National Day

This week, the women at our college are celebrating National Day, and the country's 38th birthday, draping Emirati Flags over the doors, and wearing Sheikh Zayed-inspired buttons, sashes and even black, red and green nail polish. The atmosphere is so festive (green eye-shadow anyone? or gumballs with royal faces on them?) that it's been hard to accomplish anything serious in our classes.



Yesterday, to top off the festivities, we sojourned out the college gates on a 28-bus police-escorted convoy. The stated goal was to inspire national pride in the emirate's 'cultural and Islamic gems'. The highlight of this trip though, was an audience with His Highness (HH) Sheikh Sultan bin Mohammed Al Qasimi, Crown Prince and Deputy Ruler of Sharjah, and his entourage. This royal personage and his escorts are not much older than our students. He is handsome, well groomed, and fashionable (see Ray Ban shades in picture). And though most of the students do not consent to being photographed themselves, not one of them was without a camera to capture the arrival of the Prince.



You can see that hundreds of students joined this trip, but what you don't see are the students left behind. A small number of our students, who are 18-23 years old, are still tightly controlled by their guardians (brothers, husbands and fathers) and were not allowed on the excursion due to the 'improper' amount of time being spent 'in public'. There are days when elements of this culture do send me scratching my head (or worse). But then something always reminds me that 30 years ago, when this country had just been founded, the situation was even more archaic. Colleges didn't accept women, girls were married off at 14, and females did not drive. So in the grand scheme of things, the fact that most of our students were allowed a fun day out, with their pals, their Blackberries and triple-hued makeup, I'd say progress is being made, one National Day at a time.

Desert Commute

Since we moved from Sharjah into Dubai I've been enjoying my desert commute to work. We live on the edge of Dubai and the college is on the edge of Sharjah. So to avoid traffic, I head out onto a desert road and over the dunes into the neighboring emirate's outskirts. Though it doesn't compare to the colors of my San Francisco commute over the Golden Gate Bridge, or the gorgeous drop into Boulder on Highway 36, there is an elegance to the desert scenes, the camels, the sand, the mosques and the palms. Here are a few pics from a recent evening ride home.

Mosque TV or MTV?

After a year of workouts at the college, it was time to shell out the bucks for a fancy Dubai gym membership. It's not that I didn't give working out at the office a try. Our college gym, shared by the men's and women's campuses, does have a 50 meter pool (closed for repair since February) as well as a half dozen 1990's treadmills. But with my gym-junkie history, a facility with limited hours and dated equipment was just not doing it for me. My mental and physical fitness needs were not being met.

So I joined Fitness First, a gulf-wide chain of health clubs, with dozens of classes each week, the newest equipment, chilled outdoor pools, coffee bar, spinning studio and the perkiest fitness trainers from Egypt, India and the Phillipines. And as with many of our UAE adventures, the gym experience has been full of things that don't quite make sense.

In the ladies locker room are multilingual signs suggesting that we preserve our modesty, by changing behind curtains and covering our bodies with towels. But then there are the massive banks of TV monitors in exercise areas, where every fifth wide-screen is tuned into MTV World, where you're sure to see Madonna in crude gyration mode, or Shakira in flesh colored leotard, writhing as if having an exotic (erotic) dream.

Now I'm all for modesty and respecting the local norms, and I will admit that when the kids are not around, Billy and I tune into the old MTV to see how far behind we've fallen in our pop-culture hole. But I'd like to ask the gym managers if they don't think it's a little much to directly request our compliance with modesty code while showing the most immodest of offerings from satellite TV?

And if that's not enough, there's mid-day Friday - holy time for Muslims, when the route to the gym is clogged with mosque-goers rushing to make the holy hour and parking illegally all over the roads, roundabouts and medians. The gym is indeed a little quieter at this time. But what I just discovered is that if you do hop onto a treadmill, your TV options include not only the indecent videos of MTV, but also the Mosque TV channel, with bowing and praying traditionally-dressed Muslims in the mosque, directly next to the barely dressed dancers of MTV.

How funny and irreverent and religious and multicultural can the UAE manage to be?

I need only tear my eyes away from the the mosque TV and the MTV and direct them to the treadmill on my one side with a Muslim woman running with her hightech dry-fit headscarf, to the stinky German engineer on my other side with his hairy chest spilling out of a tank top. Maybe it's best to just stare out into space..

"You are Naughty Madam"

Someone saw me moaning on Facebook last week about my fatigue, and our sick kids and Billy travelling for work, and they said to me, 'Don't you have a helper?'

The embarrassing thing is that yes, I do have a helper, a fantastic young smiley Sri Lankan helper who lives with us, packs lunch boxes, looks after our kids, does laundry, buys groceries, cooks our dinners and pulls the weeds from our tiny garden without being asked. She even said to me one recent Saturday morning, her day off, 'You are naughty madam', when she awoke to find I had washed the morning dishes. How dare me!

I honestly don't know what I'll do when I get back to America one day, where a nanny costs double-digits per hour, cleaning ladies are a true luxury and gardeners are deemed an indulgence. Seriously, the stress I feel at my college, which is basically an arm of the Islamic government, and the rage I often feel on the reckless and dangerous roads is real, warranted, and a veritable cause for lost sleep and many a new fine line on my face.

But the reality is, I do have good help and when it's time for bed-time stories with the kids, I can totally sink into the pillows with kids and books, and give myself completely to that coziest of parental tasks, knowing that the kitchen is being tidied and laundry getting put away. How totally lucky am I.

No One to Walk With

Health and wellness are hot topics here in the UAE, where obesity is out of control and the country's reputation is growing as the Gulf's Diabetes capital . For the Muslim population the situation is complicated, with the separation of the sexes and the women's need to cover, creating barriers to the pursuit of active lifestyles. And then there's the Lebanese pastry counter at the supermarket, with all form of pistachio and honeyed sweet to mess with any attachment you might have to whole-grain living.

At home we think we're doing ok with our kids, who eat cheese and fruit after school and take brown bread in their lunch boxes. But we get sabotaged by school-sanctioned birthday celebrations which include not only cakes in the school, but candy bags sent home to mess with our delicate hard-won snack regime. And then our neighbor's housekeeper seems to love giving Rosie chocolates. But what can you do? Fortunately 9-year-old Brady knows how to read labels for sugars and fats, and even 5-year-old Rosie knows that 100% juice is the good kind. Woohoo for Boulder-inspired parental badgering!!!

But public health initiatives are behind the times in the UAE, and local moms are often young and inexperieced in the ways of healthy living. This week in class we discussed the topic of transport, and walking was listed as one of the many methods of getting around. We discussed the pros and cons of cars, donkeys, subways, bicycles, and yes, walking as ways to get from place to place. But when the idea of walking was presented as an option, loads of excuses were given as to why it is simply not done here, including bad weather 6 months out of 12, non-existent sidewalks and reckless drivers.

But the crux of the problem is actually rather sad and culturally difficult to get around. One of my students says she loves to walk and every so often she convinces a brother to take her to the mall to walk a few laps, with him. But when I asked her why she doesn't simply take a walk in the neighborhood before school in the morning, or after dinner while it is still light outside, she said 'No Miss. It is not allowed for girls to be alone. I am not allowed to walk outside our house by myself, and no one will go with me'. So in a culture where even a most basic part of living healthy is not allowed, what are these women to do?

Going Local

I just realized that I did, in fact, average a weekly post during my first year in the UAE. Thanks to those of you who read, replied, and sent your positive vibes our way.

What you notice though, after a summer's absence, is how well you've settled, and adjusted to the new surroundings. First of all, you get braver. You get braver on the roads, and at the same time, less outraged at the recklessness, and more likely to go the wrong way (on purpose) up the exit ramps, and circumnavigate blocked intersections during power outages by hopping medians and staring down semi-truck drivers in your way.

You also get detached from your safe and beloved brands. Hertz rent-a-car, for example, was the only name I recognized (or trusted) when I needed a long-term rental last August. This year, however, with visitors coming and the need for another car, I asked around the office and secured a reservation at 'Orient Trading'. I didn't even sigh when I received in an email the basically hand-drawn scanned map to the location of Orient Trading, on a rock-strewn sand road in the ugliest and most industrial part of Sharjah. Who can complain when it comes at half the cost and the same coverage? To top it off, the lovely Indian Keralites in the rental office insisted I stay for tea, provided by their sweet-faced 16-year-old Chai Guy. And seriously, this was the best chai..

Finally, if you check out my 2-week-old Hyundai you'll see the seats are still sporting the plastic factory seat-covers, to preserve my sand and dust-free seats as long as possible. I couldn't help but grin when the Pakistani dealer guy asked if I'd like them removed and I said, 'Nope, I think I'm going local'.

A Visit to our Things

I planned to take a break from non-family obligations this summer, to reconnect with my kids, my husband, the daily news, and life in the Western Hemisphere. But after a relaxing European vacation, and a week with Uncle Bern and old friends in Colorado, I'm feeling the urge to get back blogging. Go figure.

What sent me back into the blogosphere was a trip to the dusty self-store, where the bulk of our worldly belongings (two 20 x 20 storage units to be precise), now resides. We left our things there almost a year ago, re-planted ourselves in the middle east, and used my modest faculty furnture allowance to re-acquire family essentials, including beds, dining table, tv, sofa, rugs, lamps, toys and cheap local art. Funny thing is, we thought we were living light, acquiring only what we needed, and patted ourselves on the back for changing our lifestyle for the better. But when the end of the academic year came, the first of my three-year contract, we realized we were just kidding ourselves. As the movers packed us up to move to a better Dubai location, and they had to send for a second and then a third truck, I posted the disappointing news to facebook, where my brother quickly replied:

"Wow, now you have too much stuff in 2 countries."

So we rolled up to the self-store in a borrowed car, for a quick visit with our stuff, with the intention of extracting the following: kids books, camping gear, and photos. But now we know you cannot expect to simply show up, unlock, locate stuff, and head out again. At the sight of our things, boxed and labeled and stacked to the cieling, I was stricken speechless and sad, impressed and overwhelmed. It seems almost absurd, that we would choose this lifestyle, where you lovingly acquire books, bedspreads and art, and then pack them up for safe-keeping, only to decamp, relocate and start all over again. I can't really describe the turning-stomach feeling I had as I half-heartedly handled our boxes of stuff while our kids frolicked among their sleds, stuffed animals and outgrown carseats.

But eventually I got busy, shook off the dust, rifled through to find the target items, locked back up, and carried a trunk full of treasured objects back to our temporary digs here in Colorado. The kids are thrilled to have their old books, I've got plans to camp in the famous Oman Oasise and Billy can hold those childhood pictures near to his heart as we traipse into our second year abroad.