos deacon was meeting us of dinner to go to Bu Tafish for dinner.

In the lobby I ran into Aziz who seemed most displeased as he yelled down the phone at CRJA's local guy about needing time with us to coordinate.

Most strange.

I told him we had been available all day and that his guys knew it...I told him I would get dressed, get Eric and come back down to talk to him.

Well we did that and it got a bit testy there as we got into a little "he said-she said" but in the end we are going to have a very busy day tomorrow as we agreed to meet with their engineers to coordinate the project after a full day of client meetings "until it gets done."

Anyway we walked to Bu Tafish and had an amazing meal like we did the last time we were in town. Grilled Shrimp that taste like REAL shrimp - Barboni - which is a small red fish that is soooo succulent I ate three of them and Eric four!

We then walked to an Egyptian Cafe for tea - it was a long walk there to the restaurant and an even longer walk to the cafe but all well worth it. I sweat out at least two litres of water but made up for it.

Cool ADCB building on our evening stroll....(1.25 litres by this point!)

Abu Dhabi is pretty green but this is what it looks like before you plant it - dirt and hoses. (1.5 litres by this point)

This is the cafe - the real deal. NOT the Rotana lobby by ANY stretch but I replenished those lost litres of sweat! (and watched some cool and some corny Arabic music videos!)