Don't Go Chasin' Water Ponds

This. Is not. What I signed up for. When I moved to Dubai.

It is raining. In fact, it has been raining for the better part of the past week, and is forecast to continue raining until this Thursday. Rain is such a foreign thing here - like snow in Tennessee - that it's prompted a whole slew funny responses, including the electronic traffic monitors on Sheikh Zayed Road that now tell you "Drive Carefully - Avoid Water Ponds." Dude, I know we live in the desert, but you could at least try to get the terminology right.

It's also freezing, by which I mean highs of 70F and lows of 55F. Which is apparently the coldest winter in 7 years - wallahi I'm not kidding. People's reaction to this, too, is hilarious - local men wearing puffy down coats over their dishdash, and radio shows encouraging people to call in and share what they'd rather be doing instead of being stuck in "this freezing [sic] weather" ("I'd like to be curled up by a fire reading Harry Potter" ... "I'd like to be in a warm bathtub with a mug of hot chocolate" ... etc).

In the northern emirate of Ras Al Khaimah, it even hailed the other day - although no one knows there's a word for hail, so the story generally goes something like, "You know, my cousins in RAK, yesterday morning they were seeing these very small balls of ice, yanni, like the rain but frozen, coming down and making very loud noises when it was falling." This also elicited a whole round of email forwards from all the Emiratis I work with, complete with photo attachments of random uncles/nephews/brother-in-laws/cousins who live up north posing (still in sandals, of course) with tiny, sad, snowballs, or with their Land Cruisers out in the desert, pointing proudly at a small patch of ice on the ground.

But I must say that all this, combined with the sun not rising until 7:06 AM, has given even me a little bout of seasonal affective disorder... what do you mean, I can't lay out by my pool in late January?! If this keeps up much longer, I might have to pack up and move somewhere that's really tropical... Singapore, anyone?!