Things I'm quite chuffed about:
1. Ethiopia in 2 days, YAHOO!
2. Possible business trip to London, 17-20 October. Brits/British residents, prepare ye the way.
3. November long weekend in Madrid for K's 30th birthday?
4. Goa for New Year's. Free villas and we're chartering a plane from Dubai. Hook it UP, and more importantly, let me know if you want to come with.
5. Rapprochement and Let's Be Friends with housemate Javs. Now we can all sleep easier at night (literally and figuratively).
6. 2 consecutive weekends of boating/wakeboarding/drinking by the pool that have left me tan enough to play "indiscriminately ethnic" myself. (Hey, if Angelina Jolie can play "black"...)
7. The impending end of Ramadan. Yes I'm loving the hours and the holiness, but I can't wait to be able to wear skirts and drink coffee on my way to work again.
8. The email I just got from my company's (Emirati-staffed) compliance department: "Effective from 9th October 2007, the following article(s) of this internal circular should be implemented. Article No. 1: All employees should inform their line managers or/and CEO’s Personal Assistant incase of obscene, outside missions such as meetings and site visits." Lost in translation, what? BLESS!
Things I'm less than ecstatic (eg, not chuffed) about:
1. The fact that I will be eating rice/beans until mid-2008 in order to finance upcoming travels.
2. 3 parking tickets and 1 speeding fine in the past 7 days. Yes, that leaves me AED 550 poorer (and no, I won't do the conversion into USD - it's too painful).
3. My (now seemingly official) 5 kg weight gain over the course of 3 months in Dubai. Again, I won't convert into Amrikan units because it's too painful, but you can do the math.
4. I got into my car this morning at 7 AM - cracked out and running on 4 hours of sleep and yearning for coffee - and turned on the radio. For reasons unknown to me, some deep, vestigial, ancestrally buried part of me expected to hear the piano music from the beginning of "Morning Edition" - so when instead of NPR, it was a stupid Radio One ad about registering to win a free Lexus for Eid, I almost burst into tears. And that was probably my first real moment of homesickness since being in Dubai.
5. Speaking of living in a place where materialism is substituted for intellectualism, I was at a friend's flat last night and we were browsing through his roommate's AppleTV looking for movies to watch. So we stumbled across the roomie's iTunes playlists and to my shock and horror, they look something like this: "Arabic, Aston 1, Aston 2, Aston 3, Aston 4, Aston 5, G-Wagon 1, G-Wagon 2, G-Wagon 3, House Party..." etc. Now I'm not trying to be a hater, but in my opinion it's already egregious to own USD $200,000+ worth of cars when you're 28 (Mercedes G-Class and Aston Martin are two of the biggest status cars here, for the uninitiated - and by means unknown to me, the roommate owns both). So I hope you'll agree that it's even more egregious to have specific playlists devoted to each of your ostentatious pieces of auto bling. I think I just threw up a little bit in my mouth.
6. My intense desire to have a grande skim Starbuck's latte at my desk right now, and my intense inability to do so.
7. This article makes me want to cry. Or laugh. Both, I guess.
... and I will leave it there instead of thinking up gripes 8, 9, and 10 because clearly, I have more to be chuffed than un-chuffed about.
UPDATE: Whilst writing this post, I received the following email correction - I apologize there was a mistake in the internal circular No. 4 which sent previously. Please find attached the revised Internal Circular No. 4 – 2007, regarding the attendance control and ignore the version sent previously. - it seems that "obscene" was meant to be "absence." Brilliant.
