The Trip begins... Stage One- The Middle East

G’day all,
Well the big 7 month trip has begun and my first stop is the United Arab Emirates. I left Galway on Wednesday and spent Wednesday night in London with my cousin Dave before Flying to Dubai Thursday morning. I decided to give this couchsurfing.com thing a go and I had an Aussie guy called Rob meeting me once I arrived in Dubai and I have been staying on his couch for the past few nights. He met me at this massive mall in Dubai where we sat down and had dinner together overlooking skiers sliding down an indoor ski slope in one of the many hi-tech super shopping malls they have in Dubai. Rob actually lives in the city of Abu Dhabi about 2 hours away from Dubai. I was pretty excited to finally be in the Gulf and driving through Dubai at night on the way to Abu Dhabi was a sight to see in itself with the crazy sea of futuristic skyscrapers surrounding these huge 10 lane highways weaving throughout the city. After arriving in Abu Dhabi we decided to go for a couple of cheeky beers at one of the big five star hotels in town. Abu Dhabi itself is a large skyscraper filled city which also has just been built over the past 30 years and just seems like a smaller version of Dubai. It was a weird feeling being warm again and wearing a t-shirt after being in Ireland for the past 9 months freezing but that joy wore off on Friday when we visited the desert. Rob is an Aussie lad working here as an engineer and I was lucky enough to get him at a time where he has 2 days off work and a company car with free petrol. We decided to head to Liwa on Friday, which is the largest sand dune oasis in the world where some dunes are 300m in height. The drive was long, straight, sandy and very hot as we headed almost to the Saudi Arabian border. We couldn’t believe it when we got there as it just looked like something out of a movie with beautiful white untouched sand dunes reaching out to a bright blue sky. After driving around the dunes for a while and passing some camel farms we arrived at the end of the road and without much luck tried sliding down the dunes in a cardboard box. Next thing some bloke in a 4WD comes cruising up to us and offers us a drive through the dunes which was great fun. At times it almost felt like we were going to roll over and at the end of our ride we went down this massive hill which was a good adrenalin rush. The man then offered us to rent his sand board which we jumped at the opportunity although it wasn’t as fun as it seemed. After 20 minutes we gave his board back to him as we were so hot and tired we couldn’t walk up the dunes anymore. I slept the whole way back to Abu Dhabi before sleeping some more then having some more cheeky beers with Rob and another couch surfing buddy from Sweden called Kristofa. We ended up going into this weird Arabic club afterwards where we all felt so out of place as a room full or Arabs stared us up and down as they smoked their pipes. As we tried to sit down a man ran over and told us it’s reserved so we sat in the back room and sucked back one more cheeky beer before heading home. Yesterday Rob took me to one of the most amazing thing’s I’ve ever seen before, the ‘Grand Mosque’. It’s a brand new mosque which is just being completed now and I honestly found it more impressive than the Taj Mahal. It blows your mind just the size and the design of the thing but even better is when you get inside. As you walk inside there sitting in front of you is the largest carpet and the largest chandelier in the world. The carpet took 600 women 1 year to make by hand and the chandelier stands 6 meters long. It was definitely a must see and will be a big tourist attraction in years to come. The other major attraction in Abu Dhabi is the Palace which was closed to tourists yesterday. I found out today reading the paper that they had a huge auction in the Palace yesterday where a car number plate with the number 1 on it was sold for nearly 20 million Aussie bucks. They seem to have more money than sense over here and as you look around I don’t think you could see anything more materialistic apart from perhaps Hollywood or Beverley Hills. The shopping malls here are amazing and are so spotlessly clean and are seen as old if they are over 5 years in age. It’s a weird combination of the world here and it’s quite odd seeing a queue of Muslims with all the gear on lining up to order their Mc Arabia meals at McDonalds. There are also some nice beaches on the cities edge where it was a surprise to see men wearing speedos and women wearing bikinis after being told not to wear shorts around as people look at you like your naked. Apart from that and all the modern buildings there is not much else to see and do in Abu Dhabi but it’s a nice experience all the same. So far couch surfing was a huge success for me and Rob was brilliant in showing me around and having me stay with him for the past 3 nights and we got on great. Next stop….DUBAI!!!

Keep it real,

Woodsy

1 MONTH TO GO !!!

G'day all,

Well there is ONE MONTH to go until the adventure of a lifetime begins. I have booked flights to Dubai in the Middle East for Feb 14th where I will begin my travels for the next 7 months around the world. This blog will be updated at least twice a week and will include pictures and videos each time and plenty of laughs. Add www.paulwood.blogspot.com to your favourites and spread the word to your friends and families and we can share the adventures with everyone. ...Update ya all in Feb :)

Pauly

Working Hard in Galway

G’day all,

Well it’s been a hectic past few months since my last update with much working, partying, socializing, footy kicking and site seeing. “Race Week” ended up being as crazy as it was hyped up to be with the whole town wall to wall with tourists for the whole week. Each day everyone went to the races and each night the whole main street “shop street” was blocked off and turned into one huge outdoor pub. All the bars gave their patrons plastic beer cups so they can take their drinks out onto the road. It was one absolute huge week long party. Our house has also started falling apart since updating you guys last with my Cousin Dan’s roof collapsing, water from the shower dripping through the kitchen roof, rats running across our living room floor and across my hand while I slept, and parts of the walls falling off. It has also been getting very cold lately and as it’s so expensive to get heating over here we all sit around the lounge room in our thermal underwear, beanies, gloves, and scarves each night laughing about how nice our house is. One thing that’s been helping us get through the bad weather is our huge games of footy we’ve been having at least once a week. Sometimes we have up to 10 or 15 people all tackling each other in the mud and rain and we play until it is dark. We’ve been inviting anyone we can to join us in our games but as the weather has been getting colder and darker our games are starting to fizzle up now. Another update to our crazy household here is our new French/Spanish/Irish hippy mate Des who came to crash on our couch for a week and is still here 4 months later. He is the funkiest guy you can meet with dreadlocks shooting out of his visor and his matching primary coloured clothes. Every time he plans to move on we talk him into staying longer and now he works here full time and loves kicking the footy more than any of us. Our Kiwi mates and Dan have now moved on and are travelling around Europe at the moment and our other mate from Adelaide Shane lives in Dan’s room now. Before the crew went travelling we had a really great day out at the Aran Islands where we rode bikes around all day through beautiful scenery and admired the views of these incredible cliffs. There islands are almost unchanged for hundreds of years and everyone still speaks the Irish language over there and ride around with horse and cart. I also now have been working 3 jobs with my day job and 2 night jobs doing promotions, one for one of the big nightclubs here called GPO and also promoting the Aussie beer “Carlton Cold” in bars on my nights off. I really love doing the promo jobs and it’s the easiest money as all I have to do is talk to good looking girls all night and put stamps on their hands and get paid for it. Through doing my promo jobs I also met these great Adelaide girls Amy and Alex who have become good mates of ours for about 2 months now and we hang out most days and all party together each weekend. It was Halloween a few weeks ago and boy was it a massive week. Even about 10 days before Halloween night there were people dressing up all over the place and the event went for a week long. None of us could believe the extent of trouble people went into making their costumes and Halloween night was huge with not a single person to be seen without being dressed up. Sean, Tate, and I all dressed up in “Nuclear Radiation Suits” for Halloween and spent about 5 hours making them. Our night was so huge that by the time we got home again at the end of the night our suits were just a few pieces of shredded cloth left on us. I’m planning on heading off to go travelling again in February at this stage with the rate I’m saving money at. So far my plans are to first head to Dubai and Qatar in the Middle East then spend a while in Egypt before heading off to travel Eastern and Southern Europe, North America, Mexico, the Bahamas, Peru, and New Zealand for 7 months before heading home again in September next year.
Anyway that’s about all for now,

Ooroooo

Woodsy