Out and About in Dubai

I was going to blog about diving today but something very exciting has happened - It rained in Dubai!

Yes, it rains so infrequently here (it’s not called the desert for nothing) that when it does happen, it’s headline news, it’s happiness bursting from inside you, it’s wanting to do the rain dance hopping up and down from one foot to the other and chanting some unintelligible babble!

As you can tell, I am quite excited that it rained last night (and a bit today). Yesterday, we were at a friend’s house for dinner and when we left their building, we noticed that it had rained! Not the light sprinkle from a couple days ago, and alas not a downpour, but enough for the cabbie to use the windshield wipers and enough to make all the pavement and sand pits wet.

I can’t believe how much I missed rain, especially at night. I love cloudy overcast skies, I love thunder and lighting, I love rain storms. I think it has something to do with being a Pisces. Even though there was neither thunder nor lightning nor did it rain enough to call it a storm, I’d say I’m a happy camper.

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Back in day, when I first heard people joke about English or Scottish weather, I thought I could never live in a place that was overcast so often. But then I started to notice that many winter days in NYC are actually quite overcast. For long periods too. Maybe that’s what makes the winter so depressing. That and the freezing cold. Makes you appreciate the breaks of sunlight that much more.

Dubai is sunny practically 360 days of the year. Average rainfall is 6.5 cm per year with half of that falling in December and January. Since leaving NY in November, I have not seen any rainfall at all. There were a couple of overcast days when the clouds were so dark that I would say, “If this were any other place in the world, I would say that it is going to rain.”

But today I finally experienced some precipitation. Granted not much, as it was only a 5 minute light sprinkle, if even that. Was barely enough for me to turn on my windshield wipers. But it was enough to breathe in that fresh-rain-on-newly-cut-grass smell. Ah…and then it was gone.

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