I am not well, in fact I feel really rough, I have left India and travelled to Dubai a four hour flight. My last night in India was the start of me feeling rough. I am not sure what is it but the symptoms are a really dry sore throat, a thick head and cramps in my hands. It came quite suddenly during the flight and really a bit disturbing, I knew that I had not slept well on my last night in India, it was really hot, really hot to the point I just couldn’t cope I just kept having a cold shower trying to get my core temperature down.

It’s  now 5:30 am and I am I I’m in my Dubai hotel room listening to the call to prayer, just wondering how this works, In rural England we sometimes have complaints about the midday or 11:00am church bells. There are frequent  moans about the disruption to a quiet life,yet in Muslim counties the call to prayer is belted out at really silly o clock with no apparant problems, at least here you can hear that they have put some money into the speakers, they are not the cheap Tandy type, the type where they make them big, make them loud type that when you turn them up to full vibrate and distort. You could tell the quality of these not by how loud they were but from the clearness of the speech,I couldn’t understand what was being said, I got the impression that someone had been a very naughty boy for something and I am sure it was important to those that it was intended but really at 5:30 am its not on.

I am staying in the Copthorne in Dubai not a chain that I have used, probably a bit up market for me, the room  is a bit tired around the edges but its is massive I have one of two rooms in a suite and the bed is over 6 foot wide, I know because I can sleep sideways and need a mine detector to find the tv remote control, which in keeping with the tiredness of the room is missing the battery box window and has been taped over several times with elastic tape. I have heard that some counties did suffer with having the batteries taken by guests wanting to obtain full value from their stay, I suppose its just an updated version of taking all the Shampoo and soaps.

I arrived in Dubai yesterday don’t ask me what time I really was not in the game yesterday, I do know that I had left India on the 9:40 am plane and the flight was about 4 hrs now you would think adding one to the other should be enough, but you have to add in the eastward travel, knocking the hours off to the time that was added when I flew out and really I cant be bothered to work it out my tablet says 08:40 but as its not connected to the internet that’s probably Indian time, a waiters now told me its actuallu 7:10am  and so as you can see a fair amount of traveling east yesterday.

So far Dubai has been fascinating and that is through this fog of a cold or whatever affecting me at the moment. Entry could not have been much easier having landed at what is the biggest airport in the world it’s truly massive with hundreds of plane moments an hour every hour all day and night, no flying curfew here. Once we touched down I flowed the crowd being directed by signs ARRIVALS down several escalators one train journey until I eventually ended up at the immigration. There were signs for Visa on entry foreign nationals but not one for “I haven’t got a clue where or what I should be doing” and the signing was obviously meant to be so clear for once there were no customer service agents 

The breakfast restaurant is like a meeting of nations I am not sure how many there are here the room probably seats 50 to 60  persons and just looking around there is every conceivable nation here, i have noticed French, Nordic, Chinese Indian and Russian