Behold, in all their glory…
I had M check the Arabic to make sure that my company hadn’t secretly sponsored me as a prostitute (hey it’s Dubai, you never know) and she assured me that I am, in fact, here as a legitimate white-collar employee… however, my title in Arabic is apparently “Helper to the Director,” as opposed to the slightly more official-sounding “Assistant Manager, Strategy and Business Development” in English… I’ll take what I can get.
The residence visa involved a meandering process of surrendering my passport first to my company and then to the government, and weeks later getting scheduled for what was supposed to be a battery of medical tests (reality: as the only white person in the immigration queue, I was led ahead of several hundred Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi men and taken to a Filipina nurse who gave me a quick glance and then signed off on the form saying I had successfully passed my chest x-ray).
The license was slightly less of a schlepisode, involving a bit of queuing, the requisite back-and-forth with bored/disaffected Emirati officials, and an “eye test” (see above). This might be an appropriate time to tell the story of how I got pulled over by the police last week because I had made “seven mistakes” and they were suspicious that I was driving drunk - sadly, I was completely sober, I’m just that krazy of a driver. It’s a learning process, me on the roads here, but at least I was saved from a ticket by K’s cultural savvy (“Smile and flirt! Smile and flirt!”).
Next week is move-in day for the new apartment, so last night E and I took a preliminary trip to IKEA. The highlight, aside from the cheap-furniture euphoria fomented by my current nesting obsession, was checking out model rooms that featured closets full of sample clothes… only instead of, say, dress shirts, they were full of sample dishdash. When in Rome…
E, for those who have asked, is not a mysterious boyfriend who has materialized here in the UAE to cohab with me (despite the fact that our landlord thinks as much). Rather, he is another ex-intern from last summer and we are each other’s “proxy boyfriend,” since his boyfriend is in New York and my boyfriend is… non-existent. On that front, we’ve also secured our third roommate – an Argentinean who works in software sales. Should be an interesting mix.
Tonight I’m road-tripping to Oman with a fabulous crew of Brits/Americans/Canadians for a day-long dhow cruise through the fjords at Musandam tomorrow… if last year’s similar excursion is any indication, it should be a weekend full of dolphins, snorkeling, booze, sunburns, and the occasional Iranian smuggling boat passing us in the Straits of Hormuz… par for the course, I suppose.
