Gifts and Goodies

The natives are getting restless. Students are emailing me, waiting for their grades to appear, and showing up at my desk with chocolates and picture frames, perfumes and fancy make up, hoping that their generosity (soft bribery) might soften up their serious English teacher. Some might call it grade grubbing. But seriously, I am a rule-following North American teacher who knows how to separate business from nonsense, and although I am a sucker for lovely gift baskets, and some ribbon tied around a bunch of flowers, or a neatly wrapped department-store gift, I do manage (I am pretty sure) to blindly apply the stringent criteria to their projects, papers and presentations. One of my most difficult groups of students, who had such a hard time getting their act together, came around to my desk with a little speech prepared: 'We know we made you very tired Miss, but we are happy for you helping us'. And that about sums it up.

Widening Horizons

Though I am often disgruntled about what is disallowed at the college, I was stunned this week by what was actually allowed. Ten male students from from our brother college were allowed to come to the auditorium on the women's campus and perform a charity concert. When it was first announced, I assumed it would be something traditional or somber. But as the event neared, the tickets sold out, and my students all informed me rather coyly that they would not be coming to my noon class on Thursday. I was then asked 'kindly', by management, to please attend the event as a chaperone, where a raucous event ensued. The music was booming, the boys were jamming out covers of Arabic pop tunes and even some original music. The girls were dancing in their seats, filming with their blackberries, screaming their applause, and despite being told constantly to 'SSSIT' by the various deans and department heads wandering the aisles, they had an awesome hour and a half of normal college debauchery.

Though it might sound completely normal to you, it is not normal in a place where the culture prohibits dancing, live music (except the singing of the Koran) and mixing of the sexes. Knowing all of this, the institution where I work continues to be a strange college-aged environment. The students at the college are day students, and their exit from the college each day is restricted by their 'out' passes. So if a student with a 2pm out-pass approaches the security gate at say, 1:45, she will be directly turned back into college grounds by an Indian security guard. Families who send their girls to our college, (women in most countries but still 'girls' in this one) are comforted by our closed-campus environment. Guardians of our students have full access to their student records, and they even get to sign off on permissions for field trips. Crazy you might think, since most 20 year old women in the US or Europe, Australia and China, and Japan too, enjoy full-blown adult status. In these countries, 20 year old women can get drivers licenses, enroll in college, visit their friends, and more or less come and go as they please, on their own.

But this is a newly opened culture, a culture where many women over 60 did not attend anything more than the mosque school. Advancements are on the horizon, but we, and they, must be patient, lest all of the rich culture that goes along with the restrictive tradition be washed away with modernization. But such patience does not come easy to this modern American faculty member, and so often still I am struck silent by a student who is not ashamed to say that her husband won't let her get a driving license, or her brother disallows her to attend musical events at the college. I should be grateful for the honesty I suppose, but I can't help but be shocked by the unabashed 'OK-ed-ness' with the day-to-day restrictions placed on them by the patriarchal family figures. Not stirring the pot does not come easily for me, but pot-stirrers in this culture do not last long in their jobs, and cultural craziness aside, I more or less like my job. So my tongue remains tied (most of the time), and I am grateful for the growing number of students from the more open families, who can comfortably attend live music at the college, and talk about their wishes openly to visit my country, or even get a job and a license to drive.

Full Cover or Full Disclosure?

You eventually start to feel as if you you more or less 'get the culture', but it takes time.

This was explained to me many months ago, after a frazzling day of sand clouds, traffic jams, and demanding privileged students. As time goes by, some things do indeed become clearer. Muslim modesty, for example, by way of covering your hair, is a great comfort to many of our students, who say that fretting over bed-head would surely make them late for college. And so when the female-only occasions arise, such as wedding parties, the doing of the hair and the choosing of the gown becomes a monumental event deserving of a whole week's planning and preparation. I was lucky enough to experience a local wedding, first hand, when my colleague was invited to one 'with guests'.

Here is what I knew to expect:

• The reception is a female-only event.
• Food will be extravagent and come in huge amounts.
• The guest list will be in the hundreds, if not thousands.
• Alcohol is not permitted.
• Gowns (fancy and in some cases very revealing) will be worn underneath the traditional black abayas.

But here is what I learned in person, at the actual event:

• Weddings are where you'll find the greatest collection and quantity of the world's gold.
• There will be loud, booming Arabic music.
• All wait-staff will be female.
• There will be no cameras.
• Dancing, all females of course, is encouraged.
• Dancing will be mostly of the belly-wiggling and hair-swinging variety.
• Dancing is done between the tables and on a cat-walk type of stage, and in a manner that would seem to most westerners as if you have a genuine romantic interest in the people around you, and mind you, all of the people around you are women.
• There might be an MC, in our case, a gorgeous Egyptian woman, to encourage above-mentioned dancing and hooting and hollaring.
• Large whole lamb bones are ceremoniously served up on top of heaps of gorgeous aromatic rice.
• The finest most delicious selection of hot beverages will be continously offered, including Arabic coffee, sweetened Turkish mint tea, Indian milk tea and green tea.
• Arabic appetizers are the best food feature of the evening, such as hummous, olives, dates, warm Arabic breads, eggplant and pomegranate salads with warm figs.
• The bride and groom only appear late into the evening.
• When the groom does arrive, the women wearing gorgeous evening gowns and letting down their hair, will hurriedly cover back up, out of cultural tradition and respect for the new bride and groom.
• Some women will remain as covered as they do on the street.
• Others will flaunt their typically voluptuous figures.
• Perfume servers will come round with Disney-like giant perfume bottles to help you freshen up.
• Strong Arabic incense will welcome you to the venue and continue to burn throughout the night.
• And foreigners will be warmly welcomed and kissed by the mothers of the bride and groom.

How honoured we were to be invited, and part of the 500-plus guest list! If any of you ever get the chance to attend an Arabic wedding, here is my advice: practice your belly dancing, starve yourself the day before, and see if you can borrow some gold.

Snakes are not Snacks, or are they?

Snakes are not snacks, right? And fuzzy / fizzy drinks?? Which is it?

Now that I've properly medicated my migraine, I'd like to put all the ridiculousness of my work day in order.

For starters, one of my 'to do' items was to get through the marking of 21 research papers on nutrition. Don't know how I expected to do this, with four hours of special event duty (involving a cute wallpapered MINI COOPER car, see below), one session professional training, and a test to finish preparing for teachers. But alas, the student writings are what provide the color and chuckle to my week, and I am grateful these reports on eating habits were there at my desk. As you might imagine, 'snack' and 'coke' are top ten words in the world of nutrition, fuzzy (fizzy) drinks and oh yes fatty asses, ooops, I mean fatty acids. When the first student said something like, 'my family has a bad habit of eating snakes in front of the TV', I was like, giggle giggle, funny little Microsoft typo, her family eats snakes, teehee. But as I went on to find fizzy spelled fuzzy, and acid spelled asses, and yep, coke spelled like this:: cock, I really started wondering where the paper dictionaries are, and the lined composition books, and spelling practice lists. Seriously, I am not making these up: 'family snaking is a big problem', 'our snake habit is harming our health', and 'sweet snakes are my weakness' were all among the neatly organized fairly well cited little research papers.

Between quick bouts of grading these gems, I had 'escort duty' at the business department mini-mall project, where local retailers, such as Mini Cooper, BMW, Body Shop and Sunglass Hut, set up stalls, to be run by students, for an exercise in retail management. Just as my monthly migraine was gearing up for a massive crescendo, I somehow got drafted to escort female students on Mini Cooper test drives, as it would be improper for the males running the MINI stall to be alone in the car with our female students. Yes, you are all thinking, come on Christina, how many of us get paid to sit in the passenger seat of a zippy car on a sunny day and let students drive us around with the sunroof open? Well, let me just share a few facts: Most of our students are not licensed drivers. Of those who are licensed, many simply have the license as a matter of their education, and do not actually get to practice real driving. In addition, as this was a marketing thing for MINI, I was told: let them enjoy the drive, read: let them blare Indian pop music with their friends in the back seat as you drive around nearly missing the light posts, curbs and security guards lining the route. And last facts: my migraine meds were simply not working and I am employed by an institution where calling in sick, or going home with a headache, is not an easily-done thing.

So it's no wonder that when I finally get home to my husband whose car had just been hit and run in front of the kids' school, after we just dented up the vehicle ourselves by backing into a local fisherman's well over the weekend, that I burst into hysterics. That's when I went into the house, found myself a snake, a fuzzy drink, and a bowlful of fatty asses.

Rainy Days

I've been here in the Middle-East for two glorious winters, so I can now pronounce that I am an expert on UAE climate, don't you think? Despite the horrid 120 degree summers, which do begin before teaching ends and we all go away for the worst of it, the UAE winters are gorgeous, cool, dry, sunny stretches of pleasant eat-outdoors weather. My husband Billy has been taking every opportunity to fire up the grill, not only for the perfectly grilled mini-chicken pieces (harder to find hormone-grown plump birds here), but for the actual warmth provided by the grill on the chilly desert-winter nights. We actually refuse to dine in restaurants without al fresco seating right now, and routinely have our moring coffee outside. Life is good.

But last week, for the second time this winter, the rain came. It was as it is in novels, people smelling the rain, watching the sky for the rain, and predicting the rain for a few long unusually cloudy days, until the storm finally came and dumped several inches onto us and the sand, literally at once. They say it comes down harder and in greater quantities than in the past, and even more often. Though it hardly seems possible, since for two years now, there has been a sum total of two rainy spells each winter. When the downpour started, I have to say I was confused because we live in the Dubai Airport flight pattern, and the rain came down with such force that at first I thought it was a low-flying plane. But when it didn't stop after a minute and a half, I got out of bed, looked out onto the pool where I could hardly see its outline. It was a downpour, a fierce, heavy, steady opening of the sky. It went on like this for around an hour, after which I gently settled back into sleep, with the satisfaction of the unusual smell of rain in the air. How absolutely lovely I thought. The smell of rain.

The next morning's reality though, was anything but lovely. Roads were clogged and closed and blocked and cars were upto the runnung boards in water, plodding through to work and school, where everyone was late and nothing got done. The roads here are built to some strange desert standards, which means they simply do not drain, until the sun comes out to dry it up, or the big orange sucker trucks come to drain the low-lying roads and cart the water out to the gulf. So after an evening of rain-smell bliss, we suffered through two days of awful traffic, cancelled classes, required meetings and near-miss collisions with clueless people in the pond-strewn roads. There you have it. True Emirati Living.

Elephants and Chai

If you've lived in the Gulf for a while, it's no big deal when your friends go off on a vacation to India. It's a normal thing, a 3-hour flight, like an extended weekend with the gals in Napa Valley. But to a lot of us, especially those from clean and remote North America, going to India is still exotic, a little scary, and well, a major undertaking. Or so I thought.

We decided to spend my two-week college break in India, largely because of the airfare (under $300 per ticket) and because our old pals from Colorado are now living in Bangalore and they extended an invitation to their home. We bought our tickets, borrowed a guide book, visited the pharmacist and off we were, two packs of malaria pills and one family-sized immodium pack later.

Our decision to stay in Southern India was made mostly with the kids in mind. India is big (who knew?) and road travel and day trips are slow. (...think 4 lanes of cars on two-lane roads, sharing with cows, cycles, monkeys, rickshaws and ladies carrying firewood on their heads..) We visited our friends in Bangalore for three days which included an all-day outing to Mysore. The palace there, where Indian royals still live, is well worth the potholed-three-hour treck from Bangalore, and the Hindu imagery painted and sculpted throughout the place is amazing. But poor 5-year-old Rosie, just when she was getting the hang of being a Christian in a Muslim country, we take her to a place where the gods have 12 arms and the heads of elephants. Surely, we tell ourselves, this confusion is really just a world-citizen in the making.

Our Banglore friends helped us arrange family-friendly lodging, first in Tea Country near Munnar, and then in the Backwaters, where the most popular activity is touring the canals via houseboat. Tea country is gorgeous and rugged, mile upon mile of nearly vertically planted groves of Tea, where every morning we looked out onto the green hills dotted with colorful and quiet tea workers picking the leaves by hand.

The best thing about hanging out in this part of India for me was the Masala Chai, a spicy Indian black tea served uniquely wherever you go. It's amazing with the caffeine that I got any sleep at all. The kids favorite part was surely the animals - the nature, the mango and papaya trees, cashew trees, vanilla beans, fields of lemon grass, cardamom, and coffee plantations, which all offered a natural background for outings, which was new and vibrant and funny, including a one-armed monkey eating coconuts and a guy chopping fruit with a giant cartoon-sized knife. We went on every India tourist's 'must-do' elephant ride where we fed the enormous laid-back animal whole pineapples onto the end of his curled trunk while sitting on his back. The boys absolutely loved the feeding part, and they were game to wait again in line, not for the ride, but to get the elephant to pluck food from their hands with his trunk. We also cruised the backwaters on a houseboat for a day, where we saw villagers doing their wash, rice workers out in their fields and Kingfishers diving for dinner. Billy enjoyed the bird viewing, which included cormorants, egrets, cranes, kingfishers and lots of other diving birds with funny names and beaks and bright green feet. But I'm sure he also agrees with me that the local fruit, chili omelets, and Indian sambar for breakfast made each day excellent before it even got started.

Burj Dubai, Oops, I Meant Burj Khalifa

The opening of the world's tallest tower, The Burj Dubai, happened last night. Because the entire tower premises was reserved for VIPs, getting close was not an option, but we were lucky enough to watch it from the rooftop of a freind's villa. The view was lovely, and the 75 degree temperature was perfect for an evening outdoors.

If you follow this link, you can get an idea of what we saw.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yuk8bU-B5y4

The Burj Dubai (now renamed the Burj Khalifa by the Sheikh) is impressive against the modern but not very tall skyline of Dubai. It's over 800 meters tall, contains more than 50 elevators, houses Armani's flagship hotel, as well as deluxe residential flats and the world's tallest open-air observation deck, where a mere 50 dollar fee gets you access on the 'fast' elevator. And yes, it is shamefully impressive when you realize that so much of country's development has resulted in a massive world-famous debt crisis.

But alas, I have a job, and friends with cozy rooftops as well as an excellent family to kick around town with, so the debt crisis is as unreal to me as it might be to those of you who've never set foot in the middle east. The only really noticeable debt-related issue for us right now is that brunch reservations are easy to come by and the beaches are delightfully under-crowded. And oh yes, Billy's job has painlessly come to an end.

So we carry on with visits to our favorite stomping ground, the one-year-old Dubai Mall, which sits at the base of the Burj, where we've been dining regularly, not only to check in on the progress of the giant tower, but to take in the tallest choreographed fountain show in the world.

Check it out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYeFFyFJxqk