More on the first night

Typical family photo for us, Big Buddy asleep in his makeshift
carseat, Mr. Big on the phone, and me wondering what the
Hell is going on.

Because our first night was so strange, I thought I would go into more detail about it. Mr. Big had rented us a car through Budget Rent a Car. He rented us a little Nissan, something. I guess this model is not found in the U.S.A.  Now one thing to note here is that even though most of the cars look like the cars in the U.S., they have different names. For example, the Toyota 4Runner over here is the Fortuner. As we get all of our luggage packed into this little sport utility, we quickly realize that the cigerette lighter is not working, so our external navigation won't work with it. Luckily, they upgraded us to the Rav 4. Once that was over, we proceeded to find our hotel, The Four Points hotel. Now, Our first two hotel choices fell through, on our way to Dubai, so we ended up here. This hotel is really pretty nice, they are just located about every couple of blocks from each other. So the first one we came to turned out to be the wrong one, hee hee! Back into the car. OMG did I mention how crazy the drivers are over here? There are tons of round- abouts and no one seems to signal. Maybe cars over here don't have signals...but they sure do have horns! Everyone drives super fast, weaving in and out of lanes while they honk at everyone in their way. As we were driving to the second hotel, Big Buddy said "Daddy, this car is making me feel grumpy!".

Car seats. Not many people have them. Here is a million dollar idea, open up a store that sales car seats for infants and small children. We were able to get a booster type seat for Ashton from the rental car place at $20/day. Yikes. I am currently searching for a place to buy one with no luck.

Restaurants. I mentioned in an earlier post that the menus misrepresent the food choices. So far, two restaurants same issue. The first nights restaurant took 45 minutes to get out our food. It helped me realize that I have become accustomed to children's menus, quick turn around and bargain pricing. (I am interested in diving deeper into this issue as we eat more of the cultural food). After dinner arrived, we began to eat, poor Mr. Big all of a sudden became violently ill from the spices in his chicken parmasean and exited the restaurant quickly. After he gathered his composure, he returned looking quit pale. He decided to retire to our room and took Big Buddy with him while I waited for the check. After getting to our room, Mr. Bigs key would not work and he became violently ill again. To make a long story short, Mr. Big ended up throwing up in the marble elevator. Because, Big Buddy was with him, everyone thought Big Buddy had done it. Way to take one for the team Big Buddy!  (Hopefully, Mr. Big doesn't read this. He made us promise that this event never happened ;) )

Finally, we were able to get Big Buddy asleep. What a very long day full of lots of new experiences! (Little did we know, that Big Buddy would be up in only 4 short hours!).