For all my international readers who couldn’t understand a word of what I wrote in the previous post :-): because I follow the principle U ask, I serve 😉 I’m going to write in two languages, English and Dutch. Two different posts with different contents, no copy paste into Google Translate.
Double trouble indeed, but with the uttermost pleasure!

Six weeks in the UAE of which four weeks in our house in Fujairah. We are still settling in, buying the last pieces of missing furniture and dealing with some final details, for which we have the maintenance guy coming over every single day :-). He has a full-time job reparing f.ex. broken water taps, covering up holes with silicone so ants wouldn’t enter the kitchen (that battle we finally won, pha!) or something else to fix in our not-so-perfectly renovated house.
But hey, he needs to be daily in the domain anyway because the White Village (our compound) is under some serious construction. Classic story. When we signed the contract in June, they would finish the renovations by mid-July and looking at the amount of work that still needs to be done, I’m afraid they won’t finish it before October.
Okay so be it, and for that reason we took a membership in the Tennis&Country Club, which is actually a very nice place to spend most of our free time. It has a well equipped gym (I know, it’s a little bit of an adaptation if you’re used to running in open air, but it’s actually quite nice), a huge pool, kid’s play area and… it’s attached to McGettigan’s, one of the five places in the whole of Fujairah where they serve something decent to drink :-).
With the girls in school from 8:15-15:45 and after four weeks of being semi-house bound, because my driver’s license needed to be converted and I wasn’t allowed to drive around, I finally find myself liberated. The past weeks I spent (read: wasted) so much time on being on standby in the house, putting things in order and dealing with bureaucracy until it drove me crazy. Now a new routine is set up for our family, and I’ll have at least some me time to think about what’s next.
After 12 weeks of waiting I received the good news that I passed my Level 3 Award in Wines from WSET (Wine and Spirits Education Trust) with distinction (hooray! let’s celebrate with an excellent bottle of wine). Starting to work in wine business is not really the easiest thing to do in a country where there is – except for some stores/hotels/bars with license – no alcohol to be found :-). In one of the two liquor stores, The Cellars – which is connected to the T&C Club – you do have a great choice of wines from all over the world. It’s a big difference if you compare it with most of the enoteca’s in Milan, where almost exclusively Italian wines are sold. You can’t blame the Italians, they do make some of the greatest wines in the world. Of course for a wine enthusiast as myself, being able to choose a bottle from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Chile, Argentina, USA, Spain, France,… is like being a kid in a candy shop :-).
This being said, let’s wrap it up for today and let’s have a look at what glass we’re having tonight. The funny thing is that those stores are a bit hidden and the interior is dark, so you always have the feeling of doing something naughty, which makes it even more excited.