Family Getaway to Dubai

We took a weekend trip to Dubai to escape Doha during Ramadan.  We stayed at Atlantis - The Palm.  Included in our room was admission to the water park and the aquarium.  It was a very cool (but short) trip and we are hoping to be able to do it again next year!  Even during Ramadan (no eating/drinking in public) everything in the resort was open so it worked out well!  In the late afternoons, we were able to go to a couple of the malls to shop and then restaurants would open at sunset and we could get dinner.  The kids did great and we loved that the flight was less than 45 minutes!
I've only posted a few pictures here.  If you want to see more, go to my facebook album.

Date Harvest 2009

We were walking in our compound one evening after dinner and came upon a worker from the restaurant who was climbing a date palm to pick dates.  He so kindly gave us some of the dates he had picked...we've lived here almost 3 years and we had never had fresh dates straight off the tree before.  That generous man didn't know what he started!...

After realizing how good fresh dates are - and how cool it is to pick them straight off the trees in our neighborhood - we went on several searches to find the ripe dates.  We tried to find the trees that were in the public areas and weren't in somebody's front yard!  Here are some of the dates we harvested on our own:

 

One Saturday we were driving out and noticed the date palm trimmer coming around cleaning up all of the dead and hairy bits at the base of the leaves.  We stopped the car and James got out and asked the guy to cut off a big bunch of dates.  Of course, these dates weren't ripe yet but we were afraid of losing our chance at these dates since most of the other trees were becoming scarce.  I thought this guy's harness thing was so cool and he was really good at climbing those palms.  (When he worked his way down to the tree in front of our house, I happened to notice when he took off his shirt - for such a skinny guy, his arm muscles were ripped!)

Since our newly acquired bunch of dates wasn't ripe yet, we had to find a warm but shaded spot to ripen them...thus was born the "Dan Cox Honorary date ripening shed" (Dan is the guy we bought the shed from).  It was the perfect spot to keep birds away too.  (The bunch in the corner in this picture is actually not the one the worker cut for us.  We picked those a couple days earlier but they never were good - very bitter if they are picked too soon.)

Micah loved to help harvest the dates when they became ripe.  (Notice the box behind Micah says "Storage"?  That means the box of dishes was supposed to stay in Houston.  Thanks Allied for making us cart around and store this unnecessary box!)

Some of the dates in Micah's basket.

I guess today wraps up date season as we finished harvesting all the dates in our shed.  We froze nearly 30 ounces of dates and that is just what was left over.  We've already made date bars, coffee date bread, date balls, orange-date pinwheel cookies...So between what we ate, baked, and froze we estimate to have had 4 lbs of dates!  All from our neighborhood trees!  Can't wait til next year!!!