Globally Blonde

… well, let’s just say there’s a little more than cultural sensitivity at play.

EVERYTHING IS GREAT AND SHINY AND I LOVE EVERYONE, WHY DO YOU ASK?

(Click through to read the full article in today’s paper.)

That feeling where you shake your head in disbelief and think to yourself, “No, I’m not ready for this, it can’t be happening so soon… wasn’t it just the holiday season a few months ago? How can it be here again already?!”

Well, that was how I felt today when Alex came home with a couple bags of groceries from Spinney’s, our local supermarket…

Ramadan Kareem (“Generous Ramadan”) from Spinneys! 

… and I realized, holy cow (language censored in deference to the propriety demanded by the impending holy month), we’re 11-ish days (give or take a day based on when exactly the imams in Mecca see the moon) out from Ramadan!

The only difference between this and your typical CVS holiday-aisle revelation is that instead of thinking “Need to buy presents! Must bake cookies! Have to hang ornaments!” as you might for Christmas, my mind immediately started racing through the classic non-Muslim-living-in-the-Muslim-world pre-Ramadan check-list: “Need to stockpile wine before the booze stores close for the month! Must throw away all my gum so I don’t accidentally chew it during the day and get arrested! Have to remember to stash granola bars in my purse for furtive, illegal midday meals while everyone else is fasting!”

Sigh. No, I jest – Ramadan is a beautiful time of spiritual reawakening, communal generosity, and family togetherness for those who celebrate it. And for those who don’t, the legal compunction to abide by all the strictures of the holy month (no public eating or drinking during daylight hours, no swearing, no loud music, no looking at people funny, etc. etc. etc.) makes for, well… an interesting thirty days.

Anyway, there’s something reassuring about realizing that the commercialization of religious holidays is not just a Western phenomenon… so I join Spinneys (and every other major brand in the region) in wishing my Muslim readers Ramadan Kareem just a few short days in advance.

‘Tis the season!

(And yes, I do track holiday advertisements on Spinney’s bags… why do you ask?)

“America’s Number 1 China Bistro” (whatever that means) opening soon at (yet another)location in the UAE, to be (undoubtedly) staffed by Filipinos, managed by a Lebanese, and patronized by Indians…

… ladies and gentlemen, globalization for the win!

(And yes, I am unabashedly excited to get my hands on some Dynamite Shrimp. The longer I live abroad, the more I have started to embrace things – including chain restaurants, country music, and the Republican party – that I would have disdained from the comfort of my left-leaning latte-liberal perch back home in the US. Don’t judge until you’ve been through the process yourself…)

Wake up, see a pair of construction boots dangling above the window of your 40th-floor apartment…

… realize it must be a window cleaning day!

Marvel at the matter-of-factness with which these guys work, careening as they do betwixt the city’s busiest highway and the city’s world’s tallest building…

… catch yourself humming, “They fly through the air with the greatest of ease / Those daring young men on the… window-cleaning bungees!”

And then, voyeurism sated, both parties carry on with their day.

Sometimes I can’t decide whether Dubai is like living far into the future (because clearly it is very future-ish and “Jetsons”-esque to have men flying past the windows of your skyscraper, no?) or living way back in the past (because don’t we have labor laws protecting against this kind of work nowadays? and aren’t there machines that could do this?!).

In reality, I suppose, it’s a little of both.

Also called shamal - Arabic for “north,” since the winds come down from Syria and Iraq to our northwest – sandstorms here have an insidious habit of popping up out of nowhere. Yesterday afternoon I went into a meeting with clear blue skies and bright summer sun outside, and when I emerged a few hours later I could barely see my car on the far side of the parking lot.

I had the unlucky fate of needing to drive from Internet City to Healthcare City (yes, those are real neighborhoods) - a route that hits nearly every major traffic choke point in Dubai – mid-shamal, so I got the privilege of being stuck in gridlock directly underneath one of the “no sh!t, Sherlock!” informational signs that dot Sheikh Zayed Road posing a huge hazard as drivers swerve or slow down to read the text helpfully informing people about upcoming traffic conditions.

As I idled there, I was reminded of some of the “greatest hit” sign messages from road events past… like the infamous “WATCH FOR WATER PONDS” warning during the Great Rains of ‘08:

… and the quirky “BE AWARE OF OTHER’S FAULTS” (a mistranslation of “drive defensively,” I can only assume?) during last year’s highway safety campaign.

That misplaced apostrophe still makes me twitch a year later. Someday, someone will hire a native English speaker to proofread official communications in this city.

Until then… BE AWARE.

Saying goodbye to the family pup in Tennessee, 8 July 2007.

Let me just start by saying that I never expected to write this post.

When I arrived in Dubai on 9 July 2007, I thought I would be here for “a year, maybe two” – that was my standard line. In fact, right when I arrived – pretty much exactly this time, 1460 days ago – I wasn’t entirely sure I’d be here much longer than a day.

I was coming off the heels of a rough year, you see. In retrospect, it was nothing that serious – I had gone through a messy break-up that left me spinning my wheels as to what to do or where to go next, and I had finished my overpriced, under-utilizable master’s degree only to be confronted by the harsh realization that graduate school does not a career trajectory make. It was a quarter-life crisis of the most typical proportions, all very Four Non-Blondes “twenty-five years and my life is still / trying to get up that great big hill of hope / for a destination” - first-world problems to the truest extent, but daunting nonetheless.

And so Dubai was my escape from all that, my attempt to get away from the malaise and make a fresh start. And four years out, it has been exactly that – but man oh man, that first night.

I was excited, sure. But i was also faced with the reality of the fact that I had just moved 10,000 miles away from home, to a city where I knew maybe half a dozen people (thanks only to my internship the previous summer), in the middle of the mother-freaking Middle East, with nothing but a highly dubious job offer and four orange suitcases to my name.

I remember that first night like it was yesterday. I landed at 9 PM or so, fresh off the 12-hour flight from JFK, and had to be at work at 9 AM the next morning. Although the sheer fanciness of the arrival process was exhilarating – the uniformed driver holding up a sign with my name in the airport terminal, the waiting Escalade stocked with a chilled towel and a bottle of cold water to combat the summer heat, the check-in at the schmancy hotel that my company would pay for me to stay in during the next month while I found housing – I thanked the bellboy and closed the door to my swish suite that night with but one thought on my mind: what. the hell. have I done. 

WHO MOVES HALFWAY ACROSS THE WORLD ALL BY THEMSELVES TO ESCAPE A QUARTER-LIFE CRISIS?!

(I mean, many people do… but I had never thought I had it in me to be one of those people. Let’s put it this way: several years ago, while I was living in London for grad school, my mom ran into my first-grade teacher back home in Tennessee. Upon hearing of my whereabouts, the teacher recoiled in shock, exclaiming, “But she was just so shy! I never thought she’d move out of your house, much less to another country!” Um… appreciate the vote of confidence, Mrs. Jarboe.)

Thankfully I’ve never been prone to panic attacks, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t come close that first evening in Dubai. Initially I tried to ameliorate the pit of dread in my stomach with a productive response: the hotel gym didn’t close until 11 PM, after all, so I went upstairs and pounded out four fast miles on the treadmill like my life depended on it. Panic undiminished, I decided to tackle the problem in a less, er, constructive manner: I made myself a stiff drink or three from the mini-bar, corporate policy (“we’re a Muslim company so we’ll cover all your hotel expenses except for alcohol”) be damned.

Heart still racing unabated, I crawled into bed around 2 AM Dubai time (only 6 PM in New York) for a largely sleepless night, comforted by only one thought: if I feel this bad when I wake up tomorrow, I’ll take a taxi to the airport and I’ll buy a one-way ticket home and I’ll force everyone I know to awkwardly pretend that this ill-fated adventure never happened.

Sometime around 6 AM, the dawn started to break over this crazy eccentric intimidating foreign metropolis, and I remember deciding that this was it: I had made a terrible but ultimately reversible mistake, and I would be homeward-bound by this time the next day.

Somehow, the finality of that decision allowed me to fall asleep at last, and when I woke up a little later that morning, wonder upon wonders… I didn’t feel that bad.

Flash forward to four years later, and I’m writing this post sitting on the comfy couch in my dreamy Dubai apartment, sipping a glass of cabernet from my favorite wine glass accompanied by my boyfriend who is happily smoking our shisha while he watches the Germany-Japan knock-out round of the FIFA Women’s World Cup (oh, how I always dreamed of having a partner who would deign to watch women’s sports!), complete with Arabic commentary on our somehow regionally appropriate Al Jazeera satellite TV package.

And I find myself gratified by the realization that, you know what? Sometimes things work out the way they’re supposed to. 

When I moved here four years ago, I didn’t think this pseudo-city in the desert would ever feel like home. I didn’t expect to meet my life partner, I didn’t realize I would forge so many truly impactful friendships, and I certainly didn’t plan to catch the expat bug – a malady that has robbed me of my desire to live Stateside anytime in the foreseeable future, even after nearly half a decade away.

Are things perfect? Of course not – and if I blogged more about the career and personal uncertainty that has been abundant in my life during recent months, that much would be amply clear. But do I feel like, for a multitude of reasons, this is where I belong right now? Abso-freaking-lutely.

So as I close out four years in Dubai – and while I am certainly not a person who is typically qualified to dispense advice in any capacity whatsoever – all I can say is that sometimes, the thing that causes you to to have that pit of dread in your stomach ends up being well worth the uncertainty…

… just make sure you have a stiff drink or an all-hours treadmill on hand to help mediate the initial discomfort.

(For some different musings on my time abroad, check out last year’s expat anniversary post, On the Occasion of Three Years in Dubai.)

USA! USA! USA!

(Image via)