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

I'm sitting at Costa at Dubai Airport, waiting for my flight to Singapore, and I'm thinking about the sub-culture I'm part of. Today, we worked our very last day at the college before the winter break, which for many of us meant frantically trying to get ready for the next term. Up until 4.00 pm.

Now, a few hours later, we are (almost) all of us in different stages of getting to the airport, checking in and flying somewhere in the world. The question around the water coolers or in the staffroom today was one and the same: "When's your flight?"

I have this image in my head of us all suddenly, almost instantaneously, dispersing from one single point on the map to - literally - the four corners of the world. If we all wore trackers, I'm sure it would create an interesting pattern on a world map.

The other funny thing of being part of this sub-culture is that flying around half the world for two weeks is the norm. The teacher saying: "I'm staying in Fujairah this break" is in the minority.

Anyway, it's fun being part of this sudden dispersal over the world map over the next few hours. And I'm very much looking forward to finding out what Singapore Airlines are like.

I'm really excited about my winter holidays this year. I've finally decided to take the plunge and see South East Asia - something my friends have been telling me I just have to do for over a decade now. And as a true train fanatic, I'll be travelling by train. This is the first leg of my train journeys through South-East Asia.

I'm flying to Singapore on Thursday evening - with Singapore Airlines, which I've heard so much about - and then I'll take the night train to Kuala Lumpur on Saturday evening. Thanks to my network of friends on Facebook, I'm already in touch with a friend of a friend, who has kindly offered to show me Singapore on Friday. That is just Fabulous. I love Facebook and the way it helps you to get in contact with people when you're travelling.

I've seen my GP this morning, and he's given me a whole shopping bag full of stuff. "If you get bronchitis, you take this, if you feel bloated, you take that." Bless his heart! I could open a pharmacy of my own.

OK, now it's only four days to go.

"Will there be adjectives on the vocabulary exam?" one of my students asks me.

This is not the first time I've had this very question from this very student - let's call him Ahmed - and I'm probably exaggerating if I say he looks terrified, but he's very concerned, and he won't let go. "If there are adjectives, I'll fail! We'll all fail!" A Shakespearian-style tragical fatalism settles briefly over the class. Or at least over the students sitting nearest to Ahmed.

Many students find word-class transformation questions tricky, I know (Disaster is a noun. What is the adjective?). But what intrigues me is why it is the transform-this-verb-or-noun-into-an-adjective variety that makes Ahmed so worried. Perhaps nouns and verbs are less threatening? Some nouns can be rather cuddly, I suppose. In my opinion, some adverbs can be quite nasty - irritatingly difficult to nail down in certain syntactic structures.

It is a well know fact that attack is the best defence, so I quickly write some word-class transformation questions on the white board - some ending with "What is the adjective?" I think I hear Ahmed groaning quietly when my back is turned towards the class, but is this not what cognitive phobia therapy is all about? Helping phobia sufferers face their worst fears?

I know word-class transformations and other types of tasks focusing on the mysterious workings of syntactic structures are not for the faint-hearted. But aren't we training and preparing the next generation of Emiratis for the real world? For dealing with economic downturns? Fixing the red tide? Meeting the ever-increasing demand for drinking water in this desert land? For terrifying adjectives that any come can come at you when you least expect it?

That's my job.

Oh, I almost forgot. I think Ahmed scored 89% on his final vocab exam.

I got up before sunrise this morning to get that Nordic Christmas feeling. Lots of candles everywhere.

However, the sun rises quickly here and it's not easy to keep that Nordic Christmas feeling going for very long - unless you're up really early (which I wasn't).

A few Christmas decorations dating back to the 60s and 70s help create a sense of connection with past Christmas mornings. I hope I didn't wake up my neighbours when I sang this old Swedish Christmas hymn after reading the Orthodox Royal Hours for Christmas Eve.

One thing I miss from my years in Egypt is that we always got Christmas off. Here in the Gulf, Christmas often comes in the last week of teaching or the first week of exams at the end of the first semester. This means that you sort of have to squeeze in Christmas when your working schedule is already very busy. Not easy! It's like, now Christmas is on (Christmas carols at the hotel), now Christmas is off (exams). Now, it's on again (mince pies and mulled wine).

This year we are lucky: Christmas Day falls on the weekend, so we don't have to work on Christmas Day. Some students are aware of the fact that there's something called Christmas happening around now, but it's usually just the odd comment. I guess it's pretty similar to Muslims fasting during Ramadan in the UK. Some British people might be aware of Ramadan, but it's not really visible.

The thing that will be visible on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day over here is the queue of cars driving to and from the church compound in Jebel Ali, Dubai (about ten churches in one place). On a normal Friday, it's pretty crazy, so over Christmas it's just total chaos. I'm considering parking near McDonald's and walk the two kilometres to the church on Christmas Eve.

Anyway, I'm about to put up my Christmas tree. Right now - at this moment in time (as the Americans say) - Christmas is on.

I woke up on Saturday morning and tried once again to find out which movies were playing at the Dubai Film Festival. The official Dubai Film Festival website (full site) cannot be opened on an iPad and the only option is to use the mobile site. I decided to use the mobile "film schedule" - you get a minuscule menu where you can display one film at a time in chronological order - and it took nearly 30 minutes to write down the details of each movie by hand. After that I consulted the Film Catalogue and decided on three movies for the afternoon.

By this time I felt slightly more positive, and when I approached the cinema ticket counter at the Mall of the Emirates I thought that maybe things would work out after all. However, I quickly found out that all the three movies I wanted to see were sold out.  In fact, I was told that "almost all" movies were sold out for the day.

Chatting to the guy behind the counter I was told that most people buy their tickets weeks before the festival starts and that the organisers only have a few tickets left when the film festival actually starts. Well, that explains how I was surrounded by people queuing up for different movies the previous night, in spite of the fact that there were no film schedules available anywhere.

I was told that there was a chance to get a ticket for one or several of the movies I wanted to see if I queued up for a stand-by ticket, but by that time I was so frustrated I decided to drive home to Fujairah instead. One of the other guys behind the counter even gave me a film schedule (meant only for the volunteers) but at this stage it was too late.

At the Abu Dhabi Film Festival and at the Doha Film Festival earlier this autumn, there were tickets available for most screenings - and they also had film schedules available. Will I try the Dubai Film Festival next year? Not sure. To go to a film festival where almost all the movies are sold out before the festival even starts does not sound like much of a film festival to me. Or at least not a film festival  where any spontaneity is possible.

The one one thing I really enjoy about film festivals - apart from watching fabulous movies - is to sit down with a film schedule and a cup of tea and pour over the programme. Trying to work out the best combination of which movies to see is usually a bit of a challenge, but an enjoyable challenge.

When I arrived at the Dubai Film Festval yesterday just after 4.00 p.m. (Mall of the Emirates) I just could not believe it when I was told they had run out of film schedules. How is it possible for the organisers of a film festival not to have film schedules available?! Why not at least make some photocopies quickly for the people showing up?

There were two volunteers with schedules standing around - bless their hearts - but to try and work out what film is showing when, while looking as somebody else's schedule, is extremely difficult. There were around 25 films scheduled for the evening, and to stand there with the film catalogue in one hand and repeatedly asking to have a peek at the volunteer's schedule did not work for me. Again and again I thought, "Hang on a minute, when did the movie about x, y or z start again?"

I'm not good at multitasking, and this was beyond me. The volunteer was very curteous and undrstanding - even when I asked for the film schedule or the fifteenth time - but I really needed to sit down with my own schedule and circle the best options with a pen, and then go over my options more carefully. I can't do that standing there in the cinema foyer, peeking at someone else's schedule!

Next, I tried the iPad App for the Dubai Film Festival. I quickly downloaded the app on my iPad and showed the iPad schedule to the volunteer. Not a single film on the app's schedule for Friday evening was correct!! After that, I tried the online schedule on the Dubai Film Festival website. It didn't work. I showed the website to an official-looking guy with a clipboard but he could not help me.

At around 6.30 I went back to my hotel and watched telly. One option would have been to just buy a ticket for any - ANY - movie, but I just wasn't in the mood any more.

For the Abu Dhabi Film Festival I got my own personal copy of the schedule with my morning paper, and when I went to the Doha Film Festival, there were film schedules available everywhere.

Where all the people queuing up for standby tickets got THEIR programs from, I don't know. It's a mystery.