The old Chinese DVD peddler

Last Sunday night around 8PM our time we had an experience...let's discuss. Actually, let me begin with some background information.

The first or second Sunday night that we were here, our doorbell rang (because obviously apartments need their own doorbells; knocking isn't good enough). I looked through the peephole, assuming it was one of our across-the-hall neighbors, Kate or Amanda. They are both young blonde women of average height, 25-ish years old, and thus far they were the only people who'd ever rung our doorbell. The person behind the door was a tall, wrinkly old Chinese (as I later found out) man who I later found out to be 55 years old. The first night he came by peddling his wares (bootleg DVDs) in his faux-leather duffle bag, but we had no idea who he was or if he was legit so we declined multiple times (politely) and closed the door. For some reason, ever since then, I look through the peephole before I open the door and I expect to see an old Chinese man. In a minor way it was rather traumatizing to see an old Asian man when we were expecting a young Caucasian woman.

The next day, we told some people at work about our experience and they said "Oh, that's the cheap movie guy!" Apparently he's known in our building, we just didn't yet know him.

This past Sunday night, the doorbell rang again and Sarah opened the door to the same old Asian man, his name is Tom as it turns out. This time, she invited him into the living room where he plopped down on the floor and started to take out pile after pile of bootleg DVDs. We pulled out a good 20 DVDs at 10 durhams each, and we tested a few of them in our DVD player. A few didn't look great (clearly recorded in the movie theatre) but most of them looked decent so we ended up with 18 of them.

The whole transaction only took about 15 minutes, but the man kept talking and asking us questions. Mind you, he didn't speak more than 30 words of English, but we found ways to communicate. It was complicated. He just stayed put on the floor asking us questions about our families, our jobs, how much we make, awkward stuff like that, but clearly we weren't giving him much information. Sarah tried to explain autism...clearly not so much. We figured he was harmless, and he kept saying "Wow, teachers, 24 years old!" while giving us the thumbs-up sign. I told him my parents are both teachers in America (he understood the word "teacher" but I think "elementary school principal" and "occupational therapist" would have been going a bit too far), and he kept saying "you father is good man, I not good man." Sarah joked that if he was a bad man he should leave, but clearly he didn't mean it that way. It was awkward when he told us that teachers make too much money, but maybe in Communist China they do make relatively too much money.

Finally, there wasn't much left to say and he just kept on with the "Wow, you teachers?!" so we told him we had to get on with our homework. This opened up a new round of trying to explain that we are graduate students part-time...not so successful. Sarah even went over to her computer to illustrate "time to do work" and he came over next to her and looked at her computer screen! After another five minutes we got out our textbooks and he took Sarah's and started looking through it! Somehow he started talking about China (sort of) and how big it is and all the places we should visit (because he left China but apparently we should visit there).

I don't remember how we finally succeeded, but once we were persistent enough he got up to leave and nicely shook our hands. We sat down to look at our 18 new DVDs (180 durhams total, or about $50), and then we started reading the movie descriptions on the back. I can't even begin to describe them, so here's one of my favorite examples from the back of Harold & Kumar: Escape from Guantanamo Bay (this is just an excerpt):

Though having experienced thick-and-thin, Kama is to be just as before but the field finds pleasure in it , he will challenge Harold's friendly sentiment , endurance and the mentality limit once more, ... Be needless to worry about, disregarding what has come about however , being able to not blot out the friendly sentiment between them , may let two personal relation become especially rapid and intense only.

Now I'm not saying I speak any other language well.  Spanish is the only language I consider myself a speaker of, and I probably sound like this when I speak Spanish.  My only issue is that whoever used Photoshop or some other such program to create the bootleg DVD case could have just searched for a movie blurb in proper English...I don't get it.

The three or four movies we've watched so far have been perfect quality, though as I write this we're watching Step Brothers and it was clearly filmed in a movie theatre.  At least the person with the camera had it on some sort of tripod though!

That's all for now, more experiences to come soon.

Jump the Curb

Last night we had our scariest near-death-in-a-cab experience yet in Abu Dhabi. Sarah, Amanda, Kate and I hopped in a cab in front of the Sheraton after our afternoon of tanning (i.e. burning) by the pool and fajitas at Sombrero (the hotel’s pseudo-Mexican restaurant with Filipino waitresses in the heart of Abu Dhabi). The cab drivers typically know how to approach Al Falah Plaza even if they don’t know the last few turns to our place, but this guy had NO idea where we were going. Within the first two minutes he proclaimed, “Sorry, it’s my first night on the job.” Not a good start. He immediately took a wrong turn, which led us down more wrong turns and one way streets, some of which he took going the wrong direction, then we somehow made it back to the Sheraton. Oh, have I mentioned that he seemed to aim the car tires for every possible curb and bump he could find? One would think, once we reached the Sheraton (going the wrong way in their one-way valet lane of course), we would hop out and try our luck at another cab/driver combo. We were in the mood for adventure though, so we continued to take our chances. We finally made it out onto the correct road after a few more curb-hopping explorations, Sarah looking out the window to tell him when to merge, and the like. He kept apologizing and seemed somewhat embarrassed, though really he should have turned the meter off to make amends. Sarah was nice; she told him it was a good learning experience for him. She’s much more empathetic than I am—I asked him if he had any other career aspirations, and I may have asked if he’d ever driven before. Hopefully I said those things in a quiet voice. I’m mean. That’s beside the point. After another curb or two and some honking horns, Sarah thought it was time to rub his flailing ego a little (maybe he would get us home with more confidence?) so she asked for his phone number for our future taxi needs…poor guy, what hope he had! Maybe we’ll call in a month or two, if he still has a license. We made it back to Al Falah in one piece, though we were all visibly holding our breath as we rounded the last turn he had to make, where there is a space between two parked cars (i.e. the middle lane of the road). No scratched doors, no missing tail lights or side view mirrors, probably just some bumps and bruises on the underside of his cab.

Now I know how driver’s ed teachers and my father must have felt, though I think I was easier on the curbs than our new friend Jerome.

NECC-AD in the National (Emirati) News

Check it out, autism is discussed and our CEO/founder is quoted!

Cabs and Classes and Kanduras, Oh My!

It's about time I post again seeing as how I've been living in Abu Dhabi for two weeks as of last night! Everything continues to be great here and I feel as if I've been here much longer than two weeks. I'm finally getting a good sense of the streets around here and I feel very much at home.  So far my experience here has felt like a combination of freshman year of college, studying abroad, and my work life back in Boston.

First things first: 

My Skype screenname is jmsmsweet and my AIM/iChat screenname is danceorinoco.  I'm usually online around 10:30pm EST (6:30am my time) as well as 8am EST (4pm my time).

In this post I'm providing links to as much as possible related to things I mention.  I've used some Wikipedia articles because I believe they give some good basic information, but they aren't always perfectly accurate.  Also, I've used the magazine website TimeOut Dubai and Abu Dhabi for info on restaurants and other cultural/tourist attractions.

Some surprising/interesting things:
-Many streets don't have names, and even if they do you typically go by landmarks (such as hotels, big restaurants, or malls) rather than street numbers. For example, my friends live on Hamdan Street and instead of giving a street number when we hop in a cab, we say "Take us to the Hamdan KFC please!"
-The middle lane of any street that's not one of the huge main streets is fair game for parking. I should take pictures of that to better illustrate my point.
-The cabs are extremely cheap, probably because gas practically spurts out of the water fountains here. To get to the Sheraton (where we have club memberships) it costs about 6Dhs (less than $2). The downside is that anytime you get in a car/cab/van/bus here, you are putting your life in the hands of the driver and every other driver on the road, who rarely signals, will not stop for pedestrians, decelerates from 60 to 0 in mere seconds at a red light, and would probably play a mean game of "Chicken." Our cab driver yesterday kept sticking something long and pointy into his ear and swirling it around for awhile. So far so good though?!
-Food is also very cheap (which makes our food stipend go much farther than I expected). We went to an Indian restaurant (Arab Udupi) the past two Thursday nights with another teacher who is from India, and she knows EXACTLY what to order. As it turns out, I love Indian food! It is ridiculously cheap though--in American dollars, we each owed about $2.50 when the bill arrived.
-Ramadan has been an experience. For Muslims, it's a month of fasting (no eating, drinking, smoking, etc.) during daylight hours, and it is also a month of purification for the soul (or at least that's my interpretation--they're not supposed to have feelings of jealousy, anger, greed, etc. and they are required to give 2.5% of their yearly holdings to those less fortunate). Most places are closed during the day but everything stays open really late at night (the Marina Mall, for example, is open until 2am).  It's frustrating that I can't get my morning caramel macchiato at Starbucks even though we get picked up right in front of it, but it's saving me a lot of money!
-Surprisingly, I've enjoyed getting up at 6am for work every day. My roommate Sarah and I have a nice little routine going. She gets up at 5:30 to shower and she puts the coffee on, then I get up and shower, then we both eat breakfast and talk to friends and family on Skype before we get picked up for work at 7:15.

-Most everyone here is very nice and hospitable!  One of the security guards in our building is particularly friendly, and the ladies who work at Boots (the local/British pharmacy, which has fantastic bath and body products as well) are kind and helpful.  

-I thought I would feel guilty and out of place for not speaking Arabic, but EVERYONE speaks English here.  People in Abu Dhabi come from so many different countries and English seems to be the one common language, so it makes sense that they assume everyone speaks English, plus most people who work in stores and some restaurants aren't from here either and likely don't speak Arabic themselves.

Work (NECC-Abu Dhabi):
-I'm working in the older of the two new classrooms, but by "older" I mean our age range is 4 to 9, and the younger classroom is 2 and 3 year olds. I've never worked with such young students!
-It's HARD WORK to set up a classroom and prepare materials from scratch! We've had to buy everything, including English, Arabic, and bilingual books, toys, and games, plus office supplies, arts and crafts supplies, decorations, rugs, label makers, laminators, EVERYTHING! 

-We have a class list, but we apparently won't know if the kids are really coming until the day they show up, so we can't put names on anything yet.  We learned a little about each student and wrote down our preferences for case students, and I was psyched about my student but now she (definitely) isn't coming.  It's a bit of a challenge to not know what/who to prepare for!  
-The initial hard word will absolutely pay off...I'm so excited for all of our new students to arrive and to get started on their programs! The kids in the first two classrooms all seem to have come such a long way in a short time and I can't wait to help effect that kind of change in my new classroom.

The Mosque:
-We visited the Sheikh Zayed Mosque on Thursday and it was amazing! It is the third largest mosque in the world, it just opened for tours a few months ago, and it is the only mosque in the U.A.E. that non-Muslims are allowed to visit.
-Much of it was designed by the late Sheikh Zayed, including the location and many of the decorative features of the mosque. Not only did he unite the U.A.E. and lead as the country's first president, he was also a bit of a designer/architect!
-All of the women in my group had to wear abayas (our bodies and heads covered but not faces). I actually felt quite comfortable in it, but I couldn't for the life of me keep my hair covered! The local teachers in our group came with us also and they helped to explain many things, and the local women helped us wrap and rewrap the scarves on our heads.
-The tour guide was fantastic; he explained many things we'd observed but not understood and he was great at answering our questions. He helped us understand the background of the styles of men's and women's dress, and of course much of it comes from desert culture and not just Islam. Of course, he made everything sound all well and good in terms of the way women are expected to dress here and he did not address other things I've read about the lack of decision-making women are allowed, but he at least gave me a better understanding of the ideal purpose of women's and men's dressing styles.
-The mosque was absolutely breathtaking! It is all white marble with beautiful marble columns inlaid with New Zealand mother of pearl and other stones. The wall that faces Mecca has the 99 names of Allah (such as The Forgiving, The Merciful, etc.) and each name is inlaid in gold. The main room can hold up to 7,000 worshippers inside, plus there's a large women's prayer room and the outdoor area can accommodate another 30,000 people.
-The mosque has the biggest continuous carpet in the world inside, which weighs 47 tons. It was made in Iran in one piece but no airplane could carry it, so they split it into four pieces to be shipped here and re-assembled.
-There are seven beautiful Swarovski crystal and 24k gold plated chandeliers, the biggest of which has also broken world records.
-See Facebook for pictures (of you're not already a member, create a username and search for me).

Thursday night:

-Thursday night is our Friday night here, and I must say, we had a fantastic Thursday night this past week.  Now that I've been introduced to this delicious Indian restaurant, I'm pretty much constantly craving it.  We went there for dinner, then we went to Tips and Toes at the Marina Mall for pedicures, then we saw Get Smart at the movie theater.

-The pedis were great!  The atmosphere was much better than the Wal-Mart nail place I've been to a few times in the U.S. and the service was much more thorough, yet it wasn't any more expensive.  We've all been wearing flip flops every possible moment outside of work, so our feet are a mess and this place came highly recommended.  It was an excellent experience that I laughed my way through (I'm very ticklish) and now my toenails are a beautiful shade of red fit for ruby slippers!

-I had to keep reminding myself that we were in another country while watching the movie at the theater.  There were subtitles in Arabic, yet I hardly noticed them.  The only thing that struck me was Anne Hathaway's cleavage and short outfits, which I wouldn't have given a second glance to until I moved here where you see no short dresses and zero cleavage!

Dubai:
-Sarah, Amanda, Jeni and I went to Dubai for a whirlwind trip last night. The bus there was only 20Dhs (or about $6). We didn't know where to get off, because it kept stopping at random isolated spots on the road, and the bus passed the mall we wanted to go to but it didn't stop near there. The bus also passed the sail-shaped hotel (Burj Al Arab), one of the major symbols of Dubai, and it looks so neat when it's illuminated at night. We took the bus all the way to the bus station, then walked around for 45 minutes trying to get our bearings/catch a cab. Fortunately none of us was injured/maimed while sprinting across the major highways we encountered.
-Once we caught a cab, it was half an hour back to the Mall of the Emirates, but it was all worth it. I'm not a big mall rat, but it was amazing! It is referred to as the world's first shopping and leisure resort.  We entered the mall through the five-star Kempinski Hotel. Just beyond the hotel we suddenly came upon snow...we found Ski Dubai! There's one main "mountain" for skiing and snowboarding, plus a snow park for the faint of heart. Included in the price is a snowsuit so everyone was in the same outfit, but it was entertaining to see a few of the men with their kanduras sticking out from underneath and some women wearing abayas tucked into their ski jackets.
-We ate dinner at a delicious Japanese restaurant (Chop Chop) and our table was right next to a window looking out on the "slopes." Were we in the Swiss Alps? The Rockies? Nope, Dubai.
-We spent so much time gawking at the snow and enjoying our dinner that there wasn't much time for shopping, but we made it to H&M, Border's, and a few other places before hitting up Cinnabon for dessert.  I loved going to a bookstore and they had some classics for 9Dhs, so I bought Pride and Prejudice (a personal favorite) and Little Women (which I never finished as a kid) as well as Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.  Sarah found a world map that didn't have Israel blacked out, so she bought it and I feel that it was a major success to find it!  

-Besides the great waiters at the restaurant, Dubai didn't seem like a particularly friendly place--they rushed us out of stores 15 minutes before they were supposed to close, and no one even pretended to answer our questions when we were trying to locate ourselves.
-We took a cab home which only cost 220Dhs for a 90 mile trip! Split between four people, it was more than reasonable, and the cab driver was really funny and friendly (not in a sketchy way).

-I can't wait to go back to Dubai to visit, sight-see, shop, and ski or snowboard, but I'm glad we don't live there.  It's a sprawling city that isn't nearly as easy to get around (though they are in the process of building a metro system), and it seems much less friendly than Abu Dhabi. I guess I know where home is!

MABA Classes:
-I started MABA (M.S. in Applied Behavior Analysis) this past week. It's going to be a LOT of work, I can tell already! I'll be able to take it much more seriously than the classes I was taking back in Boston though (originally I was in a program through Simmons College for an M.S. in Severe Special Needs and it was kind of silly). I'm taking Behavior Assessment and Research Methods for starters, but there are some requirements that I'll need to complete outside of class as well.

-For each class we have chapters and articles to read, study guides to complete, and a quiz to prepare for, plus there are projects and exams.  Yikes?!  I'm not sure if I should be scared yet.
-Hopefully MABA doesn't take over my life!

That's it for now!  Please ask questions or for clarification; I'm not a great writer but I want to give some insight into my life and experiences here in Abu Dhabi!!!

We've arrived!

I've been living in Abu Dhabi for approximately 21 hours now, and I'm completely shocked...it feels like I've barely left home!

Last night we stepped off the plane and the first restaurant we saw was Starbucks.  On the drive to our apartment I saw KFC, Chili's, Dunkin' Donuts, and Pizza Hut, and on our block there are McDonald's, Starbucks, and Baskin Robbins.  All dangerous places to live near.  After Sarah J and I settled into our apartment we met up with the other teachers at a British tavern at the Sheraton, where we drank Coronas and ate pizza.  

We went to the Marina Mall today and I was pretty sure I was in the Natick Collection (definitely a few steps up from Sangertown Square).  The Gap was on one side of us, Aldo was on the other, and we stopped at Starbucks which was in between the two, though when I went to the pick-up spot I was asked to present my receipt (as if someone might walk by and attempt to steal one's coffee).  On the other hand, when we had a shopping cart full of our bags from Ikea and we went to Carrefour, we were asked to leave our cart outside the store where a store employee was somewhat nearby to keep an eye out.  Next to our cart was a TV that someone had left to be "watched" as well.  Carrefour is basically a Wal-Mart superstore, except I didn't have to feel guilty for shopping there since I am unsure of their employment practices.  As promised, they truly had most of the typical brands of toiletries I use in the U.S.

I've heard at least seven or eight languages spoken so far, and I'm trying to pick up the Arabic numbers based on license plates and durhams (the currency, which is of course 10 times more interesting than American dollars).  I wish I spoke Arabic, because I hate being presumptuous and assuming that everyone speaks English, but so far everyone I've encountered does speak English.  I suppose it's a bit different from when I was living in Spain specifically to learn the language, to the extent that I didn't want to encounter English-speakers.

Tomorrow we'll see the school for the first time and begin preparing our classrooms, but our students don't start until September 15 so we have plenty of time.  Our classrooms and the supplies will all be brand new, as will the students!  I'm very excited to begin from scratch.  I know it'll be tough, but I like creating my own systems.

So far I haven't found a real chat program that works, only the Facebook chat application.  I'll keep working on it; I can't afford a ridiculous cell phone bill!

More soon.  Bring on the  hummus and shisha, I'm ready for a cultural experience!