Okay this will be a whirlwind post but I don't like to go more than a week without updating lest any of you stalwart work-procrastinators lose interest and start (haram!) having to do something productive on the company dime rather than read my blog, sooooooooooo...
Life is good. As of last week, I officially switched projects within my company and am now staffed on a fantastic new endeavor which is much more realistic (and more tailored to my interests) than the development I came here to work on. No details in the interest of not pulling a T!ff@ny & Co (the debacle which prompted my super blog-secrecy) but if you want to know the story, email me.
The greatest thing about my new job - besides the new job itself and my crazy wonderful British boss, who dropped the F-bomb about 60 times in the first minute I ever spoke with him ("no but it's going to be F'ing FABULOUS! and you're going to be bloody PERFECT for the job! it's all so F'ing BRILLIANT!") - is my amazing Emirati intern KH, who already in 3 days has managed to answer virtually all of the pressing questions I've wanted to ask locals for the past 4 months but been hesitant to share. She's the most fascinating person I've encountered in Dubai because she's a hard-core local (22, born and raised here, wears abaya and veil, lives with her big extended family, has friends who are sheikhas) but she's totally, totally open-minded and outgoing and willing to talk about absolutely everything. (So much so that I showed her photos of my birthday cake featuring Sheikh Hamdan and she thought they were hilarious.)
It's interesting how someone can be so worldly but still very traditional. In the course of a couple hours we went from talking about the upcoming Justin Timberlake concert in Abu Dhabi and how she doesn't cover when she travels in Europe, to talking about how - at a very liberal university professor's urging - she Googled "images of the Prophet Mohammed" and then got goose bumps when she saw the results. (It's hard to understand coming from a Judeo-Christian background, but I think that for Muslims - whose faith prohibits depiction of the human form and ABOVE ALL of the prophet - that's a really mind-blowing thing to do.)
On a different (but related) note, I had drinks last night with two American girls, both of whom moved to Dubai about a month ago and both of whom happen to be friends-of-friends from back home. My biggest takeaway from the encounter was that wow, I'm really lucky to have made the friends here that I have. It wasn't that the girls weren' t cool - they were perfectly nice (although there was a LOT of Blackberrying going on at the bar and come on, nobody who's 26 is that important at 11 PM on a Monday night). It was more that I didn't "click" with them, and I was surprised by the contrast because I connected with my core group of friends here so easily that I had assumed it was merely a function of being in Dubai. Since we're all out of our element, I thought, we naturally connect with people who come from similar backgrounds. But the more interlopers I meet, the more I realize that I lucked out; I think I'd have a whole different take on life here if I hadn't happened to meet the 3 or 4 specific people who are most important in my life here right off the bat. Funny how coincidence shapes the expat experience.
Speaking of coincidence, I was getting groceries after work yesterday evening and who did I turn a corner and run smack dab into with my shopping cart but an old friend from DC - a 40something Peacock regular who I waited on for years and who actually helped set me up with my first "job job" after college. Anyhow, after the initial shock and me screaming "SHUT UP! SHUT UP!" several times in the Indian foods aisle, he was like "What are you doing here?!" and I was like "I live here, what are you doing here?!" and he was like "I live here too!"
Dude. The world is too small. And Dubai is clearly its locus. I am expecting to run into, like, my gymnastics coach from when I was 13 in Tennessee next.
