The 42-storey building by the seafront in Fujairah is now ready.  It's just a five-minute walk from my flat.

And? Well, every time I drive past all the (yet) empty outlets on the ground floor, I ask myself whether this is the place where we (finally!) will get our very first nice cafe in Fujairah. And I mean a proper franchise cafe with comfy leather armchairs.

They've got them by the dozens and dozens in Dubai and Abu Dhabi but we haven't got a single one here in Fujairah. We've got two places that "proudly serve Starbucks coffee" - one at the Siji Hotel and one near Hilton - but it's all wrong. The cafe near Hilton comes the closest because they have nice leather armchairs. However, they allow smoking, so that's no good. Also, they serve you tea in a teapot with microscopic coffee cups and insist that you sit down first and then you have to ask for a bill before you leave. Totally the wrong way around. The reason I would go to a Starbucks for tea is that they understand I want a large mug of tea - not a silly, small cup - and that I don't want to ask for a bill and then wait for the change. I want to pay, sit down, relax, and leave whenever I want.

I don't understand this obsession with teapots and small cups. Illy's at the Tennis Club is the same. They serve tea in super-small cups with a teapot. And they allow smokers, as well. Has no-one ever heard about a mug of tea? We've got a Costa franchise at each of the HCT colleges, of course, but they close a 5.00 pm and are closed at weekends. Great for students and staff, of course, during our day at college. However, I wouldn't really like to hang out at work after work if you know what I mean.

So, is this the building were we'll get our very first Starbucks in Fujairah? Or Caribou Coffee? Or Gloria Jean's? Or Costa Coffee? Or Second Cup? Or Cafe Nero?

This empty outlet, for example, looks big enough for a nice Starbucks. I can see those leather sofas inside these windows.

Or this one.

They all have, like, two floors and a spiral staircase. The comfy leather armchairs would fit really nicely upstairs. I hope some sensible entrepreneur opens a proper franchise cafe here! So far, all the new outlets in my part of Bank Street have been sweet shops, or shoe shops, or optician's, or chemist's. What I don't understand is why they open even more of these types of outlets when we already have lots of sweet shops, or chemists, or shoe shops, or optician's in Fujairah. Wouldn't it be more sensible to open something where you are the first and only one in Fujairah? Like the owner of a nice, franchise cafe.

I'm a cafe person. I'm not really a pub person or a bar person. I can go to a pub or a bar, it's not that, but for a regular hangout, I'd like a nice cafe. Now, why haven't we got a cafe franchise in Fujairah? The cafes are all full in Dubai so there's no reason to think that a Starbucks wouldn't be successful here in Fujairah as well.

Anyway, Fujairah calling all cafe franchisors! We're waiting for you!!

Now, we'll just got to wait and see.

I’ve been following the events in Egypt on Twitter a lot over the past two weeks (more immediate and interesting than CNN and BBC) and after Mubarak stepped down last night, one tweet caught my attention. Egyptian blogger and activist SandMonkey invited everybody for a party at Starbucks in Korba, Heliopolis, to toast Mubarak’s departure. As SandMonkey was mentioning champagne and beer, a picture of the likely scenes of celebration became quite vivid in my mind.

A little over ten years ago, I used to live only a five-minute walk from this very spot in Korba. We teachers used to hang out at a pub/restaurant called Palmyra – which now is now where Starbucks is – so the tweet about partying in this area of Korba brought back a lot of memories. As Palmyra is now a Starbucks, I can imagine the scenes last night: celebrating anti-Mubarak protesters can only order coffee so they scuttle across the street to the off-licence to buy beer while the Starbucks staff looks on. However, considering that Hosni Mubarak had just announced he was stepping down after 30 years as President, I’m pretty sure the Starbucks crew didn’t mind one bit.

Also, I remember very well when Egypt won over South Africa in the finals of the African Nations Cup in 1998. My flat in Korba was on the fourth floor and I remember people dancing in the streets below for hours and hours, way into the wee hours.

Anyway, this one tweet by SandMonkey created a very vivid picture in my mind of what the celebrations in Cairo would have been like last night and I bet they surpassed the scenes in Korba from 1998 by several miles.

I wish I’d been there!

I'm sitting on the Etihad airport coach between Abu Dhabi and Dubai and I just can't believe that yesterday morning I woke up on the Vietnamese coast, six hours north of Saigon. My two-week winter holiday has been spectacularly wonderful and the only problem was that I never had time to write about my travels on my blog. Anyway, this is a kind of preamble to my holiday blogging, which hopefully will appear over the next couple of weeks.

My travels in Southeast Asia have basically been a train journey between Singapore and Saigon. Well, if they hadn't closed the rail line in Cambodia a few a years ago, this would have been entirely true. In my case, I've travelled by train the whole distance except for the journey through Cambodia and into Vietnam, where I travelled by coach and boat.

Most people prefer to travel from A to B as quickly as possible, i e by flying, thinking that the actual travelling time is a necessary, well, if not evil, so at least an inconvenience and a waste of time. I don't. I love travelling by train and I feel the hours I sit on the train looking at the passing landscape puts me in a restful, relaxing mood. I get time to reflect, and I don't find it in the least stressful. Flying, on the other hand, is stressful, where every moment of the journey is controlled and you sit for hours without being able to move very much.

These two weeks, I've travelled through Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam for the first time in my life. I can't possibly say which country I like the most. It's been fascinating to see all these countries - all unique in their different ways - and I'll focus on each in turn.

However, as very quick intro to the blogging to come, I can say that three absolute highlights have been:

• Walking through Chinatown in Singapore in the run-up to the Chinese New Year
• Visiting the floating market outside Bangkok
• Cycling around Angkor Wat looking at the temples there

Details and pictures to come. We're soon in Dubai and I'll have to change to the Fujairah coach.

Bjorn and his iPad on the Abu Dhabi - Dubai Motorway