When in Dubai...

... do as the Emirati's do. On Saturday night, our friends (and new neighbors!) Dijana and Mahmoud had a housewarming party at their new apartment. We've all been joking about having a 'locals' party for the last couple months, so they themed their party "Dubai Dress" and made everyone wear traditional Emirati/Muslim dress. Technically, you are not supposed to dress in traditional dress unless you are a Muslim and/or Emirati, but we figured for the purposes of a sociological experiment we could do it behind closed doors for one night.

And even going to buy our abaya (for women) and dishdasha (for men) was an experience in and of itself. First of all, Jared was acting the paranoid/uncomfortable roll and refused to even come into the aisle that contained the abayas and dishdashas (two separate aisles, the Carrefour carries quite the selection). So, there's me, sifting through the abayas trying to find not only the cheapest, but also one that would fit me, because it seems they have an overabundance of XXL but no smalls. So I finally found a small that wasn't too hideous (red stripes down the front versus truly ugly mustard colored ones) and was fairly reasonably priced (AED 64 or ~$20). Then I headed to the men's section to find a dishdasha for Jared. I wanted his feedback since he was the one who was going to wear it, but he was of course no where to be found, so I sifted through to find a small men's (the medium was enormous!) and then the appropriate head gear. AED 222 later and we were the proud owners of traditional dress.

Elizabeth (her interpretation of the theme was Yemani Warrior, and she acted the part), Me, Dijana

We didn't think it would be a good idea to wear our costumes to the party (plus we had no idea how to put on the head pieces), so carried them in a bag and changed once we got there. It was very weird to see all our friends wearing traditional dress, but also kind of fun (Halloween costume our first year back in the US!). Dijana and Mah carried out the Middle Eastern theme in the food served as well, and had hummus, tabbouleh, grape leave wraps, kofka, and flat bread. All delicious. Our friend Elizabeth organized a Quiz Night trivia game to play so we did that for awhile (I was teamed up with my friend Melissa and we tied for second after a big comeback in the last round "Movies"). Then we ended the night by watching "Bruno" (hilarious for the second time). A great party, and I'm pretty excited that I now own an abaya (never know when it could come in handy... I do live in the Middle East).

Group Photo: Clare, Me, Jared, Elizabeth, Dijana, Mahmoud.

The Dishdashas.

The abayas.

Australia Day Ball

On Thursday night we had the opportunity to attend the Australia Day Ball at the Grand Hyatt Hotel. Australia Day is basically the 4th of July for Australia, celebrating the founding of Australia as a country (although my Australian friends couldn't really give me any further information on the holiday besides that). The event was "Underbelly" themed (the Aussie Mobster show about the Melbourne/Sydney drug-lords from 1975 to 1985) and so people were encouraged to dress in costume or else just cocktail attire. Lots of people did dress as police officers and wear ridiculous 70's suits, however, I unfortunately do not own any 70's attire (damnit why did I let my mom throw away her high school wardrobe!), so just wore a black dress.

Oddly enough, we actually have several Australian friends in Dubai, so it wasn't completely random to attend this event (although we can rarely turn down all you can drink and eat events). Our friend Clare arranged a table for 12 and three of our Australian friends (and their significant others) attended, and we also met some other lovely Australians who were friends of friends.

The night began with a champagne cocktail hour with passed hor d'oeuvres and then a sit down dinner with crab cakes to start (probably my all time favorite starter!) and then beef cheek (which tasted like short-ribs) with mashed potatoes, carrots, and asparagus and Australian pavlova for dessert (meringue with fruit - not as good as Clare made for our Thanksgiving feast though). For such a large event (probably 150-200 people attended) the food was actually quite good, and the wine and beer were freely flowing. Throughout the dinner they had little Underbelly skits going on involving pretending to arrest various people and pretend court sessions. Kind of silly at such a high end event, but fun nonetheless.

After dinner an Australian band began and the dance floor filled up. The majority of the songs though were Australian and nothing that Jared and I had ever heard before, so we weren't too inclined to dance... until "I come from a land down under" came on and I was able to drag Jared to the dancefloor for one song.

Jared and Mahmoud, [reluctantly] getting into the gangster theme.

Me & Dijana.

The Girls.

We decided that we had had quite enough to drink by about 12:30 so left on the early side. We are off to a much better start to having more 'tame' weekends already. God Bless Australia!

A different world

I have known this for some time, but the longer I am here the more obvious it becomes to me that the Western Expats living in Dubai live and exist in a completely different world than I have ever witnessed or been a part of before. Let me explain. Every single western person I know over here (with the exception of one friend who shares my mentality) has some form of domestic help working for them on at least a weekly basis. And when I say "domestic help" I mean that they either have a maid/cleaning woman, cook, gardener, driver, or some combination of those. Even our friends who are our age (late 20's early 30's single and/or in a couple but not married professionals) ALL have maids. Some that come more than once a week, and we even have one friend whose cleaning lady comes 3-4 times a week and even prepares meals for her. And this is just single young people who live alone in small apartments.

The kids I tutor on the other hand, take the definition of "domestic help" to a whole new level. EVERY SINGLE child I work with has a nanny. No exceptions. All live-in. Despite the fact that probably 60% of the kids mothers also do not work (stay-at-home moms). And just having a nanny is actually really rare. The majority also have a driver (who drives them to school, after-school activities, tutoring, etc.). There are some kids I work with, with whom I have never met or seen their parents, but have a very friendly relationship with their nanny and/or driver (or both) who I chat with when I see weekly. The ones who live in villas usually have gardeners as well (because who else would maintain the private pool and plants??!). Many probably have cooks as well, but that isn't a topic that ordinarily comes up at tutoring. Although, at least one has mentioned their cook when I asked what their favorite food was. A lot of my kids don't live in 'neighborhoods' either, but live in 'compounds' as I was told when I asked one student to write a description of her neighborhood.

Jen and Jared on the other hand, have chosen to explicitly reject all forms of domestic help. Mostly out of principle (no one ever came to clean my apartment in Boston, why should they here? My apartment here is actually much easier to clean, none of our possessions are here). But also out of a lack of need. I work from 1pm-8pm. I have 6 hours every morning at home. Granted I work out, run errands, etc, but my schedule in no way prohibits me from cleaning my own apartment. Also, for anyone who knows me even a little bit, I have extreme OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) tendencies, and probably it would just make me upset when some Philippino woman did a job of cleaning half as good as I could myself. In fact, if the pay for domestic help was better (maids and nannies, etc, get paid dirt, hence why everyone has one and can afford one) I would consider hiring myself out. I think I am a pretty damn good cleaner (I had fantastic cleaning teachers in both my Grandmothers, who may or may not share my OCD tendencies).

Our rejection of domestic help also carries over to public places as well. In mall food courts here, people are not expected to bus their own trays. Oh no, you leave your tray of regrettable McDonald's scraps on the table, and within 30 seconds a man in a jumpsuit is rushing over to clear your tray and wipe the table. I think that system is ridiculous. It just buys into the attitude so many western expats get over here of self-importance and entitlement. Well, why not, after years of having someone cater to you hand and foot, of course you're going to think your entitled and pretty special. So, in rebellion of this, Jared and I make a point of bussing out own tray at food courts (because it's such a big inconvenience) and are able to identify other Americans when we see people do the same and feel an odd sense of solidarity. Despite being ostracized by our friends for our attitudes about domestic help, we'll stand firm. It truly is a different world here.

Weekend

Friday Brunch at the MORE Cafe at the Dubai Mall. Glorious outdoor seating directly at the foot of Burj Khalifa.

This weekend I was reminded of the Counting Crows song "Round Here." In Dubai people seem to stay up much much later on weekends than we ever did when we lived in Boston. "Round here we stay up very very very very late." Both nights this weekend we were out until 4am. I don't recall a night ever staying up that late in Boston (let alone out) besides New Years Eve 2004 when we searched for a taxi for 3 hours before basically walking back to Jared's 1st apartment in Boston on Colliston Drive in Brighton from Government Center. But here, it's pretty much a weekly occurrence that we're out really late at least one night of each weekend (usually not both as we were this weekend), but definitely a change in our lifestyle.

On Thursday night, we grabbed quick Indian take-out before going to our friends Melissa and Dom's "for a drink or two"... Well, the drink of choice for the evening was Redbull + vodka, so I should have known we were in for a long night. We hadn't seen them since they arrived back from a 2 week trip to Australia for New Years so we caught up and looked at all of their pictures from the trip (which included a 5 day camping trip into the middle of rural Australia, pretty awesome actually) and watched a couple episodes of an Australian mobster tv show (think The Soprano's Aussie-style) called "Underbelly." When we got bored of that we broke out the Wii Beatles and Rock Band Karaoke and had sing-offs for another couple hours... Needless to say, hyped up on Redbull, we didn't get home until 4am.

Then on Friday, we decided to recover by eating McDonald's fries as an appetizer to going out to brunch (McDonald's fries have become our crutch here. Have a bad week? McDonald's fries. Feeling hungover? McDonald's fries. I think it has something to do with the fact that very few things and specifically food are really consistent here and pretty much nothing tastes as good as it does at home, with the one exception of McDonald's fries...). After our brunch under the Burj we decided that the only viable way to spend the rest of our afternoon was to sit in the dark and, therefore, went to the movies. I made Jared see "It's Complicated," and had to bribe him with not only popcorn but the future promise to see some terrible and traumatizing horror movie with him.

After our movie we vegged before getting ready to go out again. Our friend Dijana was having a birthday celebration ala bar and club hopping. So we went back to Mel and Dom's for a couple drinks before (bring on the Red Bull!) and then went to meet Di and our other friends at the Cavalli Club (swanky designer bar, I was majorly under-dressed, as usual here). We had one drink at Cavalli before heading to the Atlantis Hotel on the Palm Jumeirah to go to the Sanctuary Dance Club. The dj (named Scumfrog [!]) was playing techno so Jared was in heaven. We stayed until the Club closed at 3am before taxiing it home. By this point I was completely exhausted! We will not be having a duo 4am weekend again for a long time.

If we didn't need to sleep in and veg on Friday, we definitely did on Saturday! We slept in fairly late and then got up and went to McDonald's for a second time that weekend and engaged in a self-loathing lunch. To make ourselves feel marginally better after we decided to explore and try to find a new beach we had heard about down by the Burj Al Arab, called "Russian Beach."

After driving around for a little bit we finally found it, and spectacular views of the Burj Al Arab (dubbed the "World's Only 7 Star Hotel"... another place we'll be taking our visitors in March!). We went for a long walk on the beach...

Jared looking super-psyched that I wanted to take his picture...

It was so much fun to find a new beach since we've pretty much been just going to the same beach since we got here, and great to get outside and do something healthy after our bender of a weekend. We will definitely have to take visitors to this beach, truly unbelievable views.

One of our two roast chickens... For the record, Jared objects to this picture because it doesn't look nearly as pretty as they did with both birds and veggies in the roasting pan.

After our walk we headed to the Carrefour (French Super Walmart basically) to stock up on groceries for the week. One of our New Years resolutions (among the typical, get healthier, lose the holiday pounds, etc) is to cook one new food or recipe every week. We cook at home a lot (or rather, Jared cooks for me at home a lot), but at times we tend to get into ruts of just cooking the same things over and over again (namely, our favorite things: grillables and comfort food). So, last year we started this New Years Resolution and had a lot of fun trying new things, plus it's a great excuse to actually open and use the 30 some odd cook books we have. We decided to do try it again this year (even though all but 4 of our cookbooks are back home in storage).. And so far we're off to a good start!

My first week back to Dubai, Jared surprised me by making a delicious homemade bread pudding for dessert (the ultimate winter delicacy). This week we decided to try a recipe for Roasted Chicken with Vegetables out of my "Real Simple: Meals Made Easy" cookbook. We do roasts all the time, but it's always fun to try new suggestions. This one was delicious with lemon and fresh herbs (we used rosemary, thyme, and parsley) used to season the bird. We also decided to roast not one, but two chickens, since all the chickens here are so puny (not like our hearty American chickens that have been pumped full of hormones) and so if we wanted enough food for leftovers we decided to do two. A lovely and ironic end to our weekend. My new New Years resolution is to have more tame weekends...

Cowboy

I received an email from one of the my student's parents yesterday that I had to share.

The email began quite typically, as you would expect:

Dear Jen,

[paraphrasing] Would you please work on this particular area of Math with my child this week, blah blah blah.

Then:

"Also, just to make you laugh, [my husband] asked [the student] yesterday what does Jen look like, and she answers: she's pretty, blond hair, thin like mama (made me happy although I'm not thin), and talks like a cowboy! That's how we figured you must be American."

All the best,

[student's mother]

So, yet again my American accent does me in. Being told I "talk like a cowboy" was a new one for me. Never before in my life have I felt so discriminated against and/or at least singled out for being American. Especially in such an international place as Dubai, I certainly don't think my appearance gives me away as American, Western yes, but American no. As soon as I open my mouth though I am immediately labeled. For better or worse, now I know what it feels like to be a minority.

Skype

Today I experienced the wonder that is Skype for the first time. It is banned in Dubai (shhh), so I had to download it when I was home over the holidays. I had a video call with my mom and I am absolutely hooked! What fun to be able to see my mom while having a conversation with her (for 45 minutes!) for free! Can't wait to have tea with my mom again in a couple days, despite the fact that we're probably 10,000 miles away from each other...

What I Missed...

The Laser Light Show portion...

So, due to my extended (but lovely to have extra time with family and friends) time in Boston, I missed the biggest event (arguably) of 2010 in Dubai... The Grand Opening of the World's Tallest Building, the Burj Dubai!! I have been counting down to this event since we moved here and had been excited to be able to watch from our garden while enjoying a glass of wine, but alas, snow and reckless plow drivers intervened...

Despite my absence, though, Jared was here to catch the show and took some amazing photos of the fireworks displays that accompanied the opening on January 4, 2010. During the ceremony it was announced that the formal name of the tower would be changed to the Burj Khalifa in honor of the ruler of Abu Dhabi (term of the economic bailout, perhaps??). Weird since we've been calling it the Burj Dubai for years (since watching the very early stages of construction when Jared was in Dubai from '07-'08) and all the signs around the area still call it the "Burj Dubai." We haven't been to the top yet (we're waiting for our visitors coming in March!) but I am sure the view is amazing and can't wait to see it. In the meantime, enjoy some of Jared's fantastic photography of the opening below...

Yup, those are fireworks coming off the building...

Yes, they literally tied fireworks to the actual structure of the building itself...

Yet somehow, it didn't burn down...

Also, here is a Youtube video of the opening as well... Soooo disappointed I missed this... You can see the various stages of the opening in the video, all set to Arabic music in true Dubai fashion.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRxxv6AZ_xg

Back 'Home' in Dubai.

So, I have finally arrived back in Dubai after a very lovely (albeit very hectic and at times stressful) holidays. We actually had a white Christmas this year and I wanted to share some photos... The weather was invigorating and wonderful, but after three weeks of it I was definitely ready to head back to a warmer climate... Maybe I can do this Dubai thing... at least for awhile... or maybe just for winters...

A Christmas Tree -- Dubai Style. This is the 4 Floor Christmas Tree that adorned the Star Atrium at the Dubai Mall... It wasn't completed though by the time we left for Christmas on December 17th and was taken down by the time I got back to Dubai on January 8th. Jared said the finished product glowed blue. Not surprising.

A Christmas Tree -- New England Style. This is the Faneuil Hall Christmas Tree which was quite lovely and much more my style than tacky blue effervescence.

The Winter Wonderland that was Upstate New York, where we were from the 25th to the 29th of December. So pretty, until New Years Day, when I was ready for the holidays to be over and, therefore, ready for temperate weather again.

The one very nice thing about getting an extra week at home was getting to spend lots of quality time with my little cousins and aunt and uncle in Wellesley, MA. My cousins are 8, 6, and 4 and I absolutely adore them. The middle one celebrated her 6th birthday while I was home and I was able to take her on a special excursion to the New England Aquarium in Boston. I also got to bake and play a lot with the kids (in the snow) and to make this gingerbread house. I was able able to catch up with friends I didn't get a chance to see before the holidays and spend more time with others. Great to have the extra time, even if it wasn't for a great reason.

Finally, this is Taffee, Jared's Dad's dog. She is a Coton and this picture was just too cute to pass up posting.. Glad to be back, but grateful to have had the opportunity to spend the holidays with those I care about.

Still in Boston...

Ok... So, I have not abandoned my blog for 2010, it's just that I am still in Boston... A rental car accident and rejected insurance claim later, and I'm still here for an extra week (while Jared has been back to Dubai for 4 days)... I stayed behind to handle the bureaucracy associated with said accident and insurance claim and in doing so am sorely disappointed to have missed the opening of the World's Tallest Building (Burj Dubai, now renamed the Burj Khalifa)... The holidays were lovely, but 2010 has come in like a lion (in terms of weather and bureaucracy... my hometown of Fulton, NY has made national news the last two days for snowfall, and I am engaging in daily 30 minutes conversations with American Express Insurance Reps...)... Happy Happy 2010! Never thought I'd say this, but I actually cannot WAIT to get back to Dubai!