Six to a room.

I thought it would be a romantic touch to B’s birthday celebration to take the train overnight to Vienna, where we were to meet up with good friends who live there. Therefore we flew into Geneva, Switzerland the afternoon before and immediately went to the train station, which is a grueling 100 meter walk from the airport, to purchase tickets. We tried to purchase these tickets on line a few days before but couldn’t navigate around the complicated website. The nice gentleman at the ticket counter was very good at his job and knew exactly what lines we should travel on and what stations to make the proper transfers that allowed two people enjoying the second half of their lives enough time to wheel three large suitcases to the next platform. We were told that we were the only two in our sleeping berths, which I assumed meant we were paying for a two berth sleeping quarter.

Surprise! We had mistakenly booked a six person berth complete with four new friends. Each sleeping berth was smaller than a coffin and too short for my legs. As it turns out, we couldn’t have asked for nicer bunkmates. These four young people were all attending a hospitality and hotel management college in Switzerland. One was from Viet Nam, one from Taiwan and two from India.

Bed and Breakfast - Literally

The cramped quarters didn’t allow us a very good night’s sleep but the adventure of talking to these kids from all over the world, was worth it.

Asleep at the Wheel

I’m taking B away for her birthday to Vienna, Austria to meet up with friends and just relax before starting my new job on July 1^st. Out flight left Lisbon at 9 AM, not too early in the morning, but apparently too early for the airport security to be on the ball. When passing through the security checkpoint, we placed out carry on luggage on the conveyor belt to be X-rayed but noticed that there was no human monitoring the display screen. Therefore, when we picked our belongings up on the other side, no one had inspected our handbags. In addition, the half conscious officer on the receiving end didn’t ask about any liquids we might have been carrying, nor did he ask to see the plastic bag we had placed these items into.

Nine years ago we had our pets transported into Portugal, which was a long and complicated process of coordinating paperworks between the two countries, getting health certificates and proper vaccination records translated into Portuguese and arranging the flights. The final checkpoint was to have all these documents checked by the veterinarian at the Lisbon airport in order to have our animals legally enter the country. It turns out our precious pets arrived on January 3^rd to the airport, and the veterinarian on duty hadn’t returned from his Christmas vacation. When the commercial baggage employee, whose job it was to get the crated animals to the on site veterinary office discovered that the all powerful decider of our animal’s eligibility to enter the country wasn’t present, he merely waved us on to our automobile, animals and all. We could have imported rabid skunks and gotten away with it.

Some things never change.

NOT a good substitute for paper towels!

People around here are obsessed with Kleenex. You know, facial tissue, those individual sheets of toilet paper stacked and packaged with perfume pretending to be something better. I can’t tell you how many times I have been in a public washroom here in the UAE and found nothing but Kleenex to dry my hands with after washing up. What ever happened to the trusty paper towel? Have you ever tried drying your hands with just one Kleenex? It doesn’t work. They either instantly congeal into a colloidal pulp or disintegrate and break down into individual fibers which then get all over my clothing making me look like the poster boy for Head and Shoulders shampoo. Have you ever had Chinese rice paper candy? Each candy comes individually wrapped in a little piece of rice paper, which is edible. The trouble is that if you try to unwrap each piece, the moisture in your fingers starts to gel the rice paper so you end up just putting the entire candy, wrapper and all, in you mouth. Drying your hands with Kleenex is a similar experience. And my hands are still wet.

I have big hands and it usually takes me three or four paper towels to get my hands dry. Using Kleenex to accomplish the same task raises the eyebrows of the restroom attendants (yes, every public bathroom has a full time attendant here) because it looks to them like I am trying to steal the entire box, one tissue at a time. I swear it takes about ten of those things to get my hands dry. Not very environmentally conscious if you ask me. But then again, the UAE doesn’t exactly have a small carbon footprint. Sorry – that’s UAE bashing and I promised not to do that anymore until I have lived here long enough to have the right.  I’m merely asking a question here today.

I even see boxes of Kleenex on the dashboards of most automobiles here. Do cars sold in Dubai have wash basins as an upgrade feature or are the people around here perpetually blowing their nose? I’m sure they are not being used for perspiration control, as hot as it is here, unless people want to look like they used a brand new razor to shave with that morning. Somebody please explain.

Just a Simple Pass

That echo you hear is from the hole in my stomach created by the ulcer I grew worrying that I blew the exam, the most difficult exam I have ever taken.  I took a similar examination three years ago in Portugal, and in Portuguese,which I failed, but this one was more difficult. Three months of almost constant studying did not prepare me for the humbling and confidence shaking three hour ordeal I went through on June 5th.  Not only did this exam test the academic knowledge that now makes my head a walking encyclopedia of useless facts that have nothing to do with the day to day knowledge I use as a health care clinician, but it also tested my clairvoyant ability to guess which of multiple correct answers the exam authors were looking for. Other questions offered no correct answers at all  so I had to rely on my ability to determine which  answers given were the least incorrect.

My colleague Maria, who is from Argentina not only had to study for the exam but learn English at the same time. She passed this same examination on her first attempt 9 months earlier and told me she came out of the exam crying, convinced she had failed. I figured if she could pass with that added burden of mastering the language, I would be well prepared for the exam as well.  But I kept my cool and did not succumb to their mind games and successfully passed through their pragmatic academic filtering process  masquerading as a qualifying examination. We do not get to know how well we did, just a pass or a fail and I think that is best.  I feel like I  just leveled up in the video game of life.

I was invited to the birthday party for the office manager of the company I will shortly be working for.  A small gathering of at least 50 people. Just the staff and spouses from one of the clinics the company owns. We took up an entire room at the Lebanese restaurant and had an exquisite meal. It turns out most of the wait staff is Syrian, and when the birthday cake was delivered, they sang their version of Happy Birthday. I thought the Portuguese had a great version of this song.  This one tops that.