Apres la deluge

The 7s was, as always, great fun but this year it was particulaly memorable as a result of the torrential downpour that occurred on the Friday afternoon. I have never seen weather like it in Dubai in the three years I have lived here.

The morning was a little overcast but intermittantly sunny and we had strolled around the ouside pitches taking in the atmosphere. On our way past the Dubai Big Bus Tour exhbit we were offered some rain ponchos. Bearing in mind that the sun was shinning at this point we were in two minds whether to further clutter up our pockets but in the end I can never resist the temptation when offered free stuff and we all took one. Good move. A couple of hours later the first curtain of rain gradually enveloped the desert around the stadium obscuring Dubai's skyline in the distance and then working its way across the pitch to the DHL stand where we were sitting (under the covered bit although as it transpired the roof was to keep the sun rather than the rain out..). It tipped it down for about an hour and continued to rain on and off for the rest of the afternoon/evening. It was perhaps not as wet as the "caught in a waterfall" monsoon that occasionally we would expereince in HK days but nevertheless, having only experienced a few drizzly days in the past three years of lving in the desert, this was something else entirely and it took a great deal of explaining to my friend A who was on holiday here to escape the English Winter that, certanly in my experience, this was very unusual. Fortunately the Big Bus rain ponchos were incredibly effective so only the lower parts of me that were not covered got very very wet - it was also still warm so we avoided freezing to death and were able to continue to watch the rugby now being played on a somewhat sodden pitch.

The Saturday was fine with plenty of sunshine and I took E. and the kids in the morning (A. distinguishing himself at the Range Rover exhibit by throwing a rugby ball between two sets of tyres to win himself a ball - more than I and most of the other adults taking part were able to do) and they had fun running around like lunatics on the grass banks around the outside pitches and hurling themselves down the "ski slope" (in fact the "snow" was tiny polysterene balls which got absolutely everywhere). In the afternoon I was being enteratined in the corpoate boxes which was fun so all in all an excellent, if unexpectedly damp, weekend of rugby.