Temporarily lost.

One of the things that you take for granted when you've lived somewhere for a while, is that you know where everything is.  Whether it's shops or the beach, you have an inbuilt compass and GPS with years of knowledge as a database, so much so that you don't have to consciously think about the directions to where you are going, it's often done on automatic pilot.

If you've ever moved to a completely new area you'll probably remember this feeling, that you are temporarily completely lost.  Then gradually you learn new routes, to school, the gym, supermarkets and you soon begin to build up a mental map of your new environment so that when you do get lost you can fathom out the most likely direction you need to be travelling in.

So when I got lost approaching town from a new direction today I managed to stay calm!  One of the useful things about living in a tower block in a city with many of them, is that you can use the tall buidings as reference points.  However as they are building a cross city trunk road at the moment there are plenty of road closures to thwart your direct route.  I ended up circling our flats like a plane in a holding pattern, trying to find the way in to the maze and being faced with roadworks and closures.  I made it after half an hour, then the second time I had to make the same journey it was ten minutes.  Who says men don't learn from experience.

What doesn't help navigation is the fact no-one has personal addresses.  We all have PO box numbers and ours is the school's so shared with every one else who works there. This works OK for parcels coming from home but not so well with the Indian take-away delivery guy.  He telephones me to say that he is outside flat 5006 and why aren't I opening the door?  Could be because we're in flat 506 in the building approximately 100 meters away from the one he is currently in...

We had a four and a half hour round trip to Oman this week to get Amélie and my visas stamped.  This was the first time we'd been out towards Oman and the RAK  changes character the further you go away from the city centre.  The hypermarkets, malls and tower blocks fade away to make space for small shops and businesses in towns where cows roam the streets.  What becomes obvious is that there is a myriad of artisans who's purpose is to keep everything working.  Cars, household appliances, computers, you name it.  Things that would be discarded in Europe are kept running by skilled people making a fraction of the minimum wage in the UK and working late in to the night.  There is so much more to see of this country than first meets the eye, and some of it is very different to the gloss of Dubai.