Emirates palace

The CE1 class visited the Emirates Palace for the GCC Economic and Financial Integration Forum. We arrived at 9 o’clock and then we registered and then we entered the conference room and listened to the opening speech.

From 9:30 to 11:00 was the first session time chaired by Dr Jassim Al Mannai, Director General of the Arab Monetary Fund, who talked about economic and financial integration and international experience.

Dr. Abdul Aziz Aluwaishig, Director General International Economic Relations GCC Secretariat, was the first speaker. He talked about the history of developments and agreements made in recent time by the GCC countries in their chasing for the freeing up trade and decreasing the tariffs in the GCC zone.

After that the Head of Unit in the European Commission, EU, Lukas Stemitsiotis talked about the challenges they faced and the problem the Euro zone had because of Greece and the possibility a Greek default on its debt; the European countries are damaged by this problem and they are struggling to find a solution for it.

The third and the last speaker of the first session was Dr. Aladdin Rillo, Director Chief Economist of the ASEAN Integration Monitoring Office. ASEAN stands for the Association of South East Asian Nations. Dr.Rillo talked about of the experience of the ASEAN and he mentioned ASEAN Mutual Recognition Arrangement. He also mentioned the goal in his region was integration of capital markets instead of a single currency but the problem they faced was the difficulty for developed countries like Singapore to share the same currency with the undeveloped countries like Laos or Cambodia. Maybe this applies equally to the Euro zone. He was the best of the speakers because he was brief and he gave more details.

At the end, they opened a time for the people who were there to ask questions and give their opinions 

Word	Synonym	Antonym
Happy	Glad, pleased, joyful	Sad, unhappy, depressed, down, heartbroken, miserable and blue
Shout	Scream, yell, shriek	Whisper
Clever	Smart , brilliant, intelligent, bright	Dull, stupid , idiotic, dumb, dim, thick, coldish
Exciting	Interesting, thrilling,	Boring, dull, uninteresting
Furious	Angry, mad, irate, enraged	Calm, mild , pleased,

narrative writing

Thirty years ago, Hedley, accompanied by his wife Mary and his elder daughter Kate, travelled from Brunei to the Niah Caves in Sarawak, Malaysia.

They set out early in the morning from Bandar Seri Begawan and they drove the car to the border of Sarawak. When they reached there they crossed the river by the ferry so that they could continue their trip to the caves. They stopped for lunch then they carried on their way. Then they took a boat up the river and sailed to the rest house and stayed there for the night after they had their dinner with the people who were living there too. They shared food and drinks with them and they went to sleep.

The next day, they walked in the jungle for 30 minutes until they reached the caves. When they entered they noticed that the caves were very huge and very high. They also saw a few men climbed up bamboo poles which reached the roof of the cave. They scraped off the bird’s nests from the roof of the cave and the men down collected the nests and put them into sacks. Those men collected these nests to sell them to the Chinese.

In the afternoon, they collected their stuff, said goodbye and went back home. It was an exciting trip and I think it’s the kind of trip that cannot be forgotten.