Butt Sweet House

Local Abu Dhabi restaurant.

Maybe it’s just me, but it really irritates me when people of English speaking nationalities make no attempt to speak the local language properly when living in a country foreign to them. I can understand tourists making mistakes, and will allow newly arrived expats a grace period of about a year, but the video depictred here really rubs me the wrong way.

The fantastically clean and efficient national metro system in Dubai announces your next stop in both Arabic and English. For all the millions of Euros it cost to build this transportation system, you would think they could have hired a professional announcer who could take the time to learn how to pronounce the Arabic words.

By the way, Deira is pronounced “Day-rah” and not “Deer-Rah”.

Living in Portugal for 9 years sensitized me to this seemingly blatant disrgard for local customs where the local language is admittedly difficult to pronounce, but do-able if you give it a little effort. Expats we know living there for decades still butcher the local language to such a degree, it’s almost comical. But I can’t help feeling it’s a disregard for the people and culture of the place they have been caling their home for years.

Now I’m off to find where I can take lessons in learning Arabic.

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.

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.

I couldn’t help notice the friendly ladies as I walked to the supermarket today, the only sign of commercial life within a half mile radius of the apartment/hotel complex where I am staying.  This is a huge long term residence project and there are 10 apartment blocks in total, each having a unique and colorful name to highlight the ambiance and attention to detail I’m sure the architects had in mind when designing this place. I am in the appropriately named “Block #5”. The doorman of the building I am staying in told me the supermarket is just down the road to the right of the parking lot. “Go out the door and take a left turn at Block #3, take the next right turn at Block #7 and it’s a the end of the road. Not far.”, the doorman said. Although I will elaborate on the UAE definition of “Not far” in a later post, I found myself at the entrance of the Spinneys supermarket some 45 minutes later, after a very interesting walk.

The friendly ladies in Dubai

There weren’t many people out and about in the streets as I strolled down the road. As I mentioned before, Dubai is a very automobile friendly place and most people would rather drive 50 feet to their mailbox than drive. And, being in a concentrated densely populated Mecca of residential housing units, the taxi drivers were circling me like Africanized bees, sounding their horns trying to get my attention for a cab lift. “No thanks, I’ll walk” must translate from English to Arabic into something along the lines of “The zebra bit my cat” based on the looks they gave me.

There was also a scattering of people, mainly women, standing on the sidewalks trying to flag down these taxis while also talking on their cell phones. They smiled at me as I walked by and some even greeted me. What a friendly place.

One hour later, ladened down with four reinforced shopping bags of food weighing enough to cut the tendons in my fingers with their ergonomically designed twine handles, I decided that a taxi ride back to my temporary home would be a good idea. However, seeing how everyone else in the store arrived by car, I found that  the parking lot of the supermarket is not high on taxi drivers’ lead generating locations. There were no taxis on site as they were all busy buzzing around the residential complex, about a half mile away. By the time I walked back to the perimeter of the complex, having stopped several times to put down my bags and let the blood flow back into my fingers, I noticed that the same friendly ladies were still waiting on the sidewalk. This time they were extremely friendly, asking what was in my bags and apparently wanting more of my time than I had to give. Why they couldn’t get a taxi during the preceding hour was beyond me as I desperately rushed back to the room, playing “Beat the Clock” with the widening, ever weakening wet spots at the bottom of my grocery bags caused by the now thawed frozen pizzas and frozen orange juice containers. If I ever see them again when walking to the grocery store, I might stop and try to make some new friends, and show then how to hail a taxi.

Goodbye to our little house in Portugal.

B and I have been talking a lot lately of how we are ready to get out of Portugal. It´s been a great ten years and this country is exactly what we needed at the time.  We needed to de-stress, rid ourselves of the American materialistic mentality, get closer to the land, and basically get our priorities straight.  How we accidentally ended up here is a story for another time, but knowing what I do know now, about all the other European countries we could have settled in, I would still choose Portugal as the initial landing point for our life out of the USA.  Starting over financially  in your 40′s was tough enough, but Portugal welcomed us with open arms and showed us that money wasn’t everything, that we could live in a different culture, and that there was a lot more to life than the narrow minded perspectives we came over with. We have never been happier with so little.  Living in a country where the locals are very friendly, the air and food are clean, crime is low and the family unit is still intact reminds us of what we grew up experiencing in the states but, sadly, no longer exists.

We're leaving this view out our front door for the UAE.

But we are ready to leave. We feel we are well grounded enough to tackle the big city once again. We have our priorities straight, know what really matters in life and won’t make the same mistakes again. The economic crisis has affected Portugal and in a way, is forcing our hand to make the move to Abu Dhabi, in the UAE.  It’s going to be a big culture shock – almost two extremes on opposite ends of lifestyle choices.

My initial impression from visiting the area several weeks ago, which will most likely be proved to be completley inaccurate once I settle in there, is of an artificial environment created out of the barren desert with a lot of money. The feeling being in Dubai and Abu Dhabi can be hypnotic. Everything you could ever want to purchase is there, employment is practically 100%, streets are clean, beautiful architecture and not a stone out of place; an environment that could easily suck us back in to our destructive habits.  But I know that’s not all there is to the UAE. There are future friends and aquaintences from many different nationalities to be made. There is the the culture and history of the local Emerati to learn. Getting close to the land in the UAE means trekking into the desert, primarily via four wheel drive vehicles. This I am really looking forward to.

So the economic necessity of filling an empty retirement bucket in a land seemingly hostile and artificial might make it look like we are selling out.  But if we take the lessons we learned from Portugal and focus on the future relationships we will be developing, I’m sure we will find the beauty that really does exist underneath all the glitter in the UAE.

UAE camels lead the pack.

Emirati camels dominated the season’s largest and last racing festival in Kuwait yesterday.

Camels from the UAE won three out of four races on the final day of Kuwait’s tenth camel racing festival, with Freeda, a camel belonging to Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, Vice President of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, winning the main event: a 10-km race for females over five years old.

As they trotted across the finish line, the exertion of the race had caused their mouths to spew foam.  Child jockeys that were controversially used to race the beasts have been replaced with light machines that whip the animals’ back.

Racing camels do not have the velvet, shiny coats of thoroughbred racehorses; tufts of hair grow in patches over their muscular frames. Their long, gangly limbs, angled bodies and thin waistlines give them a model-like appearance, and the fastest ones can be worth millions of dollars.

Camels are plentiful in Kuwait, but most citizens prefer to eat them rather than race them, and the Bedouin see no contradiction in using the animals for transport or nourishment. Even at the track, the feast provided for the assembled guests included two large camels cooked tender and served on a bed of rice, their humps protruding from the trays.

This sounds like great fun and I am going to put camel racing on my agenda when I return to the UAE for the big exam.  I wonder if the losers are served for lunch?

Cross species kissing would probably get you beheaded.

A British couple accused of committing a public sexual act by kissing on the lips will spend a month behind bars, after losing their appeal against their conviction in the Dubai Court of Appeals today.

Original article here.

AN, 24, a marketing executive, and CA, a 25-year-old tourist, were convicted in January and sentenced to one month in jail followed by deportation, and fined Dh1,000 for consuming alcohol.

The defendants were arrested after an Emirati woman with her family filed a complaint on November 28 claiming that the two had been kissing and touching each other in a sexual manner in front of her children at a diner in Jumeirah Beach Residence. AN and CA both admitted drinking alcohol but denied committing a sexual act, claiming they had kissed each other on the cheek.

The defendants’ lawyer, Khalfan al Hosani, told the judges that the 38-year-old Emirati woman – currently the only adult witness in the case – had presented two different testimonies to police and public prosecutors.

What a great way to promote tourism, an industry your country depends on.

First of all, before my friends and family get upset about my move to the UAE, this story is from Saudi Arabia, not from where I will be moving. The UAE lives in the 21st century.

A Lebanese man condemned to death for witchcraft by a Saudi court will not be beheaded today as had been expected, his lawyer said.

Ali Sibat, a 49-year-old father of five, made predictions on an Arab satellite TV channel from his home in Beirut. He was arrested by the Saudi religious police during his pilgrimage to the holy city of Medina in May 2008 and sentenced to death last November for witchcraft.

See the original article here.

The Saudi justice system, which is based on Islamic law, does not clearly define the charge of witchcraft.  Sibat is one of scores of people reported arrested every year in the kingdom for practicing sorcery, witchcraft, black magic and fortunetelling. The deeply religious authorities in Saudi consider these practices polytheism.

Don't open these in Saudi Arabia

Made predictions? Death by beheading? Witchcrat?

Christianity embarassed itself 300 years ago with these same kinds of antics. The Salem witch trials and public executions of people that didn’t quite fit into society were “justified” because of the Puritan’s extreme interpretation of the Bible.

But Ali Sabat just made a prediction and this is interpreted as polytheism. I suppose carrying fortune cookies or one of those fortune telling magic 8 balls are also a captal offense in Saudi Arabia.  Is meterology considered heresy as well?

I did see a weather forecast on television when I was last in the UAE, so I am not worried about losing my head the next time I go there.  I am going to make it a top priority to befriend some Emirates and find out more about the culture.

Doing this will get you jail time here.

In many Western countries this is sign means “good job” or “I agree.” However In most of Latin America, West Africa, Greece, Russia, the Middle East, and Italy it basically means “up-yours.” It’s so offensive in several countries in the Middle East that it’s giving this symbol is an arrestable offense.  And I thought the pretty girl at the bar liked me.