Furniture Shopping!!!

We woke up early and went to the real estates office to pick up the keys to our apartment. We then went there to make sure we had the correct set of keys - thankfully we did. Cameron dropped me off to pick up the bedroom suite to our apartment before heading off to Abu Dhabi to collect a cheque. Kate (a friend) and I jumped in a taxi and went to the Spinneys carpark, (Spinneys is a Supermarket) wound down the window and waited as a dozen men came running to help us. We told them we needed 2 strong men to come and dismantle the bed, take it to The Greens, and then put it together again. We haggled a bit and ended up agreeing on a bargain price. The guys followed us back to the apartment, where they packed up the bed in their truck, then followed us in another taxi out to The Greens. The taxi that Kate and I were in nearly lost the van along Sheikh Zayed Road (which is 4 lanes of pure madness) so we made our taxi driver drive slowly at about 80kms an hour with his hazard lights on, so the truck could keep up. The driver was not at all popular with the rest of the drivers on the road as most cars go along at least 100kms hour. In Dubai though, if a driver does not know where they are going, or if they want to get in another lane and can't or for any reason other that they deem necessary they may drive along with their hazard lights on and you may not have a clue what they are doing. It is a very funny sight. Anyway, we got to our apartment okay and the men unloaded the bed and reassembled it for us.

Later that afternoon when Cameron got back from Abu Dhabi (about 4pm) we began our furniture shopping. Fortunately, we had been to the shops before to look around and decide what we wanted to we knew exactly where to go, what we wanted and where to get it. We were super organised! We began at IKEA at Dubai Festival City, where we got our futon, bookcase, tv unit, coffee table and some other assorted household items. We paid for our purchases and ordered the free home delivery (which was booked in for Thursday the 31st August). We then went to Plug Ins (an electrical store) and ordered our TV and washing machine to be delivered. We also bought and took home the microwave, iron, toaster, kettle and juicer. By this time it was about 9:15pm and we still had to go and get dinner sets and stuff, so we headed to Carrefour (the Deira branch) to collect them. After a small detour (ok, Kathryn got lost) we got there and ran in to get the rest of the kitchen stuff and a few other bits and pieces. We then went back to our apartment and unloaded the car, which by this stage was completely chockers, before going back to the Winchester for bed - we were absolutely exhausted by this stage!