Digs

Now that I'm Officially Settled In, I figured it was time to post pictures of my digs in all their glory. Schmom and Day-o, now you can picture me when we talk! The rest of you, now you can judge my interior decorating skills (or lack thereof) and see the couches on which you shall sleep when you come visit.




















And so we start: the entry hall.




















Kitchen!




















Dining area (+ sick view).















Dining area and living room. (Having a water cooler really makes me feel like an adult. Don't ask why. But it's very fancy, no?)















"Transitional area" into the living room.















Living room (check out how looooooong the couches are on which you will sleep - 4-seaters, baby).















Everything. Check out the bar (sweet!) and the tree we bought in Sharjah and transported home in E's Corolla. Adventures.















My room! Brought to you by the colors red & orange.




















My sole window - that's why I pay 30% less than my two sucker flatmates. ;-)















Check out my hott "Made for Canada" Chinese flat screen TV.















How many items from IKEA can you count in this picture?




















My bathroom.

Public Apology

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

from K
to Me
date Sep. 28, 2007 10:25 PM
subject Are you CHALLENGING me?!

This, Piff, I feel is bordering on insult the likes of which our relationship has not seen since the [imagined] doubt of your knowledge of the Kashmir region:

"I'm superexcited not only because I've been stalking Ethiopian culture/trivia for the better part of the past decade..."

While this statement is not a direct challenge, I would ask you to remember your place in the hierarchy of Ethiopia Lovers. And it goes like this:

1. Me
2. Everyone else (incl. you)

And nothing, Piff--not going there, not MOVING there, not MARRYING Zera Yacob Amha Selassie, Crown Prince of Ethiopia--will change that.

Word.

K

PS. Am reading Homi Bhabha's "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse", which starts with the fabulous sentence "The discourse of post-Enlightenment English colonialism often speaks in a tongue that is forked, not false. "

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

K, I stand corrected and I will dutifully accept my place below you on the hierarchy of Ethiopia Lovers. In return, I would like to ask that you never, ever doubt my knowledge of the Kashmir region again.

LOL. Only my friends... ("Piff," for the uninitiated, stands for "p!g fu*ker." We keep it real.)

SHUT UP!

No really, shut up. Guess who just booked tickets to go to Ethiopia for Eid?! That would be me, M, and New American Friend Al. Game ON!

We got a sweet deal on Ethiopian Airlines and it was actually much cheaper to fly to Africa than to closer destinations in the Middle East, since Eid's a peak travel weekend here. It's surprisingly feasible as a long weekend trip - under 4 hours direct flight from Dubai - and we'll have 4 full days and 3 nights which should be time to see Addis, Lalibela, and maybe even the Rift Valley Lakes if we're lucky (and if we manage to do anything besides stuff our faces with injera and doro wat).

I'm superexcited not only because I've been stalking Ethiopian culture/trivia for the better part of the past decade, but also because I think M & Al will be fabulous travel partners - the former having spent every summer of her life in Cairo plus 2 years doing Peace Corps in Bulgaria, and the latter being a foreign service brat who didn't even live in Amrika until college. So clearly, we will take the Horn (of Africa) by storm!

And on that note, I'm off to start my weekend - which will include 3 house parties tonight, wakeboarding on a friend's boat tomorrow, and going to the t-shirt printers at some point to pick up the "Sheikha In Training (SH.I.T.)" shirts that J & M and I are getting made for ourselves. Let me know if you'd like to pre-order one for when you come visit. ;-)

If there was no Dubai?

Whatever part of me thought that life here would calm down once I got settled in was clearly mistaken. It seems like now that I have all the basic essentials of life here sorted out - flat, furniture, car, bureaucracy, etc - things have only gotten busier/crazier. I didn't manage to get to bed before 5 AM either night last weekend, and this weekend isn't on schedule to be any less overloaded. And the week in between - where did it go?!

Part of the craziness I attribute to Ramadan, which is like Christmas party season in the US (only with less booze and more conservative clothing). Every night this week I've had someone's company's iftar or sohour (the second post-fast meal) to go to, which then devolves into a trip to a Ramadan tent for shisha, which in turn devolves into tea and board games... and before you know it it's 3 AM and you're stuck in the rush of people going home to eat again before the first morning prayer at 4:30.

All this Ramadan socializing has led to several more unsettling conversations about the, er, darker side of this place that is apparently not all sunshine and Range Rovers and diamond-encrusted camels. At a friend's dinner party the other night, it was brought to my attention that according to UAE law it is illegal for unmarried women to give birth in Dubai. Not illegal like "we'll turn our back and not enforce it if you're Western," but illegal like "you can have free prenatal care and great doctors and then we'll have to imprison you after you deliver." Not surprisingly, abortion is illegal as well.

I'm not really going to comment because hey, that's the law and I've chosen to live here. But it is shocking to realize that if a single woman gets pregnant, whether of her own volition or not, her options are: (a) leave Dubai in order to have the baby, (b) marry the father, (c) travel abroad for a legal abortion, (d) have an illegal abortion in Dubai. Luckily if anything ever happened to me, I'd have all the options on the table, however unpalatable they may be - but most of the women here? Let's just say that your average Filippina secretary probably can't afford to take 6 months off to go back to Manila and have her baby, and your typical Russian waitress sure can't get a visa to fly to London for a "procedure." So that leaves (b) or (d) and, well... who knows.

In the same conversation though, an interesting point came up amongst several Jordanian/Lebanese/Syrian acquaintances about how, yes, it's easy to gripe about Dubai - but where would they be if there was no "Dubai"? It's pretty much de rigeur for the city's 20-30something Arab professionals to be jaded about Dubai: the contradictions, the segregation, the restrictions, the soullessness, all of which - for them - isn't offset by the excitement of being in a new region and a different culture, as it is for Western expats. (Plus, to be honest, non-Emirati Arabs get paid way less than Westerners - that's just a sad fact of life.)

[Can I take a moment to point out that I am using "Western" here not to make Edward Said roll over in his grave, but because it is far easier than saying "British, European, American, Canadian, Aussie, or Kiwi" every time I want to reference the concept.]

So anyhow, I understand their rationale - after all, hailing from the Levant they come from places with vastly richer history, culture, and traditions (but vastly smaller economies and fewer jobs) than this random piece of desert which has only recently sprung up as an overnight metropolis. So the point they made was that as much as they all gripe about Dubai (and believe me, they do - I don't think I've met a Lebanese here who hasn't elaborated for me at great length about how much they'd rather be in Beirut if they could be), it's also a unique opportunity for them.

It was interesting to hear them speculate about where they'd be if there wasn't a place in the region that filled Dubai's role. Their responses basically fell into two categories: either they'd be back home in Amman or Beirut or Damascus, overeducated and underemployed, living near their parents and prodded into semi-arranged marriages with lots o' kids; or they'd be in Saudi or Kuwait, working the same kinds of jobs they have in Dubai but stuck with a shitty quality of life, tons of social restrictions, and a good deal of scorn/segregation from the locals. And that's basically it; maybe if you have some kind of hyphenation going on (Lebanese-Canadian, Jordanian-British, etc) you can find a job in North America or Europe, but barring that it's next to impossible to find jobs in those places on Arab passports these days - come on, the entire year's quota of H1-B visas for the States was allotted in a day. So khellas (that's it, it's finished, game over ... incidentally Jenn, how pleased are you that I have learned the expression for "game over" in Arabic?).

Anyhow. It's interesting to think about what Dubai is to me (sunshine, Range Rovers, diamond-encrusted camels) versus what Dubai is to them (the rare place where they can have a great job, live an open lifestyle, and still be connected to their proverbial roots). I guess at the end of the day, we're all here for very different reasons - but that's what makes this place so interesting. Maybe there's a PhD dissertation on human geography in there somewhere... haha, just kidding. (I hope.)

In closing, I would just like to say that I was in a meeting this morning where one of our project consultants made reference to a JV they had done in Saudi with Bin Laden. I mean, I'm assuming they mean the Saudi BinLaden Group and not OBL himself, but still. I love that I'm in a place where that just gets thrown around as a casual reference. Where do I live?

What's in a name?

Ramadan kareem indeed. We're a week into the Holy Month and I have to say, Ramadan's a great time. The Ramadan tents are all beautiful and opulent and fantastic, I've had a lot of interesting conversations with people about what fasting means to them, and I've bonded with heretofore unknown non-Muslim colleagues as we make beelines to the kitchen, pockets heavy with contraband snacks. The hours are also dreeeeeeeamy... 9-3 officially means that I'm usually out of the office by 4:30, which means that I have a WHOLE OTHER DAY after work... every afternoon this week I've run errands, gone to the gym, gone to yoga, gone out for dinner or shisha, and then come home and been like "Really? It's only 11 PM?!" Fabulous. There's also an awesome "witching hour" around sundown when everyone's at iftar and the roads are empty (reminiscent of Saturday afternoons in Knoxville when the Vols are playing) - you can whiz across Dubai like it didn't have the worst traffic in the world.

In other news, stemming with a conversation I had with some friends last night, I'd like to present to you a list of the neighborhoods, landmarks, and points of reference that I use on a daily basis to navigate Dubai - mostly because it highlights the bizarre (but accepted) practice here of calling every new thing you build a "city" or a "village." The conclusion we reached is that when you have a country with no fixed urban history, no established settlements, and no real past as anything besides a vast unmarked desert, you have to start from scratch - and this leads to a map peppered with places like:

-Industrial City
-Internet City
-Media City
-Studio City (where all the movie-films will be made, if Hollywood moves to Dubai as planned/hoped)
-Knowledge Village
-Academic City
-Culture Village (under construction; "culture" component TBD)
-Lifestyle City
-Global Village
-Textile Village
-Heritage Village
-Festival City (home to IKEA and our favorite mall... it truly IS festive)
-Outlet City
-Motor City (nope, no irony there)
-Sports City
-Golf City
-International Endurance City (endurance horse-racing needed a city)
-Falcon City of Wonders (the best, right? home to replicas of the Eiffel Tower, the pyramids, etc)
-Old Town (still under construction, making it the youngest Old Town in the world)
-International City ("Chinese immigrants! We have built you affordable housing made from Tinker Toys and pipe cleaners! And we will call it 'international!'")
-Healthcare City
-Humanitarian City
-Aid City
-Lost City (where? why? how was it lost?)
-City of Arabia (future home to Mall of Arabia, one of the 3 competing "biggest malls in the world" that are currently being built in Dubai)
-Silicon Oasis

Further to this, the main expat neighborhoods (which we like to disdain, since we live in a much cooler/less plasticine area) have equally perplexing names:

-The Springs (features no springs)
-The Greens (features no greens)
-The Meadows (features no meadows)
-The Lakes (features man-made lakes!)
-Emirates Hills (features no hills, unless you count the sand dunes they had to bulldoze to make the neighborhood)
-Green Community (not to be confused with The Greens; "green" here was originally conceived to mean environmentally sustainable, but that proved difficult ["what? SHINY!"] so they decided "green" just meant there would be a lot of plants there - which seems green=sustainable as well until you remember the whole desert bit).

And with that, it's bedtime!

(Paint) Ballin'

These are the kids who are my life in Dubai: J (reluctant Brit; UAE government civil servant and speaker of 12 [!] languages), M (Egyptian-American Jersey Girl; economist extraordinaire for an investment bank), and E (would-be boyfriend [if I dated Americans and he dated women]; real-estate finance mogul and should-be professional chef). Know them and love them because they will rock your world when you come visit (they certainly rock mine).















Hardcore paintball strategizing in Sharjah - why did NO ONE in my life ever think to tell me how much I would looooooove this game? I totally pretended to be Jack Bauer the whole time.















This is what happens when you play paintball outside in 115 F and 95% humidity. Whatever, we felt no pain.




















M's birthday. We share a mutual fascination/horror/obsession with the Arabs' ability to bedazzle anything they can get their hands on (cf: Swarovski crystal-covered mobile phones; sequin-laden abayas; the entire interior of the Burj Al Arab). So when her birthday rolled around, I knew I had to...




















... bedazzle her a cake!















Tonight we drove to the desert and went for iftar at Bab Al Shams. I love how even when you're not fasting, Ramadan is an excuse to go out for really nice, elaborate dinners every night. The iftar package included camel rides, which we were only too happy to indulge in... please note (a) the expression on my face (it is SCARY when that camel rockets itself six feet into the air to stand up) and (b) the fact that I am riding a camel in 3-inch stilettos.















Iftar also included belly dancing. Since it's Ramadan, however, we were treated to a male belly dancer, since having a female dancer during the Holy Month would be unseemly. There are no words - NO WORDS! - to describe the experience, but that's okay because I think this picture says it all.

I'm now going to try and forget the above image (forever etched in my mind) and get some sleep.

Win the Superbowl and Drive Off in a Hyundai

(Kanye lyrics are so applicable to my life here... haha, and not just "Golddigger.")

VERILY, I SAY UNTO YOU: IT HAS COME TO PASS.

I - famous from such hijinx as "it would cost less to insure a monkey than it would to insure her!" and "I promise you she hasn't been drinking, Officer, she's just that bad of a driver"- have purchased a motor vehicle. And not just any motor vehicle. A brand spanking new, sparkly turquoise SUV.

Behold...















"Ahhhhhh!"















Dreamy.















E captured me doing some kind of "ohmygod I own a car" dance.















Look out, Dubai. (No, really... look out.)















My regrettably non-status plate... still waiting for a patron on that one.
















"Objects in mirror are closer than they appear" bil arabiyya... problematic because I have this habit of trying to sound out every Arabic word I see, which is not what you should be doing whilst switching lanes (or so they tell me).

Honestly though. If you ever want to do something insanely empowering, I recommend buying a car in a foreign country. Especially in the Gulf. As a single American woman. From a dealership where they blare Arabic pop on the showroom floor and the Jordanian sales guy tells you to "speak with more respect" when you get assertive after a week of delays, inshallahs, and bukras (tomorrows). Bonus points if you manage to get it delivered on the first day of Ramadan by threatening to pull wusta (connections) with random important Emiratis who you may or may not actually know.

Lest anyone report me to the Al Gore Police for buying a non-hybrid SUV, okay yes I know it's bad, but I think I should be absolved of some guilt given that:

(a) I have not owned a car and have been reliant on public transportation for the past 8 years so I think my carbon footprint is pretty low
(b) Dubai is that rare place where you actually need an SUV - both because other drivers don't respect you if you're in a small car, and because thanks to the total lack of urban planning you often have to off-road in order to get from Point A to Point B (provided you don't want to drive all the way to Oman to turn around)
(c) Shockingly, in a country where it costs $15 to fill your gas tank from empty, hybrids are not marketed. Not just "oh you don't really see them on the roads" not marketed, but actually "I would have to import it from another country" not marketed.

Okay, conscience eased. Now I'm off to load up the SUV and drive to the emirate of Sharjah for a paintball game organized by a Californian friend, the teams for which will be "Americans/People Who Like Americans" and "The Rest of the World." Yallah bye-bye!

Sheikhs on a Plane

Two days inshallah until Ramadan! (Although you wouldn't know it from Carrefour, which has been rolling out the Ramadan decorations for the last few weeks, a la Christmas in the States.) Provided the moon is in the right phase in Mecca tomorrow night (I am not sure exactly how the process works but that's my understanding), the Holy Month will begin on Thursday morning. I'm excited for the experience - the iftars, the Ramadan sweets, the festiveness, the 9 AM - 3 PM work hours (although whether or not I'll actually work that little is debatable). I'm less excited for de facto fasting - 90% of my office is Muslim, so no eating/drinking at work obvi, and restaurants are closed during the day except for takeaway... it's frowned upon to eat in sort-of public places like your car, and my office is too far from home to go back and forth during the day. So basically, game on quasi-fasting! (Aka sneaking NutriGrain bars into the bathroom.) I have a date with a Lebanese guy on Thursday night who's taking me to one of the big Ramadan tents erected throughout the city for shisha and backgammon (this is apparently a classic Ramadan combo) so it should be a good kickoff to the month's festivities.




















Oh and lest you not believe my earlier post about license plates, voila some ads from a car magazine I just bought. (Yes, I now buy car magazines. Collective gasp of disbelief. Girlfriend's gotta know if she's getting value for her money.)















I think this one is really funny because they're selling 2-digit plates, which are super prestigious, but instead of being Dubai plates they're from the emirate of Fujairah (which is a kind of "Tennessee is to New York" relationship). How low-budget. Nonetheless, a "15" Fujairah plate will still set you back a cool USD $216,621 at the fixed exchange rate of AED 3.67 to USD $1. Honestly, at that point, I think starting a big bonfire of all your money is a better way to get rid of it. Or just, you know, giving it to me. Hook a girl up.















I have also learned that even 5-digit plates can be prestigious IF they're "good numbers" - witness the 5-digit "14141" going for USD $12,261.















Aaaaaaand shifting gears - sunset as seen on my drive home from work.















Seeing the tallest building in the world at sunset = not a bad way to unwind. (Even if you have AN HOUR TO LOOK AT IT since you're stuck in mind-numbing, rage-inducing Dubai traffic... so much for unwinding.)

Oh and the title of this post... I went to a stand-up night last week where a hilarious Aussie guy talked about how he had just flown back to Dubai from Qatar. Apparently at the Doha airport they wouldn't let him through security with one of those little metal claw thingys you use to remove staples, but they simultaneously let two locals board the flight with their falcons. (If you do not know about the crazy, fierce, bloodthirsty killing power of a falcon, I will save that for another post, but suffice it to say: respect the falconry.) So of course the punchline (which left everyone but me groaning, since I am a Great Lover of Puns) - "Oh sure, ban me and my office supplies but let those guys on with their falcons... I can tell you right now what's going to happen, it'll make a great movie - Sheikhs on a Plane!"

Maybe you had to be there.

"I Need to Pay For Things in America"

The weekend was uneventful - in a good way. Thursday night I went to Cin Cin with the girls where we met a festive group of Lebanese guys who insisted on buying me double Jack Daniel's on the rocks when they found out I was from Tennessee; we also had "Line of the Weekend," courtesy of J ("Nothing says 'class' with a capital 'k' like an 8 months-pregnant Syrian woman trying to argue her way to the head of the queue for a wine bar/cigar lounge"). Brilliant.

On Friday, in testament to the great maturity and wisdom I have attained in my brief tenure as a 26 year-old, I managed to avoid the aptly named "Beer Fest" event in the Irish Village, which resulted in most of expat Dubai getting plastered at 2 PM and several friends meeting us for late night pizza in various states of incoherence. Instead, I spent the afternoon at the Auto Souk with Javs, where we saw a bunch of cars for sale with Texas/Louisiana/Mississippi plates - perplexing, until Javs remembered reading an article about how there's some US regulation saying you can no longer sell a car if it's been standing in a certain amount of water for a certain amount of time... hello, hurricane season. Of course there's no such regulation in the UAE, so if anyone wants a Katrinamobile - cheap! - it's waiting here for you in Dubai. (Globalization called, and she wants you to know she is out! of! control!)

Yesterday I went to Mall of the Emirates in pursuit of a coffee table, but came home with several hundred dirhams' worth of Zara work clothes instead. Whoops. Also at the mall, and continuing with the theme of "Emirati Banking is Where Logic Goes to Die," I arranged a wire transfer from my account here to my account in the States and, after repeatedly being told that my response in the "Reason for Transfer" blank was not detailed enough, actually had to write "I need to pay for things in America" on this very official-looking international transaction form. It took all the restraint I had not to write "Funding international terrorism" just to cause some trouble.

That's all for now. Ramadan starts in about 10 days, inshallah, and I am already getting excited/nervous, so expect a post on that shortly. (Excited for iftars and festiveness; nervous for Food Panic like no Food Panic I have ever known.)