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.)
