I live in Karachi...

Now that might seem a strange thing to say after 18 months of living here, but I have to admit that every so often I get this sudden realization that I do in fact live in Karachi. I still find it amazing that I have shifted (that’s me picking up Pakistani idiom!) 4500 miles across the globe and now live in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

My last few days in Kenya where great, I had a couple of days when the boys were at school and Paul and Pam were at work. So I settled down with the DVD player and my latest cross stitch project and didn’t get out of my pyjamas! I watched the first series of Spitting Image and was disturbed to find that it was 25 years old which made me feel very old indeed. I also watched ‘The Sarah Jane Adventures’ which is a spin off from Dr Who which I really enjoyed.

On Friday Jackie and her parents and I went into Nairobi to visit the Maasi Market and I now the proud owner of two giraffe and four Maasi warriors. From Nairobi we headed to Mitchell’s Tea Farm at Limuru, which was absolutely delightful. We had a short talk on tea growing and how it is harvested and processed and then a gentle stroll round part of the farm followed by a delicious lunch in a very colonial dining room.

Friday evening a made a roast dinner to celebrate my final night with the family and discovered that making good roast potatoes at 7500 feet is not possible. Because liquids boil at a lower temperature at altitude it means that the oil never gets hot enough to get the potatoes really crisp. But that aside I really haven’t lost my touch and roast dinner for 9 was delivered to perfection, if I do say so myself!

The journey home was fine; Dubai airport doesn’t get any better even though they have opened a new terminal for Emirates flights. Like most everything else in Dubai it is dedicated to shopping and there really wasn’t anything worth buying amongst all that glitter. There was one excellent piece of news when I arrived at the gate at Dubai, I had been upgraded to Business Class for my final leg which was most enjoyable, and the lobster was particularly delicious!!

It’s been a busy week since I got back from Kijabe last Sunday. There have been A level exams in school which has meant late finishes on a couple of days. There have also been a lot of meetings and things to organise. We have also lost a member of staff so there are more timetable changes to sort out tomorrow. The timetable sometimes feels like the Forth Bridge, just when I think I have finished I haveto start painting it again!!

This year’s school production is now only 6 weeks away and I am getting just a little bit nervous, in fact I have woken up a couple of time in a cold sweat thinking we will never be ready. We have managed to sort out some of the costumes this week from ones we already have which is great and Tanveer Carpenter should have completed stage one of the set over the weekend, so the show will o on, Inshallah…