Classroom pics!

The Magician came through! Check out the classroom! Desks! Chairs! Whiteboard! Lockers! Nary a stray shelf in sight!

As you can see, it could be a classroom pretty much anywhere, though note the huge A/C vents above the board and the very, very small windows. The cushions in the library nook are courtesy another teacher, but are so comfy I may get some for my apartment.

I feel landed and--best of all--cheered at the prospect of being a lot less control freaky cause clearly the whole world didn't collapse when I stopped stressing about it.

Computer update: Sigh. The word now is "as soon as we get it." I accepted a loaner from the students cart after refusing one for days--somehow thinking if I didn't have one that my own would magically appear? Zen masters of letting go accept loaners...

Little by little

Classroom update: the desks and chairs have appeared! The pile of locker shelves has diminished! The maintenance crew leader--I'll call him the Magician--came in while I was clapping my hands with glee and promised the white board would be next. I gave him a huge mental hug, knowing that to actually hug him would be a cultural no-no. But, best of all, I believed him because of the desks, chairs and shelves--and because I'm becoming the zen master of letting go. But mostly because of the desks and chairs.

Classroom pics soon!

Computer update: still nobly waiting until Tuesday.

Apartment update: Still empty except for those two little Ikea chairs. The magic couch and foldy table still scheduled to arrive Sept. 3 (the day after Ramadan starts! Eeek! I've been assured absolutely nothing gets done for an entire lunar month! But, because I'm a zen master at letting go, this hardly worries me at all. Not.) I can always eat at K's. She got her diningroom table and chairs today--beautiful wood with stylized carvings along the edge of the table and down the middle of the four matching chairs. Not from Ikea, needless to say.

There is this French expression: petit a petit l'oiseau fait son nid. Literally, it means little by little the bird builds his nest. But the best English translation is slowly but surely or one step at a time. I like the French version because of the nesting connotations and because there are so many different timelines out there. And yet, slowly but surely, things will get done.

Taming the control freak beast

(For those of you who have worked with me before; for those who know me really well (and who will know me better after reading this); and for those who understand what I'm talking about here even if you've never met me.)

It's impossible to have a new job in a new country AND be a control freak. Alas. I know this in my head, but my reflexes need to catch up. They still fire automatically when something needs to be done. I find my body moving quickly down a school hallway, only to realize I have no idea where I'm going or what to do once I get there. For the past five years at my former school, I helped determine "the way we do things here." (I also knew where everything was.) Now, I'm learning a whole new set of procedures (not to mention a new building layout) that--sigh--someone else has figured out. Often, I find myself in a place (literally and figuratively) where I can't move forward without help. OK, I'll be honest. This happens all the time. It happens because other people know how to do something or where to go, and I don't. Where it gets really weird are the situations when...wait for it...it's their job to do it for me. Eeek!

The following scenarios have tested my control freakness in just the past 24 hours.

1) My classroom has no desks, no chairs, no white board, and sets of lockers with piles of locker shelves stacked up on the side.
What I was told: draw a floor plan of the room as I want it and give it to the maintenance crew leader who will see that my room is arranged thusly, and the lockers completed.
My impulse: whip out the screwdriver and start assembling. Find the furniture supply room and start hauling. Who cares if it's 110 degrees in the shade--school starts in 9 days!
What I'm going to do: the floor plan (check!), bite my nails, trust that it will get done...hyperventilate a little, bake brownies for the maintenance crew, go back to trusting that it will get done.

2) My school laptop is not ready yet. Since this is a Mac campus and I have a PC, it's hard to get started (doing anything!) without the laptop.
What I was told to do: wait until Tuesday.
My impulse: panic. Hunt down the tech guy and find a way to get the laptop this minute (shout out to K for soothing words after bearing the brunt of the panicking part).
What I'm going to do: wait until Tuesday...look enviously at my colleagues whose laptops are ready. And wait until Tuesday.

Professionally, this is a lot of what I came here for--to figure out a way to let go, to trust the process and myself enough to allow things to get done on a timeline that differs from the one in my freaky head. To depend on other people maybe a little without feeling as though the world will collapse onto my very shoulders. That kind of thing. Having a maintenance crew step in is wonderful--but "maintenance crew" is just a stand-in for "anyone with a different timeline that may, actually, be as good or better than mine but how would I know if I have to control everything all the damn time?"

Crossing cultures is always a good way to bring these issues to the fore. There are few situations where a person is LESS in control than in a new country. Though I sometimes find it hard to relax, I don't find it hard to accept the reality--and necessity--of this. After all, what is a colonizer if not a control freak with a lot of power and no perspective? And I'm not a colonizer. So, I'm taking lots of deep breaths, freaking out privately (or to K) and reminding myself that the (many, many) opportunities to practice letting go is good for me. Maybe in the same way lima beans are good for me. But good nonetheless.

The homos downstairs

(Not a post my mom will print out for my grandmother...)

The homos downstairs #1: Apparently, the men's hammam (Turkish-style bath) downstairs is quite the down-low scene, if you know what I mean. (Although I will say that not all Turkish baths are hotbeds of homosexuality and to think otherwise casts a sexualized, Western eye on a very cool bathing tradition). That being said, this particular bathhouse looks more toward San Francisco than Istanbul, according to the colleague who lives on my floor (the one with the adorable daughter) whose husband is Emerati (but, one assumes, not a frequenter of the bathhouse downstairs).

The homos downstairs #2: There is also an excellent cafe/bakery downstairs, right next to the hammam, in fact, that does a booming business in Middle Eastern cooking, delivering their kebabs, falafel and flatbread pizzas all over town in cute little white vans. Its vast menu is published in both English and Arabic and is creatively translated in places. A particularly striking translation is the name of everyone's favorite Middle Eastern chickpea dip...which they spell h-o-m-o-s on the menu. Homos is offered in a wide variety of ways, including "homos with meat," "homos with pine" (I think they mean pinenuts...), "homos plate," (a personal favorite), and "misc homos" (haven't quite figured that one out yet).

So we have bathing homos on one side and homos at least four different ways on the other. It seems we've moved to the Castro of Abu Dhabi...

Apartment pictures: "Before"

For the curious: these are pics of my apartment! Actually, they are pics of K's apartment, but mine is identical down to the (very limited) furniture in the bedroom (provided by the school). My apartment is on the second floor (along with a returning teacher and her adorable daughter), K's is on the 3rd, two colleagues are on the 5th, and two more are on the 6th (the top floor). Folks on the top floors have amazing views of the park across the street and even the Gulf, at times. We on the lower floors have huge windows and big livingrooms.

You'll notice that there isn't much there--these are definitely the "before" pictures. The "after" pics will have to wait for the furniture...

Speaking of the furniture, the chairs pictured in the livingroom are mine--from Ikea! My foldy table and magic couch (mentioned previously) won't be delivered until Sept. 3 (mouldering in a warehouse in Dubai. They will be delivered by truck, not camel, but apparently the journey between the two cities takes just as long when hip, Swedish furniture is in demand). K's table (from a real furniture store) is being delivered on Tuesday, so we won't have to picnic for too much longer.

My apartment is considered the worst housing compared to the other apartments of teachers at my school, which is amazing to me. This place is way above average. I love it, love it, love, it--especially the natural light. Check out all the windows!

Shopping on jet lag

I have been to Ikea exactly three times in my entire life--all of them with people I love very much. The first two times (in the States), I got into pissy "whatever...whatever" fights with my hapless (but well-loved) companions and, in one case, ended up crying. I have nothing against reasonably priced and hip Swedish furniture. But Ikea is too much of everything, for WAY too long a time. Enough to make anyone (I think) stuff-blind and cranky.

The third time I went, however (this very Tuesday), I learned the secret to shopping at Ikea. Do it jet-lagged.

My new school is savvy to the fact that its new hires are moving across the world AND starting work. The first three days of orientation were low-key bureaucratic stuff in the morning and shopping all afternoon. We were driven around in school vans by the saintly bus driver and the whole admin team, who waited patiently and heroically (laptops and cell phones humming) in mall after mall while their newest staff members stocked up on the necessities of life. Ikea, of course, was a featured stop.

Not only did I skip through the store free of creeping irritability and frustration, but I actually found two major pieces of furniture that I wanted--yes, wanted--to buy. Neither were in stock, actually, and I didn't go home with much, but that's not the point. I made it through Ikea AND wanted to buy two, major somethings. (For those of you familiar with the catalog, it's a table called Norden with a foldout leaf and a set of drawers running down one leg. In birch. And a magic couch (I forget its name) with an entire little bed/couch extension hidden underneath that can be rolled out and popped up, transforming the whole thing into a 1) double bed or 2) place where more than one person can lounge comfortably. This avoids the one-person-can-stretch-out-one-person-has-to-sit-up-with-the-other-person's-smelly-but-well-loved-feet-in-their-lap syndrome. I love this couch. I plan to get it in dark beige.)

We went to other malls and other stores on Wednesday and Thursday...they were all full of stuff and full of UAE folks doing their shopping. I learned that I can, maybe at some point wear a tank top (since several women--both Asian and European--were sporting them in the mall), but I'm still going to be respectful and avoid it. I learned that some Emerati men will ask if you if you want to go to the front of the line at the Indian restaurant in the food court, and some will try to cut and intimidate the woman who is just trying to take your order. ( I knew they were Emerati men cause they were wearing the traditional (ie sheik) garb. ) I learned that abbeyas, while all black, come in many different cute cuts and styles, including deep pink sequins along the head scarf (and always the chic shoes peeking out from the ankle-length folds). I learned that the cell phone guy in the Carrefour (Walmart) in the Marina Mall (big, big mall in Abu Dhabi) is sweet and will tell you not to buy the fancier but ugly phone because it's ugly, install your SIM card, get you about $50 worth of free minutes AND change the language settings to English and not Arabic. (But how cool would it be to text in Arabic!)

And if you think all these "cultural" experiences are trippy in that they involve very familiar things happening in slightly different, through-the-looking-glass ways then you understand what it's like to move from the USA to the UAE at this time in history.

Welcome to the kalidescope

My first glimpse of Abu Dhabi was the international terminal at the airport. We emerged from a low, tube-shaped hallway into a domed arrivals hall covered with a dizzying kalidescope of tiles and supported by an enormous, fluted column (similarly ceramic-ed). I'd been traveling for 30 hours, so remember the moment in a series of images, as kalidescoped as the decor:

• a Filipina woman in a silver-bangled halter top (hey! I thought we couldn't show off our shoulders, much less cleavage and belly buttons),
• a group of women cloaked in black abeyyas, one talking on a cell phone.
• men who looked like sheiks (men who probably were sheiks) in long, white dishdasha shirt dresses with scarves around their heads affixed by black cords at remarkably jaunty angles.
• blinking lights, buzzing phones
  
• the swoop of Arabic script on the signs,
• long lines, the wrong line, then the right line,
• opening one eye wide for a high-tech retina scan (my first!)
• flinching at the thunk-thunk of low-tech rubber stamps on my passport and visa.

I arrived at my new apartment around 12:30 a.m. There are three other new teachers in the same building, K among them. The luxury of being able to talk into the night with such a close friend after each new day is a gift beyond measure. The whole building sits above a men's hammam (traditional Turkish bath), a bakery and a dry cleaners. It's a far cry from my Peace Corps experience...no cement floor or tin roof here. Instead, the floor is hardwood-esque, the livingroom is about the size of my place in Burlingame; there are two bedrooms and two bathrooms, both with tubs (!)--and, joy of joys, large, rectangular, east-facing windows look out over the street and to the park across. The upper floors in the building have a Gulf view (I'm on the second floor), but my windows are the biggest in the building. In the morning, light streams through--hazy, pale yellow light filtered through the thick, humid air. It's hot outside, but not as hot as I'd been led to believe. Not heart-stopping hot. Just Houston/Florida/the worst of East Coast humidity and sunshine, oppressive but not unbearable. I'm getting used to the icy feeling of my sweat cooling in the a/c of school and home. I thought I would be writing to you all about the depth and breadth of the heat, but I don't have much to say. It's really, really hot. But that's all.

I feel like a stranger but also like I belong. This might be because I'm one of 30 new teachers coming in this year, and so surrounded by people going through the same thing. It might be because K is here too and deconstructing the wider world is nothing new when we are together. It also might be because I've studied Abu Dhabi for so many months, taking advantage of Web images that didn't exist in the same way the last time I moved abroad in 1996. The buildings of the skyline are like old friends; the street names ring a bell--and all the restaurants (from McDonalds to Trader Vics) and the stores (Ikea, Ace Hardware, etc.) look like home. Then I see a covered women with a full veil with high heels and pedicured toes peeking out from under the folds of her abbeya. And it's so cool because this woman, a walking symbol of modesty and respect for both cultural tradition and religious expectations, is wearing four-inch stilettos and Hot Rod Red on her toes. As if anyone needed another reminder that there is nothing black and white in the world, even a woman in a black abbeya. But no one would need that kind of reminder in Abu Dhabi. It's just that kind of town...

Coming attractions: some pics, Ikea as an international phenomenon and on not being a total control freak