Okay, so sorry to be the worst updater ever, but I promise to get into a better blogging routine once I get settled in. You'd think after 6 weeks here I'd be further along, but every day is full of work and trying to stave off exhaustion (occasional lunchtime drives into the desert to nap in my car are key) and every night there's couches to buy and cars to test-drive and unpacking to do and pidgin English to speak with bureaucratic officials whose non-Hindi vocabulary includes only nouns and present-tense verbs ("phone line, can have today? is possible?"). Haha. Not that my head almost explodes on a daily basis or anything.
But seriously, being here is exhausting. In fact, my friend M was actually hospitalized for exhaustion/dehydration last weekend (she's fine now), an adventure which included the hospital mis-registering her nationality and then insisting that she was, in fact, American Samoan and demanding that she produce her American Samoan passport. They then sent her to a doctor who told her he would be conducting a variety of "investigations" (tests?!) but that she could not know what they were lest she influence the results.
What else is new... last Thursday my team at work took a field trip out to the desert in the company's Land Cruisers to check out our project site (which right now consists of dunes and camel farms). What was supposed to be a 20-minute trip to see where our new offices would be ended up being a 2-hour desert safari, with my various male Emirati coworkers competing to play "Impress the American" with their ability to drive up and down dunes at 90-degree angles and insane speeds. (They were all impressive, but the best part was watching them adjust their headdresses to "desert style" with great flair when they got behind the wheel.)
Over the weekend E and I house-shopped for about 30 hours and I came out of the experience with, among other things, a pimped-out but very cheap LCD flat-screen TV from the famous faux-Canadian "Hactc" brand (upon closer inspection, the box says "Made for Canada"... I guess the "Made in China" is implied). I figure it will be perfect for watching bootleg Chinese DVDs, if nothing else.
Last night - in preparation for the massive housewarming party we are throwing this Friday - we made a pilgrimage to the Ajman Free Zone two emirates away, where you can buy $6.75 1-litre bottles of Stoli without the liquor license (or 30% haram tax) required in Dubai. We had heard stories of local teenagers following people out of the free zone and ambushing them in Sharjah (the emirate between Dubai and Ajman, which just so happens to be dry), but luckily we had no such Wild West-style misfortune and we made it home in time to enjoy our 800PIZZA (run by Filipinos, but the best Italian-style pizza I've had outside Naples) with a glass of tax-free, license-free Montepulciano before turning in for the night.
And so. Now I have to finish up a presentation on strategic direction in the hopes of sneaking out during lunch to go sign us up for Showtime cable. Just another day in the desert!
