Day 1854 (24/01/2015)

It was a bit late by the time I had done everything last night and went to bed, so I slept in this morning, waking about 9:30am but it was my one day off. Although the client has paid for the room they didn't pay for breakfast or any other meals, so there was no reason to rush this morning as I wasn't that hungry.

After getting showered I had a quick explore of the hotel checking out the gym & the pool. Then I went for a wander around the area, to see what was nearby. The first shock was a Premier Inn, I didn't expect to see one of them here.

As I am in the diplomatic quarter I passed a few embassies on my walk about.

Basically the whole area was dead, which may be because this is their Sunday but also because there is nothing here apart from the embassies, a few hotels and their National Exhibition Center. It is clean but dead, with a feel a bit like Tenerife but posher. It would be unfair to judge Abu Dhabi on this small area, a bit like judging Birmingham if you were stuck at the NEC.

I can't be bothered to wander further a field as apart from Ferrari World, the Grand Prix track and shopping malls there isn't a lot to see.

Although I did visit a nearby hotel, which has an 18 degree lean (apparently this is a record) and had a nice open balcony on the 18th floor (on the top of the white metal structure at the front of the hotel) which over looks Abu Dhabi, where I sat for a few hours with an iced lemon tea.

And then a prawn & smoked salmon lunch, which was very nice.

It was very nice and I might go back as it was quite posh. One thing to note is that all the hotels seem to have airport type security at the entrances, putting luggage thru x-ray machines and people thru metal detectors. The guards don't seem to be armed so this might just be for show to reassure the westerners that they are looking after us.

Back at my hotel I did some work in my room, where I noticed a marker in the ceiling to point which way is Mecca.

The telly is awful here, the one advantage of going to Eastern Europe is the telly is a lot better, for a number of reasons, one of them being that they have quite a few channels in English. But here it seems that 25% of the channels are currently showing stuff about the King of Saudi Arabia, with two sports channels about racing falcons and only a few channels in English, one being the BBC News. So I've taken to watching Richard Herring videos on YouTube and listening to Radio 2 & 6 on the iplayer.

I went to the gym for a short cycle and lifting a few weights, easing myself back into it after not going for over a week because of my cold, then went for a lie down by the pool, relaxing listening to some music.

I was only there for about an hour as sunset is at about 6pm and then it gets dark quite quick.

In the evening I went to one of the restaurant in the hotel as they had an all you could eat buffet.

It was OK but I probably wont bother again.