"It was the best of times; It was the worst of times"

Welp, it's the end of an era...an era of sweat, blood, and tears. It is 12:35 at night here in RAK, about 33 hours before I leave this sweatshop backwater camel jockey country behind for good. I'm at school, yet again, because I got them to allow facebook on my computer for the last week, having no internet at home anymore.

How can I sum up this experience?

In my time I have not blown up my cooker, destroyed my fridge, caused any floods, or been traumatized by my washing machine. As far as I know, I haven't made a single student cry. I haven't given anyone the verbal barrage they so desperately deserve (FYI - Monty, Karen, Jacquie, and Melissa, you all made the short list)...although email is a wonderful thing... I haven't made any enemies (at least not actively). I've lost about 30 pounds of good ol' American flab (but unfortunately have another 30 to go...) I have managed not to blow my top over the UAE's human rights violations (such as making NRI's do hard labor in 50C weather, teaching their sons about sex via prostitutes, or imprisoning maids unfortunate enough to get pregnant because they were raped by their sponsors)...but only because I know there are things I can do nothing about and can't think about too much because they will make me so upset I might do something illegal.

On the other hand, I haven't gone desert camping, I never saw the Empty Quarter, I have added NO new recipes to my repertoire, and my Arabic has improved only by 4 words: left, right, how much, and yes (thank you, Socrates). And I have sleepwalked through a lot of this year.

On yet another hand (I may be turning into Shiva...) I managed to avoid some of my mistakes made in Bahrain. I had friends here. I didn't buy a car. I think I might have actually improved as a teacher during this year. There were times that I felt really unsure of myself, but the last couple of units I've taught were good, and I think I'm finally starting to understand the PYP. I wanted Stephanie to be a more personable administrator - she's very different from John or Kit, although since she was let go, I've seen a much more human side to her that makes me wonder if she didn't sacrifice that warmth for the sake of being "professional", but at the end of the day, the tension I felt because I wasn't completely sure where I stood with her did keep me pushing myself to understand the curriculum and how to work with the teachers.

I'm still processing it all. I wish I'd had the internet at home this week - I've forgotten things I was going to write in here, this was never meant to be one big cumulative report. I'm sure I'll remember some of those bits and bring them up later, but for now, let me finish with yet another Wicked quote:

"Who can tell if I've been changed for the better? (I believe I have been changed for the better.) Because I knew you I have been changed for good."

Masalaam, RAK. Hallo, London!

The Final Countdown

Two weeks from today I will be in London. Two weeks from today I was supposed to be in Iowa, but the fact is that as long as I get to go to London and still be home before the family reunion, I'll live with the fact that the travel agent screwed me over. I have a plane ticket, I have my passports, if I get my ass in gear I might even have money by the time Thursday's over.

There are lots of logistics involved in picking up and moving halfway around the world. You can't live somewhere for a year without picking up some detritus. I've been leaving my books behind - just gave away the whole House of Night series to a TA I knew would appreciate it - and am putting together a bag of clothes for the GETH charity. Still, it seems there is more to do. I've got two boxes and a suitcase to send to Socrates' future residence, and I'm going to ship a box or so of my own stuff while I'm at it. I've sold most of the stuff I needed to, and tomorrow I'll go shut off my internet so that I can pick up my pay at the end of the week.

This is the way things are winding down here. I'm not even sad - I just wish it was over already. I don't regret coming here; at times it has been a monumental pain in the ass, and as times I've felt very alone, but in just about every single way it's been better than it was in Bahrain, and meeting Socrates was the cherry on top. On the other hand, it was not the experience Korea was - maybe if it were, I wouldn't be leaving.

Last Thursday I went on a consular run to pick up my new passport. Since I had to take the whole day off, anyways, it turned into shopping trip, part two, and afterwards I met the girls and went up Burj Khalifa (the world's tallest building). Don't get me wrong - it was fun dropping 1000 dirhams like it was hot, and pretty amazing looking going up to have a look around. But it says a lot about the artificiality of this place, that it's a destination built solely on being the biggest, built on sating your consumer lusts. From the Burj you look out beyond the mall and Sheikh Zayed Rd and realize that the place is a desert - there are a few outcroppings of tall, futuristic buildings, but just beyond the oasis it's only a big, ugly desert.

There is very little of historic importance to see, 99% of the mosques don't welcome non-Muslim visitors, and most of the belly dancers are Russian or Brazilian. There's driving and whoring and shopping to your heart's content, but if you want to ride a real Arabian stallion, or learn about carpet weaving, or how to play a tabla drum, in other words, to see the warp and weft that the nouveau riche UAE is built on, you're going to be hard pressed to do so.

Hallelujah!

The old passport is back in my possession, I'm going to be an art teacher full-time still next year, and we are down to a mere 23 days before I blow this popsicle stand. Oh, and since I have to return to the consulate to pick up the new passport, I'm going to have to take ANOTHER day off school (oh darn). I'm thinking I'll park at Mall of the Emirates this time, take the metro from there, and afterwards play in the snow. Oh, and shop. Can't forget the shopping. Have two days in London at the end of this hell with a sexy man; I needs me some new threads. Party on, Wayne!

I've been working diligently to cram in as much fun, new experiences as possible before I go, with a little help from my friends. This Friday past we hit the Wafi rooftop for "Peanut Butter Jam" - a bunch of little expat bands playing rock covers (I knew I was going to enjoy it when the first full song we heard was the one about living next door to Alice...)

...

Sometime during the night someone said, "What do you think, you feel up to Atlantis tomorrow?" and thus Trish, Carol, and I ended up going to the waterpark out on the Jumeirah Palm. Well, I've gotta be honest with you - after making the hour+ trek down for the third time in 24 hours, not driving but navigating which is actually more stressful, and realizing it was REALLY hot and I was REALLY not up for a sunburn, I was not in the best mood and I'm afraid I ditched Carol and Trish for longer than I intended to (started heading down the lazy river, which, it turns out, is much longer than the one at Fun Plex). I sat for a while and read, wondering if they'd turn up, and then decided I'd man up and go down the "Leap of Faith" - the nearly-vertical waterslide that zips down the front of Aquaventure's distinctive ziggurat slide complex. This slide is particularly cool because before it spits you out with a major wedgie (and, in Trish's case, with your boobies exposed - yay for my one-piece!) it shoots you through a shark-infested aquarium. Not that you can see it, because you're going too fast, but if you can manage to keep your eyes open a slit whilst water is sluicing up from your feet, you can see a kinda blue-green blur during three-tenths of the second you're on the ride.

Well, when I made my way back down to the chairs, Trish and Carol were getting out of the water, and so we ended up doing the rest of the slides together and having a blast. We hit Dubai mall on the way past for Taco Bell (for the first time in almost a year...yum, yum, yum, said Max) and tickets for next Thursday to the top of Burj Khalifa. While we were there I imposed on them to stay for the fountain show, which was on my list of things to do before leaving. I gotta say, it was pretty spectacular - the fountain was timed to a piece of Arabic music and it was almost like the streams of water were liquid belly dancers, the way they spun and undulated. But as I was sitting there I couldn't help but remember sitting in the shadow of the Burj eating lunch a few months back with Evil and Socrates, and feeling a little lost. I may not be alone here, but the world is lonely when you don't have a best friend to look to.

The Ongoing Saga of the Missing Passport

It has been four weeks and two days since I lied about my nationality. That was the irony of the situation...par for the course, I was cross (the fact that the taxi driver smelled bad didn't help) and I didn't feel very chatty (which is always when they decide they want to talk to you), so when he asked me where I was from, I told him Canada. It was after getting out of the cab that I looked into my purse and realized my passport was gone. And I thought, "I probably deserve that." (I don't think I deserved the rubbish month I had since then, but maybe I'm just biased).

Panic did not set in immediately. I had vague recollections of cleaning my purse out, of moving it out of the zipper part because I kept looking at it and thinking, "That is going to fall out." I have a distinct memory of thinking, "I should put this in my desk." So I went into the apartment and looked for it. When I didn't find it, I decided I must have put it in my desk. It wasn't until I got to school the next day and realized it wasn't there, either, that I started to panic.

Should my passport have been in my purse? Negatory. Ever since a colleague from GDA had her purse cut off her with her passport inside on the streets of Saigon, I've been a little paranoid about losing mine. Especially as it collected more and more stamps and visas...it's like a personal history of my last nine years. But HR Twitgirl said she needed it to get me a letter of experience, and I refused to leave it in her care while waiting for the Trunchbull (our new principal) to make her way through the volcanic ash. I should have left it with her - probably she wouldn't have lost it, and if she had, she might have gotten fired over it. Oh well. Hindsight. 20/20 and all that jazz.

Failing my own resources, I started begging Heavenly Father. I told him that I wasn't up to this test of my faith, that I needed that passport back, asking him to enlighten my mind to find it, or soften the heart of the person who had it, so that it would come back to me. Then I went and I revisited every place I'd been for the week previous - the mall, Dunkin Donuts (I'd only been there the once, mind you), the golf club, Ivari, the Hilton. No sign of it (and I was not the most patient daughter of God, let me tell you). Since I was out sick on the following Sunday (four days since I discovered it was missing), I visited the police - even if no one had turned it in I needed to start the process to get the report for the consulate. It was depressing - part of me just refused to believe it was gone, but as the next week went by I had to admit it was not coming back. I went back to school on Tuesday and told HR Twitgirl that I'd lost my passport. Now, let me explain something about Twitgirl. She's 23, and inherited her position when we sacked her predecessor. She is only comparatively competent, and even though she speaks English, she tends to talk to you like you are a KG student, and has some very confusing turns of phrase. So I told her I'd lost my passport, and she said something about ten days and not to worry, they'd get the police report I needed.

I let a week go by (it had been two weeks then since I lost it), and visited her again. She hadn't lifted a finger toward dealing with it, but said she'd go to the police that afternoon. I was busy the next day, but went to her on Thursday, expecting she'd have the police report. Nope. Apparently they need the ID card of the Man at RAK ceramics (our parent company), and he wouldn't be sending that until Sunday. Sunday I checked in with her again, and she said he still didn't send it, that it would come tomorrow. >sigh< I went ahead and asked for Wednesday off and filled out the online application and lost passport notice on the Dubai consulate's website.

Now, catch this - the Evil One, in her vast state department knowledge, let me know that if I filled out the lost passport notice, that it would be cancelled immediately, and it said so on the website as well before I submitted it. Just keep that in mind for now.

HR Twitgirl finally got the ID card to the police, and informed me that it would be TEN MORE WORKING DAYS until I got the report. I was not impressed. I let my head of school know I was not going to need Wednesday off after all, and walked around for the next week with steam coming out my ears. Twitgirl told me later in the week that she'd used her "wasta" and that they'd get the report on Sunday. Okay, well, actually it was Tuesday (four weeks after losing it) before I had it in hand, but you know, details, details. The fact of the matter is, Tuesday afternoon I had the report, I had the next day off, and I had a car booked to pick up that afternoon.

And this is why I know SOMEONE out there has a sense of humor...because that afternoon I get a call from Rakesh to tell me that he'd head that one of the British school teachers had found a passport with a RAKESS visa in it. When it is too late (by a week and a half) to skip this whole rigamarole. I was locked into getting a new passport, mine has been cancelled. Here's the thing that burns me - so apparently it wasn't a BC teacher who found it, it was some Filipino that he knows, who told him about it. Now I don't know WHEN he told Mr. BC about the passport, but if it's been any length of time WHY didn't I hear about it before? And even more to the point, what kind of a douchebag holds onto a passport they found for FOUR WEEKS WITHOUT TURNING IT IN!!! Did he not think it was important enough that someone would be looking for it?

Anyways, the moral of the story is I went to the consulate yesterday (which took effort - the taxi driver didn't know where the hell he was going so I had to hoof it ten minutes longer than I should have). When I got to the security guys at 12:20 they told me to come back at 12:30. Five minutes later there was a queue twenty people long, and that really cheesed me off. Then I got a little belligerent - I kept it in my own head, mind you - but yeah, I basically realized I'm racist as I looked around at the other people in the room, who got there ahead of me, most of whom were not "real," whitebread, born-in-the-USA Americans, feeling slighted that I had to wait until they managed to sort their issues out before I could finally take care of my business - and since I speak English and have a modicum of intelligence, I would have been finished a lot faster than most of them. And I've got to go back in another week or two to pick the damn thing up. None of which would have been necessary if the loser who found my original had just turned it in. Grrrrrrrr.

On the plus side, I got to do a little shopping, since I parked at the Dubai Mall (did you know that, in addition to all the cheesy/trashy Emirati lingerie stores, Dubai Mall has a La Senza, a La Perla, and even an Agent Provocateur? Trufax. Yes, I am a Mormon girl with an underwear fetish, deal with it), and had lunch at the Macaroni Grill.

Hiatus

I had, what, 64 days left the last time I wrote? Now I'm down to 40. I've been remiss with the blog here, but what can I tell you? I guess since I had to change it to private and the jokes about only having three readers became true, I just don't have the motivation. After all, Babysis, Glamwhore, and the Evil One all chat or email or whatever with me regularly, so they know what's going on in my life. However, I'm going to soldier on, and once I leave this country I'll be able to make it public again, and maybe someone out there will want to read it.

I "gave up" fizzy drinks 47 days ago. Yes, those are quotes. I haven't been entirely successful at giving them up...in the space of two weeks I drank 6 cokes and 2 Mt. Dews, but otherwise I've been clean (of those 8 drinks, 2 were medicinal - you try driving back from Dubai at 2:30 a.m. without caffeine - 3 were celebratory, and 3 were just so Trish didn't have to drink alone). I felt like I was making pretty good progress until the week in which I drank 7 of those drinks (I lost my passport, Barni, my cat, died, and I got sick enough to stay home from school two days)...since then, I haven't had as much exercise as I would have liked. Basically I've been suffering from a hardcore inertia and not felt like doing anything productive. Probably because it was fun being curled up on my guestroom floor watching Dr. Who. I finished season two yesterday and since then have straightened things up some, none too soon, since I've got to start thinking about packing and report cards (only 500 some to go!)

RAKESS is rife with rumors since the Trunchbull took over as principal. Everyone is looking over their shoulder. I was feeling guilty about leaving, but then they cut art entirely and made Casey a classroom teacher, and now my only regret is that I made things too easy for them. If they'd tried to put me in a classroom, maybe I could have gotten out of here on a breach of contract and not had to pay for my visa and plane ticket...although the Trunchbull is not as nice as Roy was, so I don't really believe it.

Trish and I have been trying to make the most of the last of our time here - we saw the rock pools at Hatta and rocked last month's quiz with Dean, Michelle, Allan, and Moira, went down to Dubai with Rachel and Lana to get wild at Fibber McGee's and have done reconnaissance on SkiDubai, and have a few other things on our list. But I've gotta say, last Sunday I started reading Dead in the Family, and I was transported through time to last Spring, reading the series for the first time in New Orleans and in the snowstorm that I returned to that week, and the cozy feeling of being sunk into these books (the same feeling I had when I read all of the Stephanie Plum books), and the fact that Glamwhore shared them with me, and I shared them with Babysis...and at the video store when Trish stopped on the way home Friday, I saw Up, and I remembered all our midnight movies with the B&N crew...and I was just struck with a longing to be there now. I need the next 40 days, I know, but I'll be glad to be shot of here.

Hard Time

I have 64 days left here. Today was one of those days that made me say, "Good riddance!" It started when our secretary told me that I couldn't hide stuff behind the display board - apparently my buckets and apron peeking out do not spell, "Professional." Well, I can understand the apron, but give me an effing break - I have to teach the KG's in their own rooms, I haven't been given a cart to move everything around on, and I don't have the time to run back and forth to my classroom between sessions, so what the hell do they want me to do? I've been about as flexible as a Chinese contortionist while they figure out exactly what they want me to do about the KG's, so I got a little peeved over a complaint this asinine. Then there's the fact that I spent the last 30 minutes of the day with 2H while their teacher was out - not that huge a deal until I realized that I'd switched today's duty with their teacher yesterday because of their field trip. And I didn't want to switch because it was the best day of the cafeteria calendar, Fajita Day, but I did it anyways, and now I needed my lunch period to finish prepping something I didn't have time for in the morning. Argh!! The logical thing would be to work a little harder and get ahead of the game so these things wouldn't phase me, but I rarely operate under the rules of logic.

An ironic thing occurred to me this morning...when I first decided against music as a profession, way back in my innocent college days, I thought I wanted to be a kindergarten teacher. I had all these talents - music and art and storytelling - and I thought that teaching kinde would be great because it would let me use them all. Yeah, well, then I volunteered in a kindergarten class, and I realized how much work it was, and how much responsibility you have for their learning, and I ran screaming into art education. Yet here I am, after five years of teaching, and not only has more of it been as a kindergarten teacher than an art teacher, but I'm about to go and do it to myself AGAIN. And I'm sort of looking forward to it. Maybe GDA warped me in more ways than I think...

Lazy Day

It is 3:36 PM and I have yet to leave my apartment. I talked for two hours this morning to Tori, then read, slept, read....etc, with a little chili cooking thrown in....until coming in here to look at plane tickets. Here's the score:
18 days without pop.
6 days of exercise:
Sunday: Belly Dance practice
Monday: Biking and jogging
Tuesday: Swimming
Wednesday: Biking
Thursday: Walking to the Sailing Club and back
Friday: Swimming
And we'll make it seven once the sun goes down a bit more - maybe I'll dance in here a bit before heading to the pool.

The problem is, I don't feel like anything's happening yet. The scale tells me nothing's happening yet. This is one of the reasons I didn't have any success at getting things started last year - I'd have a few really good days but it's hard to keep going without results. But I'm determined to keep going til I leave this country, so I have to get some results at some point. Especially if I add more good habits into the mix. Next on my list is to start packing my lunches again, and then to quit eating out. My mocktails experiments this past week were not wildly successful and as I've been told, juice doesn't have any less calories than coke, so I think those are out, but I'm going to keep the tang and lemon barley water, just to satisfy my sweet tooth and give me a little variety. I think I'll also fast tonight over it. I really want to be healthy again.