Small town living

Being in "The Music Man" has me thinking about small town life in more ways than one. Of course, the whole show takes place in an archetypal Midwestern town where shared triumphs and shameless back-biting are par for the course. As one song puts it, "But we'll give you our shirt. And the back to go with it, if your crops should happen to die." Which is immediately followed by, "But what the heck, you're welcome. Glad to have you with us. Even though we may not ever mention it again." The message is loud and clear: living in a place where people know you well is both a blessing and a curse. But never as idyllic as the picket fences and clapboard shutters make it appear.

There are no picket fences in Abu Dhabi. The place is low on clapboard, too, and big on apartment buildings between six and 15 stories that line almost every street in town. The park across the street from my place is one of the few green spaces in the city. The rest is nothing but concrete and glass hives full of people, each in their anonymous niche. But that's part of the reason people move to cities, right? To break free of the ancestral pressures and penetrating stares in a dense sea of strangers. Abu Dhabi, home of two million people on an island no larger than San Francisco, should be the antithesis of River City, Iowa, the mythical town in "The Music Man." Right?

Wrong. Abu Dhabi is a very small town, and it has gotten smaller since my circle of acquaintences expanded to include the cast of the musical. Understand, this is a new phenomenon for me. I taught in San Francisco for five years. Most of my students and I lived less than a mile from school--and I ran into a kid maybe three times the entire time I taught there. Three times. In five years. In a big city you simply do not run into people you know very often. In Abu Dhabi, I see kids, parents and colleagues almost every time I go to the grocery store. I run into them in restaurants, bookstores, and Ikea. And for every child I see, there are those I don't see, but who see me, and announce the fact at school the next day. "Ms. R, I saw you buying a Krispy Kreme/looking at lingerie/picking your nose." Well, maybe not that bad. But these kids are everywhere. It reminds me of my childhood in small-town California. Even then, though, I can remember running into teachers only a few times. I lived across the street from my 4th grade teacher and hardly saw the woman! (That was the year half the kids on the block were in her class, so I don't blame her. But still...)

On the surface, there is an easy explanation, but I think it's too easy. It goes like this: in Abu Dhabi, people go to malls. It's what they do. If there are a limited number of malls in town, I can expect to see people I know if I, too, am at the mall. Not only that, but many restaurants are located in malls. Not just food court places but actual sit-down restaurants. Furthermore, Westerners tend to congregate in familiar places (like the malls) where 1) the customs and norms align most closely to their own and 2) the air conditioning functions beautifully. If I choose to frequent those places, then I have no one but myself to blame for bumping into half the faculty and most of the student body on a regular basis. (An artsy rendition of the mall near my apartment building. It doesn't twinkle like this, even at night...)

But it's not that simple. It can't be. Abu Dhabi has 2 million people. San Francisco has less than a million. San Francisco has two malls. Abu Dhabi has three big ones. True, I'm at the mall a lot more in Abu Dhabi than I was in SF because the grocery store is there, but I run into people while not at the mall as well. Not only that, I know by sight (ie: to wave and say Hi to) about 50% fewer people in Abu Dhabi than I know in San Francisco. Maybe even 60% fewer. I've lived in Abu Dhabi about 10 months. I lived in San Francisco about 10 years. As a San Francisco resident, I never left the house expecting to run into someone I knew. Occasionally, I would bump into someone, but I never expected it. When I leave the house in Abu Dhabi, I actually think about who I may run into. It's closer to the mentality I had living in Batie, my village in Cameroon, where I would avoid high-traffic times if I was feeling especially introverted. Batie had about 600 families. Abu Dhabi has about 600,000.

But maybe that's what Abu Dhabi is, a huge village made up of little villages where people, unbeknownst to even themselves, establish orbits around their culturally chosen "town squares" and congregate there whether they plan to or not. The closest grocery store to my apartment is frequented by Abu Dhabi's rainbow nation. It's truly not a Westerners-only joint, as one look at the produce section will prove. Yet maybe it is part of the Western expat orbit I've somehow gravitated into without being aware of it. It makes me curious about the other villages in town I'm unaware of. Maybe next year I'll try to break out. I'll know it's working if I suddenly stop seeing my students everywhere I look, and start feeling as though I'm truly living in the big city.