Thursday is the New Friday

This morning I slept in.  It was glorious.  Travis woke me up with fresh coffee and home-made pancakes.  We sat around the breakfast table in our PJs, listening to bossa nova music and making plans for the weekend.  We’re starting to feel settled now, enjoying a relaxing Friday morning. 

“Wait…what?  Is this a holiday?”  Nope.  It’s the weekend, and it surprises me every time.  Our work week here is Sunday-Thursday; Friday and Saturday are the weekend.  My mental circuits are lagging on the update.

We’ve had no problem adjusting to the new currency.  (Lucky for us, there are about 4 dirhams per dollar, so the mental math is easy.)  Distances in km?  Measurement in liters?  Great.  (They always told us in school that we were going to have to convert to metric eventually, so I’m ready!)  Convenient too that the conversion from dirhams to dollars is almost identical to the conversion of liters to gallons, so dirhams/liter are equal to dollars/gallon ($2.60 for premium).  Signs in Arabic?  Sure, that’s cool.  (There’s usually an English translation nearby, so it’s a good way for me to check my reading skills.) 

Converting Celsius to Farenheit is a bit tricky to do in my head (Here’s the “easy” trick Travis taught me: starting at 32 F/0 C, memorize the sequence 50, 68, 86, 104, and 122—correlating to 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50 C.).  Fortunately, it doesn’t get close to 50 C nowadays; but the temperature is still in the low 40s C daily, so the forecast doesn’t really matter as much as it did in Seattle.  (Here’s my mental crib sheet:  43+= hot; 37-42=pretty hot; <37 moderate.="" span="" style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> 

It hasn’t really been less than 37, actually, so that’s moot.)  Yesterday, when Wyatt and I walked home from school in the early evening it was around 38ish (about 100F).  I was wearing pants and a polo shirt and didn’t even break a sweat.  It’s amazing what the body can adapt to, given time and several liters of water.

Almost the same...but not quite!

Speaking of adapting, Dubai is such an international city that the amount of adapting you do is dictated by personal taste.  Learning Arabic is an option, not a requirement.  Wearing more-modest clothing is respectful but not expected or required.  The food that we liked to eat in Seattle is available here, too.  Indeed, the selection at the grocery store is overwhelmingly vast to accommodate everyone’s tastes.  The trick is to wade through the choices and figure out the new system.  For example, there were a dozen kinds of mangoes in the produce section last time we went to Carrefour.  They came from 3 continents and all had slightly different colors, shapes, and sizes.  Which ones will we like the best?  After we evaluate all of our options and choose a couple kinds to try, we have to take them to a counter in the produce section to get each bag weighed and tagged with its price on a barcode sticker.  It’s kind of like the deli counter at US grocery stores.  For now, grocery runs are a much more thoughtful activity as we find our new favorites.  

Out and about, there are a lot of familiar things…but with a little twist.  We drive on the right side of the road, but there are many round-abouts and few stoplights.  Left-turns are rare, to keep traffic flowing smoothly, so going anywhere usually requires a few U-turns.  The rules of the road are the same, although the signage is a bit different.  If you see the green light flash, stop immediately.  There is no time to accelerate through the light and stop light cameras are abundant.  Highway radar cameras are spaced every few kilometers (even more common than the speed limit signs).  To add to the confusion, the posted limit in the emirate of Dubai has a +20 km/hr grace whereas in the emirate of Abu Dhabi the posted limit is the limit (but the posted speeds are all 20 km/hr higher). 

In buildings, the ground floor is on the ground and the first floor is one above it.  When you call a customer service, you press 1 for Arabic and 2 for English.  Water and electricity bills are easy to pay (at the gas station).  You can get anything you want delivered to your door (dinner, groceries, tools, laundry, etc.)…except your mail, which has to be picked up in person at the Post Office unless it’s courier-delivered (in which case you’ll get a random phone call with no advanced notice informing you they’re at your door).  Please don’t mail us anything! 

Bit by bit, with lot of trial and error and ample patience from those around us, we’re learning the new routines here.  Our learning curve is steep.  Except with the days of the week.  Going to work on Sunday mornings is a shock every time.