Swans and Mansions

The other day a friend and I were at the mall, a place I have been innumerable times. We noticed an area with what looked like an outdoor market behind it, so we went to check it out. We found a place to buy plants and tons of "pet stores." I put this in quotations because most of these animals should not be considered as or kept as, pets. There were the usual cats, dogs and bunnies but there were also roosters, goats, chickens, ducks and I even saw a large, fully grown swan sitting in a cage. I wanted to buy the swan and let it free cause it just looked plain miserable. The weird thing was, that these seemed to be relatively legitimate pet stores where you could buy the pet, food and all accessories needed for your pet (swan). At home this would be a black market operation but I feel as though there maybe a convenient lack of regulations surrounding the sale of "wild" animals here. At this market there was also a large area fenced-in by barbed wire with an admissions gate. Inside were all Emirati men (I knew because of their incredibly expensive white SUVs and the National dress) standing in the middle. We were trying to decide if it was some kind of illegal rooster and monkey fighting or something, but we could not get close enough. Eventually we saw a sign pointing that was that said "Public Abattoir", which when I looked up on my phone means: Public Slaughterhouse. This was definitely some information I could have done without and I'm glad we didn't get the opportunity to get close enough to see anything I didn't want to see. I think perhaps this is connected with the fact that Muslims are supposed to only eat Halal items that have been slaughtered in a certain way. Perhaps this is where people bring their livestock to be slaughtered correctly under Islam?

This weekend the Sheikh that owns our building complex invited all us teachers to see his new mansion/compound that he is building. It will be pretty impressive when it is finished complete with a 66 suite guesthouse for his large extended family, a huge 15ish room building to be used for his office (it has an elevator!), a grand ballroom/disco, a giant separate kitchen building, worker buildings (they were considerably less nice, though) and an outdoor seating/party area. Many of the rooms inside were made entirely from (slightly ugly marble) which I'm sure was very expensive (check out my facebook for pics!) My favourite part of the whole thing was driving the ATVs and golf cart around the grounds. It felt like real-life Mario cart! It was all very fun until one of the men got too agressive so I peaced out to avoid the uncomfortable situation. Look for that story in a few years in the blog-book I'm going to write! It will contain all the stories that I cannot post right now.