Arabic, Urdu, or English?

I was just about to work on my latest pondering from our sand-road villa about Language, and Rosie sidled up to say, 'Can we go back to Grandma's house now? And play with my cousin Toby?' So perhaps first I ought to address the homesickness and the guilt you feel about dragging your kids away from the familiar, their own schools, their pals since birth, and of course, from a quick plane ride to Grandma's. Though we're settling in well, the kids are all enrolled at the Australian school, and Billy's been busy networking, there is a clear void left by Grandma and all the TLC the kids got while spending a big chunk of their summer with her. Grandma and Grandpa and the doting aunties Janell & Sarah, as well as Uncle Bern and his dogs in Colorado, our fake but FUN Aunties Jill and Ann in Chicago, and of course our best Colorado pals the Bieners made our transition here easier for sure. But at the same time it became even more difficult as we had to say goodbye to such an awesome and supportive American village. Thanks guys!

Now on to the topic at hand: Language. The language situation in the UAE is my current challenge, and so far I've figured out this much: I need to learn Urdu. With Arabic as the native language and English as the language of commerce you'd think that being American would give me an edge. But it doesn't mean a whole lot when an Urdu-speaking taxi driver from India, who's only been here 13 days picks you up, and can't figure out where it is you want to go. It also doesn't help when the Pakistani Urdu speaker who has come to put together your Ikea furniture tries to tell you he'll come back and finish the job another day. So I've learned to say How are You in Urdu - maybe this will help.

Because the locals here are a minority, (Emiratis make up less than 25 percent of the total population), and because cheap foreign labor from poor countries makes up another 25 percent, the language most often spoken is indeed English. This makes the prospect of learning Arabic for me and Billy quite hard, as anyone we'd want to practice with will either not be a speaker of Arabic in the first place, or simply be unwilling to tolerate our attempts at Arabic. So in the mean time, I'm relying on Arabic lessons from Brady. He studies Arabic every day in school and comes home with tricky Arabic body part games. As you might imagine, he gets a great thrill when I actually get it wrong.

So for those of you planning to visit here, you need not have any anxiety about speaking the language. You will certainly get by with your English, but picking up an Urdu phrase book might not be a bad idea.