Car-Culture Shock.

I have been busy moving into my new apartment, traveling virtually every weekend, and working much harder than I'm legally allowed to during the holy month of Ramadan. As such, I haven't had much time to write. So I thought, in the mean time, I'd at least share some of my email responses to questions people have been posing me...

How is it going over there? You arrived in Abu Dhabi the same time as Christopher arrived from Sierre Leone to Toronto, so I'm going to time your culture shock together! Has it began yet?
I think our experiences of culture shock may vary slightly...I work and socialise almost exclusively with Montrealers and Vancouverites. Even my two non-Canadian friends both lived in Canada for awhile. Plus the fact that I've been on the road for so long, I'm kind of instantly adaptable these days. The biggest cultural difference is that I'm adjusting to car culture.

What's it like?
Well, I've had it really easy here. I got hooked up with an apartment with a really cool Aussie girl my workmate met on the street, in the building 3 of my work colleagues live in. So I have a fab place, fully stocked with furniture and dishes and the like, and my workmates seem happy enough to drive me everywhere. I basically haven't lifted a finger. I'm so stocked up that when it was time to have a potluck amongst the crew, I hosted it because I have the most dinning space and dishes. I even have a guest room with a double bed all set-up.

Abu Dhabi is a place that's very difficult to characterise, and my experience here revolves around my job, my weekend travels, and my workmates who live in my building. I feel like I could make more definitive statements about Oman than I could about Abu Dhabi, because I don't feel like I've remotely scratched the surface of AD yet. I feel like I'm combing the surface with a car, but I'm not even the one behind the wheel.

What's work like?
Work has been fine, but new staff is always arriving, and change is the only constant, so things might not always be as good as they've been for me at work. I anticipate that any cool projects I've been given to manage will be re-allocated to new staff members just when they start to get cool.
How do you get exercise with the not going outside part? Are you swimming there?
We have a pool and a gym on the roof of our building, so I go to the gym about twice a week and I swim a couple times a week too. But not so much as exercise -- it's still too hot in the pool and outside to swim for exercise. One night I went swimming in the Persian Gulf at 4am, and even then the water was still a couple degrees hotter than the air -- maybe 35 degrees at 4am.

But this week it has finally cooled down, and being outdoors is actually beginning to be enjoyable. As autumn ensues, I'll be able to comfortably explore my environment from outside of the car and actually penetrate my environment enough to have some actual culture shock.

Thank God It’s – Thursday?

Some Q&A about my first week in the United Arab Emirates.

TGIF has a whole new meaning in the UAE – people are literally thanking God on Fridays as they go to the mosque for mid-day prayer after a long Sunday to Thursday workweek. Though I doubt the TGI Friday restaurant chain had that much forethought when they opened up shop in Dubai.

Isn’t Abu Dhabi where Garfield would send Nermal?
Yes, Abu Dhabi is where Garfield would send Nermal – and sometimes Odie – by airmail. It is also the capital of the United Arab Emirates, a country composed of 7 Emirates including Abu Dhabi’s famous cousin, Dubai. His Highness Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan is President of the UAE and Ruler of Abu Dhabi, and Abu Dhabi is governed by His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi.

Where is the UAE?
The UAE is located on the northeast corner of the Arabian Peninsula and is bordered by Saudi Arabia, Oman, and the Persian Gulf. Other neighbouring countries on the Arabian Peninsula include Yemen, along the Persian Gulf are Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Iraq, and just across the Gulf is Iran.

How far is Dubai?
I went to Dubai this weekend, and it took about an hour to drive there. Though the UAE is one country, each Emirate enjoys a great deal of autonomy. While Dubai has invested heavily in tourism and has deregulated real estate such that foreigners can own property in the Emirate, Abu Dhabi is more government and industry focused, where only Emiratis can own land. Dubai is a collision of new meets old, east meets west, where the “locals” are filthy rich and are the last people you find on the streets. Scattered “downtowns” of new developments compete along the highway with few pedestrian and road connections between them where social life is concentrated in the towers, while the fantastic older city is centred along the creek, with a great number of ferry and pedestrian connections between the various souks and other centres of migrant worker street-life. We arrived at mid-day on a Friday – prime prayer time – and it was thrilling to see the streets of Dubai at their most social hour.

Do you have to wear a headscarf?
The UAE is a very liberal country, and I have felt even less threatened here than I did in Turkey and Morocco – also very liberal Islamic countries. The UAE is composed of 80% foreign nationals, and women’s style of dress reflects this – women dress in anything from a head-to-toe black Burqa, to very tight clothing with a headscarf, to knee-length skirts and a tank top, and Indian women where saris. Emirati men all seem to wear their traditional white Arabian draped clothing with a white head piece.

Where do you live?
I’m staying at a hotel until I sufficiently furnish and move in to an apartment that I’ll be sharing with an American woman in a downtown district. The other three planners all live in the same building about 20 minutes away from my future home. The hood I’m moving into is very Pakistani, and everyone is super friendly. As Aaron says, in the absence of a communal language, the currency here is sweetness.

What’s work like?
The working week is Sunday through Thursday, with Friday and Saturday being our weekends. Our office is a new branch of the government that is still being defined, named, and housed. There are three bosses in our office [two Emirati, and one Australian], four planners [2 Canadians, an American, and an Aussie], and about a dozen managerial, administrative and support staff members, including local, Lebanese, and Bangladeshi nationals, with about as many women as men. We also have a team of consultants from Boston working in our office for the next year, three of whom are permanently based in our office in AD and are staying at the same hotel is me. Lunch is the major meal of the day in the UAE, and we eat lunch communally in the afternoons together, usually Lebanese food. If my name wasn’t difficult enough, I share an office with an Australian planner of Greek origin.

What’s daily life like for you?
Everything feels familiar and normal for me here, but in reality, it’s far too soon for me to accurately describe daily life here. I have described the city as a paved Morocco, while others have described it as Texas meets Tehran. There is no alcohol in the UAE, except at hotels [that said, we still managed to find a 2-for-1 margarita happy hour this weekend at a Tex Mex restaurant on the ground floor of a hotel in Dubai]. It’s very very hot, generally 40-50 degrees Celsius with 40-80% humidity. Before our epic walking tour around Dubai yesterday, I hadn’t spent more than 15 minutes outside in the heat at a time, and my colleagues with whom I was travelling with seemed to concur. I estimate that yesterday was the most consecutive hours I’d ever spent in sweltering heat in my lifetime – in Japan, I’d duck into a convenience store for 10 minutes just before reaching the threshold of being desperately overheated. Yesterday, I surpassed that threshold pretty quickly, and spent most of the day almost numb, wondering how there could be any more liquids inside me left to sweat. But it was absolutely worth it – a Friday to thank God for.