Mississippi friends in Dubai

By some amazing fluke, we happened to know people here from Mississippi. I went to grad school with Robbie and Judy, a spunky married couple who had just returned from serving in the Peace Corps in China. I only knew them for about a year while we were in the same program, and Robbie and I worked in the Honors College together, but I always thought they were fun and interesting and wished I had gotten to know them better.

I was shocked when I realized that Woody had an interview at the same university where they work in Dubai. They sent us numerous emails detailing life in Dubai and working at Zayed University, so when Woody was offered the job, we felt fortunate to have insider info with which to make our decision.

Another coincidence is that Robbie, Judy, and I are all runners. Running is a huge part of my life, so I wanted to be sure that I could keep it up here. They assured me that there is a lively running culture here with frequent races. So far I've just been running in our hotel gym on the treadmill, but once the weather cools down and we move into our villa, it should be easier to get outside to run. Judy and I run at about the same pace, and we're neighbors in the same compound, so running together should be pretty convenient.

Woody and I had no idea that we'd be living in the same compound as Robbie and Judy. Our first day in Dubai we were taken by bus with the other new hires to see the villas that a couple of us would be moving into. After we toured the villa we were standing outside waiting for the rest of the group. Out of the corner of my eye I saw movement from a distance. I glanced up and saw this couple walking toward me down the dusty street. As their faces shifted into focus, I slowly started to I realize that it was Robbie and Judy. I was so utterly shocked to see them just appear in this random sandy villa in Mirdif, Dubai, that it was almost as if the heat made halos around their heads and they moved in slow motion toward us, the sand-colored backdrop behind them (Hallucinations are a breeze when you've not had much sleep.). I realized at that moment how weird it was that the last time I saw them was eight years ago in green Mississippi, and now we happen to be neighbors in the same compound in the United Arab Emirates. This is definitely one of the most notable coincidences of my life.

Apparently, Robbie and Judy knew we'd be placed in their villas, so they came looking for us when they saw the ZU bus, but I had no idea, so when I saw them, I couldn't figure out how they'd found us. After we hugged hello and introduced them to Griffin, they took us back to their villa and we caught up.

Since that day, we've seen them often, and they have made our experience here warm and positive. They've introduced us to some great people, and Judy and I have already tried a new sport together. (Yesterday we attempted surfing!) We have plans to learn to paddle board and run a half marathon this year. I feel so fortunate that we already have friends here with whom we share something in common. Zorba the Greek said that the more you see, the bigger the world gets, but sometimes it turns out to be delightfully tiny.

Aubree's three rules for taxi etiquette in Dubai

Okay, so I know I've been here less than a month, but I've taken a lot of cabs to get Griffin back and forth from school.  These are the most important aspects of using cabs here that I've learned (the hard way) so far:

1. If you have called a cab specifically, that cab will wait for you and not give anyone else a ride. Therefore, if you find another cab before the one you ordered arrives, you must call and cancel the booking.
   I waited on a cab for thirty minutes with a cranky four-year old and heavy bags of groceries, so I hopped in the first cab that came, not knowing it wasn't the one that was called. Before we got out of the parking lot, my phone rang, and an angry cab driver on the other end was berating me for getting in another cab. He was following my cab and pulled up beside us, glaring at me while he yelled through the phone at me. So I got out with Griffin and all his bags and got into his cab. He was angry at me the whole time, asking why I was in Dubai and how long I'd been there while he repeated taxi etiquette to me. The next day a much nicer cab driver confirmed this rule of etiquette.  1a. If you find a taxi driver you like, get his number.  You can call him specifically when you need a ride.

   I have the number of my favorite cab driver, Happy, in my phone, and I will now call on him anytime I need to go somewhere.  He told me just to give him fifteen minutes or so to get to where I need him.  He will make picking Griffin up from school so much easier now.

2. Know how to get to where you want to go, but be open if the driver suggests a more efficient route.
   This may be naive of me (I've only been here three weeks, after all), but taxi drivers seem pretty honest. I haven't had anyone yet add miles to my journey to drive up my fare. Driving here is challenging, and these drivers are contracted to work twelve hour days, seven days a week for five years. Therefore, if a driver claims to know a better way, I'll let him give it a shot.
3. Don't overtip
   When we first arrived in Dubai, Woody and I thought that we were expected to give everyone big tips. So we grossly over-tipped everyone we came in contact with that first week. Then a friend told us that this isn't a tipping culture. Even at restaurants, for instance, there's no place to include a tip on the credit card receipt. It's okay to tip if you appreciate what someone has done for you, but a small tip (a few dirhams) goes a long way, and if you tip too much, it's inappropriate.  

The friend maker

Thanks to Montessori school, the Y, and our many friends and neighbors back in Texas, Griffin has become an excellent friend-maker. Here's his strategy: when he sees another child that he wants to play with he says, “Hi I'm Griffin. What's your name? Do you want to be my friend?” Children of all ages respond really well to this. In Griffin's past life in Texas, it led to him making friends and keeping them. Every time he saw that child at school, the Y, or in our neighborhood, he had a friend to play with.

Griffin has found that children all over the world respond well to this. Those who speak English, that is. He soon learned that if a child doesn't respond when he offers his friendship, it's because he doesn't speak English. After getting rejected by non-English speaking children a few times, Griffin started asking me “Mommy, does that boy speak English?” first.

One morning we were in the hotel restaurant, and there was a boy he wanted to play with. He approached the boy and asked his name; when the boy said nothing, Griffin ran up to me whining, “Mommy, he doesn't speak English.” A few moments later, however, the boy came up to Griffin with a spy car that shoots torpedoes. They instantly became best buddies, playing side-by-side with the car like they'd been friends since birth. They managed to work out sharing the car and invented countless games while not once communicating in the same language. They bonded through their shared love for cars.

Unfortunately, language barriers have not been the only challenge for Griffin in making friends. Like I mentioned earlier, in the past he made his introduction, and then every time he saw that child, he had a friend. The problem here so far has been that all the friends he's made have been in airports, malls, and hotels: places where people are transient and don't return. Poor Griffin has introduced himself to countless children whom he will never see again. We looked for the spy car boy the next two mornings in the hotel restaurant, but his family had already checked out.

The most touching instance was when we were in a big mall near our hotel. We were walking in the mall, headed back to the room, and a girl around nine or ten years old ran by us. Griffin ran after her yelling, “Hey! What's your name?!” She came to a sudden halt and spun around, looking surprised, and said, “Aisha.” Then Griffin said, “Do you want to be my friend?” She smiled and said, “yes.” Griffin was so delighted that he jumped up and down. But then it hit us all that we all had to continue toward our destinations. We were heading back to the hotel, and Aisha appeared to be joining her parents in a shop. To my surprise, Griffin was so happy that she had agreed to be his friend, he didn't seem to care that we had to part ways. He did ask me later, however, if she could come over for a playdate. I had to explain to him that I didn't know her parents.

This type of thing has happened several times a day for the last three weeks. It came to a head late last week when he broke down on the floor genuinely sobbing that he didn't have any friends here. In desperation, I searched the room for the business card of the dad of a boy that Woody and Griffin had met at the hotel pool. I emailed the dad (a stranger to me), and asked if his wife could get in touch with me to arrange a playdate. The dad responded promptly and politely, but several days have passed, and the mom hasn't called.

Fortunately, Griffin started school this week, so he'll see his friends every day. I don't think he realizes this yet because this morning in the taxi ride to school he told me he needed some friends. When I said, “you'll see your friends at school,” he seemed a little confused.

It won't take long before we establish a routine here, and soon he will have friends and neighbors that he can count on seeing regularly. Woody and I know that it just takes time to get reestablished after moving, and we're trying to teach this to Griffin. If he's anything like his parents, his wanderlust will motivate him to move many times throughout his life. I'm proud of him for his social perseverance, and I admit that I might have a thing or two to learn from him.

This is the story of how we got here

We boarded the plane in Jackson around five o'clock Tuesday evening. We flew overnight and all slept a little. Where I was sitting, an air vent was blasting on me but was too high to reach, so I didn't sleep well because I was so cold. When shifting weight around in the suitcases in the airport in Jackson, I had pulled out the warm merino sweater I had knitted a couple of years ago because there wasn't room for it I the suitcase, and I was so glad to have it on the plane. That was what enabled me to get the couple of hours' sleep that I did. Once the sun started rising (around one Texas time!) trying to sleep was a lost cause. That was the first time I had ever actually witnessed losing time because we were flying east as the sun was rising. It was quite an eerie feeling.

We landed around eleven in the morning Amsterdam time, so when we entered the airport I had gotten about two hours of sleep, and Woody and Griffin had only gotten five or six, at the most. Walking through the airport with such little sleep in a foreign country and on the way to an even more foreign country was like being in a dream. My senses and body didn't work quite right; I felt slow and confused by simple things.

For instance, I stood in line in the ladies' bathroom waiting for a stall. I was at the front of the line for a while because I didn't see an open door to go into. Then I heard, “Hallo? Hallo?” coming from the attendant, and I realized that there was an open stall that I had overlooked. Everyone in line behind me waited patiently.

Eventually, we found a cozy table near a coffee shop and anchored ourselves there until it was time for our flight to Dubai. Before that, however, I did manage to buy some nice chocolate and spend $18 on one Hot Wheel car for Griffin ($.97 back home).

The flight to Dubai was the hardest leg. It was only six hours (short compared to the nine hour flight from Memphis to Amsterdam), but the seats were small and close together, and it was too sunny for Griffin to fall asleep, so we had to entertain him the whole time, and we certainly weren't at our best with such little sleep.

After he broke down crying on the plane, “I want to go home to Texas!” I pulled out my secret weapon. It was a Leapster Explorer (an educational video game player) that my mom had bought for his birthday but we were hiding until the flight. He really enjoyed that, and it kept him busy for several hours on the plane. Also, I let him listen to my mp3 player, which had his favorite songs saved on it.

Finally, we landed in Dubai around eleven o'clock at night. As soon as we could see the city's lights from the air, Griffin said, “Mommy, are we in Dubai?! Is it still my birthday?!” We had told him that he could get new toys for his birthday when we got to Dubai, and he remembered.

We were met in the airport by a woman from a greeting service to walk us through customs and pick up our luggage. She was nice and tried to make conversation with me, but I was exhausted, and it was midnight in Dubai, not to mention how little sleep I'd gotten in the last two days. I just wanted her to stop talking to me and let me daze into space while Griffin ran circles around my legs.

She brought up the wonderful food and how I'll still be able to get my hamburgers in Dubai. Because all Americans love hamburgers, right? Just please stop talking to me, woman. My conversational skills and manners are somewhere over Iceland.

When we stepped outside, it took a few seconds to realize that the sensation I was feeling was heat and humidity. I'm a Southern girl, but I've never felt anything like this. It was like being on another planet. It enveloped me and clung to me almost intimately as I moved.

We finally made it to the hotel where we ordered room service and quickly fell asleep. We left Mississippi at five P.M. Tuesday and arrived in our hotel in Dubai around one thirty A.M. Wednesday: a total of about twenty-two hours of travel. (That's the same amount of time I was in labor with Griffin, come to think of it.) Woody and Griffin acclimated to the time change in just a couple of days. It didn't catch up with me until about a week and a half later; then I had some late mornings.

We've been here for three weeks now, and traveling here is already a foggy memory. The fact that we'll do it all over again when we go home to visit next summer looms over me. Maybe traveling this far is something that people get better at the more they do it. Or maybe that's why they serve free beer and wine on planes.

Mama bear update

When I picked Griffin up from school today, I immediately checked his lunch box, and he had found the lower level of his sandwich box. :) When I asked him about it, he said he had known it was there all along.

It turns out, however, that the fancy trolley bag I bought him is too big to fit in his cubby, so he'll have to use his old backpack after all.   

Mama bear

It hit me yesterday after Griffin was safely in his classroom, and I was free to wander around the school with my thoughts. I had never fought so hard for anything before. I had never cared so much for anything before. Just getting here alone was a two-month-long struggle against everything comfortable, routine, and easy. Then when the school assessed him the first time and incorrectly said that he was completely unschooled and wanted to put him a class with the 3-year-olds, I was awoken. I realized that this was the time that I had to start fighting for my son. So I called the school and demanded a retest, and the next morning at 8:00, he was reassessed and admitted into the 4-year-old class.

Later that day we went to buy uniforms in a tiny room with floor-to-ceiling shorts and shirts cryptically organized and labeled. There were parents and children wall-to-wall, and I had no idea what we needed to buy or what sizes we needed. With the help of a lady in the store, we left two hours later with three pairs of tartan shorts, five white polo shirts, swimming trunks, canvas gym shorts, a green hat (to represent the Balmoral house Griffin was placed in), a swimming cap, two pairs of shoes (one for daily wear and one for athletic), white socks, and navy socks.

The newness of this experience was overwhelming and exhilarating at the same time. I had never bought a school uniform before, let alone in a foreign country. I know nothing about the British school system. How am I supposed to know all of this?! We'll add this to the long list of things I should have been trained on before becoming a mom.

To add to my feeling of getting things accomplished in unknown territory, I was doing all of this running around in taxis. It made me feel very urban and weirdly in control.

Our next stop was the Hyper Panda supermarket to get his lunch box and trolley bag (both with Lightening McQueen on them). I had promised Griffin we would do this today after I sent him to his first morning of school without a snack. The front office had told me that he didn't need any food, so we didn't send any. When I picked him up at eleven o'clock, he was sitting at a table with no food and a perma-frown while all of the other children were snacking happily. When he came to me, he was crying, “Why didn't I have a snack!?” For the rest of his life he'll remember that on his first day of school, he was the only one without a uniform and without a snack. He won't remember all the sacrifices we made to move him to a country where he could get an better education. He won't remember that I fought to get him reassessed so that he could be in a class that was appropriately challenging. He won't remember that we had a mother/son date right after school in which we ate Annie's pretzels and chocolate ice cream with sprinkles. He'll remember that his mommy didn't pack him a snack on his first day of school. And that perfectly summarizes parenthood. You love your child more than anything else in the universe, and you are constantly sorting through choices deciding which course will be better for your child in the short and long run. And it feels like the harder you try, the more you fuck up.

So we got the trolley bag (with wheels that light up!), the lunch box, and everything that goes with it, and all was happy. Then we had to take a shuttle back to the hotel. We waited with our heavy bags of uniforms, shoes, and groceries, and eventually the bellhop escorted us to the shuttle van. Ahh. Our last journey in this very long day. We were comfy and buckled in, and this lady came up and started yelling that she had been waiting for thirty minutes, and why did we get the van. I saw her and one other girl, so I said, “There's room; come on in!” She ungratefully said to me, “Yes, because we have been waiting.” So they moved us to the back of the van, and then they said they wanted to sit in the back, so can we move to the front, then when we moved to the front, it turned out to be five of them instead the two I initially saw. By the time they were all in, there was no seat for Griffin, and I said, “It's not safe! He needs a seat!” The queen bitch said, “No, I am sitting here because I am with child, and it is not safe for me.” So Griffin is standing in the middle with nowhere to sit while all of these ladies are filling up the van. The busboys then quickly escorted us out of the van, took our bags, and put us in another shuttle. I was mad about how rude and ungrateful the women were because I didn't have to invite them in; I was being kind. They were taking their anger for waiting out on us. And again, I had to stand up and fight for Griffin's well-being.

Nevertheless, Griffin and I made it safely back to the hotel where we got settled in for the evening. I washed his uniforms and got him prepped for his first full day of school, which was this morning. We got him up and dressed in his uniform, and he is proud to wear it. I packed his new lunch box complete with coveted thermos and snack. I had even found a cool Lightening McQueen sandwich box with a little tray that sits on top so you can put food on the bottom and top levels. He has a cheese sandwich and Babybel cheese on the bottom level, then on the top are carrots (which he won't eat, but I included so the teachers think I'm a good mom), and pretzels. He hasn't seen his lunch yet, so it will all be a surprise when he opens it.

So this morning he was too excited to eat, but it's okay because he has a snack and lunch, right? Then it occurred to me about twenty minutes after Woody and Griffin left that Griffin doesn't know there are two levels in the sandwich box! He may just see the pretzels and carrots and not get enough to eat!

And again, this is what it is to be a parent. It's a good exercise on succeeding and failing everyday. Good school – check. Right class – check. Uniforms – check. Lunch box, bag, and thermos – check, check, check. Assured nutrition and sustenance for a seven-hour school day – big fat fail. But bright side (because I'm bound to positivity since getting that damn tattoo), he'll learn to eternally search for hidden compartments in everything.

P.S. Sorry about the periods at the beginnings of sentences. Blogger has sensed our move, and everything's in Arabic, including the page layout, which types from right to left.

Today's Wednesday.  Our flight to Dubai leaves Monday at 5 P.M.  We'll have two layovers: a short one in Memphis and then a 3 hour one in Amsterdam, which Griffin calls Hamsterdam.  It will take us 20 hours total travel time (including layovers) to reach our destination. Fortunately, we'll be flying overnight, so hopefully we'll all be able to sleep.  We'll arrive close to midnight the next day, and then Woody will begin work the next day.

We've gotten so much done.  We moved out of the house, found a renter, found homes for our two cats and fish, sold our car (and will sell the truck today or tomorrow), and have appropriated all of the necessary documents we need to get our visas.  I'm amazed that I was able to list all of that in just one sentence.  It felt like it took more work than that.  Moving out of the country in two months' notice is one of the most intense things I've ever done.

We have a little time to breathe now that we're staying with family and the hard work is done.  The only thing we have left to do is sell the truck and get a rental car.  Tomorrow is Griffin's birthday!  We're having a little party at Chuck E Cheese with Griffin's cousin, Lanie.   I can't believe he'll be four.  I don't know many world-traveling four-year-olds.  I know that Griffin will do great.

Speaking of, it's time to fix his breakfast.  Signing off for now.