Sharon and Jacques’ Excellent Blog

This is a first in a series of posts to accompany pictures that aren’t really mentioned in the original blog so I’ve back dated these posts. I hope people can find and read them.

The first leg of our trip was Toronto to Dubai via Heathrow. As I recall we arrived at some ridiculous time in the morning were totally jet lagged and both in bitchie moods. We had expected to fly Emirates only to discover with the Star Alliance we ended up on an Air Canada flight. Air Canada is ok but it doesn’t compare the Emirates which didn’t help the matter.

I make a point of taking at least one mid-travel picture of Sharon as its become part of our travel ritual. Sharon hates it but I have a collection of really wonderful pictures of Sharon at her worst. I keep them around for blackmail purposes for the day when Sharon rules the world.

 After London we arrived in Dubai and were picked up at the airport by Mike and Sally to spend 3-5 days in Dubai before moving onto South East Asia. Mike has the dinstiction of knowing me the longest of any living person. Mike knew me when I was a child in Zambia. He and my brother, Paul, used to be best friends and I was just the annoying younger brother. Mike and my brother went to the same school in Rhodesia when we left Zambia and eventually settled down and become an accomplished doctor.

Roll forward quite a few years to the mid 1990’s and Mike shows up in Toronto with his wife Sally and is working at Sick Kids doing gene transplants for really, really, sick kids (think boy in the bubble). Mike did much of the pioneering work in the field on baboons in South Africa.

Mike and I quickly reconnected and for the duration of his stay in Toronto we saw them on a regular basis. Mike was the doctor I called when I broke my collar bone mountain biking along Queens Quay.

Mike eventually left Canada because the stupid government would not give him a medical license and he had to rewrite all the board exams. At the time he was teaching pediatric immunology at U of Toronto and grading students so go figure. Mike has spent quite a few years working in the middle East and was just getting things organized to move and set-up his own practice so things were a little hectic.

Mike and Sally have 2 boys James and Scott. I have had glimpses of James growing up in Toronto and in South Africa when we visited and he is very much his father’s son. Tall, blonde, very athletic with no fear. Sally is a very soft touch with animals and takes in strays on a regular basis. At the time of our first visit, she had 3 dogs; Tashi who would greet you at the door with a shoe in his mouth looking very pleased, Gadsby who never missed an opportunity to eat and was frequently found licking the dishes in the dish washer just in case and Rupert a tough looking little terrier. They also had 3 cats. Mouse and Sylvester were long time family pets and Pig was a cat the boys found around the house and took it in. For Sharon and I it was a treat to be in such an active household. There are a few pictues of the Loubser family here.

The antics of the pets were great. Sylvester liked to drink out water containers. Tashi, I think, wanted to eat Sylvester but was very polite about which yielded the following:

Sally was the perfect host and took us for the obligatory round of shopping at Dubai’s world famous malls. One of best known is Mall of the Emirates and it features a fully functioning snow ski hill. Unfortunately, I only managed to get a picture of the outside off the ski hill:

A small gallery of images of Mall of the Emirates is here. Next it was on to Bangkok to see if one night in Bangkok was really that good or bad.