After nearly three years living in the United Arab Emirates, I have finally bitten the bullet and left my cushy government job in Abu Dhabi to search for new opportunities in Amsterdam.
People have often asked me why I rarely wrote about my experiences in the UAE, compared to my endless emails exploring the Japanese psyche, my elaborate photo documentation from multiple stays in Europe, and my unquenchable excitment about Ghanaian people.
There are several reasons / excuses:
1. Professional learning curve -- unlike my other world adventures, my life in Abu Dhabi revolved around my exciting, but intense job. Most of my mental and emotional energy was poured into absorbing as much as I could of such an unparalleled professional opportunity.
2. Busy travel schedule -- living in the Middle east, there are dozens and dozens of [inexpensive] countries within a 3 hour flight radius, and several low-cost airlines to get me there. I took every opportunity I could to travel, on average leaving the country once a month. I was very fortunate to go to Yemen, Ethiopia, Oman, India X 3, Lebanon X 2, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Jordan, Nepal, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Botswana, South Africa, and many other places, sometimes just as long weekends from Abu Dhabi. [I also had 40 work days of paid vacation per year, plus about 3 weeks of public holidays.]
3. General Hecticness -- there's exciting-professional-hecticness, there's fun-travel-hecticness, and then there's painful incessant administrative hurdles that one has to jump through in the UAE which make life unmanageably hectic. I have never been able to express to people how unnecessarily traumatic small administrative tasks are to accomplish in the UAE. And for no good reason except human carelessness. Just as one example, to have internet connected at my house it took 11 applications, about 25 visits to the internet company's offices (each visit takes about 25 mins stuck in traffic, 15 mins trying to park, 1 hour waiting only to find that you were given a waiting token for the wrong division, and I will spare you the explanation of trying to communicate with the staff members when you're trying to determine *which division you are meant to speak to, etc., etc.), four visits to my house by the technicians to [not] install my internet, and then keeping the technician hostage until the internet company and/or the technician can give me a good reason why it's impossible to install internet. Imagine the headache of basic tasks such as opening bank accounts, paying phone bills, finding an apartment, buying a car, car repairs, minor car accident administration, minor car accident repairs, car servicing, communicating with a taxi driver, home repairs, cancelling visas, etc., etc.
4. No camera -- everyone is taking fabulous, highly professional-looking photos these days with state-of-the-art cameras, and then emailing them or facebooking them electronically to be instantly shared with the rest of the world. It was during my trip to Peru in 2006 that I realised I was starting to live through my camera, feeling constant pressure to capture a moment, capture a site from it's most interesting angle, and document my life experiences on film. These days I am rarely the one behind the camera, and seem to have gotten much more lethargic with documenting my experiences in general.
5. Ex-pats -- I had never had so many white anglo friends in my life. Emirati culture is very private, and Abu Dhabi's population is 20% UAE Nationals, and 80% ex-pats. I worked for the government and was very fortunate to have a great deal of exposure to Emirati culture, and to have Emirati friends. But there are social rules that must be followed which limited the amount of time and conditions under which I could enjoy the company of my Emirati friends. The mix of ex-pats is highly stratified based on the combination between your job and your nationality: labourers live on labour camps and speak no English with no right to travel or see their families for the duration of their stay; service workers live in crowded apartments, sometimes with rotating sleeping shifts, speak English and are very sociable, but their role is to serve and they have no right to travel or bring their families; and, skilled workers and entrepreneurs, who have exponentially higher wages than service workers, have the right to bring over their families, have the vacation days, money, and right to travel, but are still divided in salary by the position they hold as well as the country they are from, with Western skilled workers having the highest wages within each pay band. Therefore you can save everyone a lot of embarassment by just simply spending time with the people who have relatively the same social boundaries, pay, and rights that you have, although it gives you much less material to write home about.
6. Good friends -- having been employee number 12 at an organization that now has over 180 employees, many of whom are young, energetic, explorative, art-and-culture-loving, food-loving, extroverts, and despite Abu Dhabi being considered a "boring" place, we made the most of it and managed to have endless fun. Abu Dhabi was also the longest I'd ever spent in one place except "home", and I certainly have a new appreciatation for longer stays.
7. Long distance -- whatever energy that was leftover was spent maintaining a long distance relationship, which is now a no-distance relationship in Amsterdam. I tended not to write because the first question was often "When are you two finally going to live together?"
So I have no excuses in Amsterdam!
