Happy Thanksgiving!

For Thanksgiving, the man & I scouted out this bar/pub place called Harry's in the Dubai Renaissance Hotel. We drove down there in the midst of a bunch of terrifying shite going down in Mumbai, which probably explains why they swept our car for explosives before allowing us to park in the parking garage beneath the building. Just a precaution, eh?

Once inside, we had a fantastic, inexpensive turkey dinner, listened to one of the best lounge singers I've ever heard sing covers for the night's entertainment, and caught the first quarter of the Titans/Lions T-day beatdown before catching a taxi home to watch the end of the game. It was -great-.

Last night we decided to fire up our grill for the first time since Emmo left. Mmmm, steaks! Cook 'em Dan, cook 'em!

Pug of the Week

http://api.ning.com/files/tlB4pKQX5mhQg842e--k1X9Lg5L8WZ5rCzWkQSXXy4w_/pug0507.jpg

Signs you've been watching too much ANTM

You know you've been watching too much America's Next Top Model when you read this headline:
Model Predicts Halt to Africa's AIDS Epidemic
and think to yourself, "who the hell would predict something as unlikely as that? Surely no one famous? Naomi Campbell perhaps? She's nuts. I bet it's just some dumb teenager who won Miss Arkansas or something and does promotional modelling on the side. I better click this link and find out."
and then you click on the link and see...
Oh, a scientific data model.

Welcome to Oz

Things are a little funny around campus at this point, as the students are all out of class and participating in some kind of huge giant all-encompassing active-learning event which involves the buying and selling of goods and services. One student is asking me if I want to purchase a tattoo from her tattoo shop. She shows me an example on her lower abdomen: "It's playboy!" She tells me.

Another student flags me down to peruse a collection of eggs filled with dirt and seeds which, once cracked open and watered, will sprout a plant with a message ("Thank you", "miss you", "condolences", "thinking of you") in three days' time.

There are billiard tables outside, loud American hip-hop music playing, all manner of strange and unusual snacks sweets and treats for sale, and no classes and the library is closed. A fine couple of days to be completely drained of energy - which I am, after staying up very very late at my friend's house last night watching season 6 of America's Next Top Model. We're down to five contestants, and that Jade needs to GO, for real.

I spent my day today catching up on acquisitions (to the fine beats of Timbaland) and discovered I have got to spend a LOT of money before January 20. Shoppy shop!

Libraries are the same all over

Yesterday I spent my afternoon ratcheting together Ikea furniture, with the aid of our acquisitions technician, to hold up our "Eid Read" display. I have this sneaking suspicion that, no matter what position I hold, no matter where I am in the world, as long as I'm in library work, I can still be called apon at any time to assemble low-cost improvised furnishings. This is also true for pretty much everyone else in the library word. Our acquisitions tech is getting her MLS currently. "Have they taught you the proper allen wrench technique?" I asked her.

It being Saturday today, and me being at work all day at a closed campus with nothing resembling lunch facilities, I am STARVING. And you know what starving means? Bad, bad choices. I've implored Mr. Man to pick me up and drive me straight to MacDo. Mmmm.

A Typical Day at Work

I've realized that my typical day at work is full of little cultural nuances that I, at this point, take wholly for granted. Here's a little exposition for those interested. I had a student today looking for "a typical day in the life of a Sudanese child" as a topic, and I thought, usually our typical days don't seem very eventful to ourselves, only to other people far away.

This morning I got to work at around 8am, filled my water bottle from one of the free water dispensers, and sat down at the reference desk for my two hour shift. During my shift, I was asked questions such as, "Miss, can you help me scan this pile of receipts?" And, "Miss, I need information about transactional leadership for a 30-minute oral presentation." That one was fun. We went through the electronic databases, did some article searching, found a few books on leadership, ordered a few more books from other colleges, and photocopied a few pages from some of the business encyclopedias and dictionaries in the reference collection.

During the morning lulls, I flipped through the recent editions of New York Times Book Review looking for new and exciting titles to buy. I found a few, including some fantastic-looking full-color photographic volumes on the sea creatures of the deep and Islamic gardens.

After that, I left the reference desk and read some e-mail before having a bi-weekly meeting with the boss. We talked about collection development, philosophy, information literacy initiatives, future actions, and my failure to properly clean up the magazine area last time I closed at night.

Then it was straight on to the bake sale. I was trying to get to the cafeteria for lunch, but I couldn't get through the mob of bake-sale tables and students gang-rushing me to buy their baked goods. In the end, I lunched on weenie wraps and fruit juice, all for the good cause of supporting student activities.

After lunch I did a bit of cruising the stacks for biographies that need to be in the biographies area and not in the general stacks, weeded some relevant collection areas, and started gathering materials together for our "Eid Read" promotion - a big display of beautiful books that people need to borrow to read during the Eid holiday (Dec 2-14.) Mmmm.... holiday.

The bulk of my afternoon was spent in an English class observing teaching to better improve my own teaching. A joyous way to spend time, it consists of chatting with the students and asking the English teacher useful things like, "How many new vocabulary words can a person reasonably absorb in a week?" She says 20 in a week is what the studies say. This is of utmost importance for my study of Arabic. Everytime I exceed 20 new words in a week, I can feel like a genius. The whole thing is very nice for teaching practice though, if you're a learn-by-example person like me.

The end of the day is following up on e-mail, consulting with colleagues on pressing issues like who will drive us to the conference next week and what kinds of books we must buy and when we will meet to develop a presentation to the management team, and working on my own piece for cross-system projects like our big reading promotion program next year. It's sort of in the strategic panning/development stage at this point, lots of gathering input and compiling documents and formulating goals, et cetera.

The walk home from work is more and more pleasant these days with the temperature nice and breezy. Our streets are all paved now in our neighborhood so I didn't even have to get dusty, and there's plenty of juice in the fridge for after-work libations to go with language study. I've got about 2 hours or more to myself after work before Dan-O gets home, so I'm spending that learning Arabic and Spanish and writing home and reading the news. My next exposition will be on the presence or absence of Christmas paraphernalia in malls.

Quantum of Solace

This weekend Miss Lecia and I walked over to our lovely nearby mall, Sahara Center, to enjoy the recently released, slightly edited-for-Muslim-audiences version of Quantum of Solace.

Before the film, I was standing in line for concessions listening to an 9 year old British girl give orders to the cashier. There was something in her tone of voice that spoke of a life privilege and pampering, of riding lessons and servants waiting at attention to clean up spilled chocolate milk and comb tangled hair. I try not to be a class-warrior, especially given my embarrassingly high standard of living compared to the worldwide middle-class, but something about snotty rich children always bothers me.

I was in the process of paying for my nachos and Diet Pepsi when she returned, peaked over the counter, shoved her large popcorn forward, and interrupted the Pilipino man counting out my change. “This is NOT fresh.” The man could not think of an English phrase that would convey his feelings and allow him to keep his job and so simply stared blankly. I began laughing as he looked from the girl to me. The Young Princess turned her attention my direction, wondering what was so funny about the injustice of her popcorn problem.

“You are ridiculous!” I offered by way of explanation for my chuckling.
“I am not!” She replied, and looked back to the popcorn vendor to see if confirmation would come from his direction. No help would be forthcoming. The Popcorn Vendor just chuckled along with me until The Princess huffed off with her popcorn calling for “daddy”.

I don’t know if the intense, barely restrained class conflict exemplified by this exchange will ever come to a head, but I am starting to see a few “Che” bumper stickers around town, even though the cars on which they are plastered are more expensive than one would expect for revolutionaries, so you never know… Sadly, if the revolution does come to Dubai I’ll probably be among the first against the wall, along with the rest of the Western Fat Cats, but still, snotty rich kids always make me wish the Dubai Liberation Front would hurry it up a little.

Weekend Update

Miss Emmo is now gone away, and today I came home from work to an empty house, sesame wonton triangles still lingering on the kitchen counter, conjuring the sights and smells of happier times just a few days past, now looking sad and stale and oh-so lonely. It's as though you're still here, Em - not a thing has moved; not a dish washed, not an RTNU-turned-candy-thermometor removed from its vat of used cooking oil. Like a testament to your presence, an homage to what things have been, these objects sit untouched in sacred fashion. They amplify your absence and remind us what sad, sad people we are.

In other news, I went over to my friend's house last night for a girl's night. We had white wine and cooked up some frozen pizza and sprinkled a bunch of feta on top and watched "Margot at the Wedding", which is among the most bizarrely compelling films I've ever seen, and afterwards stared at each other in stunned silence for a few minutes. Was she completely batty, we asked ourselves? Furthermore, is Nicole Kidman's face actually paralzyed? How can her eyes be so expressive when her forehead is frozen in place?

Work is work - we are working hard on several extremely major initiatives to improve the quality of the print collection and to develop (from scratch) an information literacy program. I haven't been doing much teaching lately and am focused mainly on the hard intellectual work of professionally executing large team-based projects. After a long day of brain-concentration, I am in the mood for nothing more than a chirpy kid's film and some top ramen. That's next on the agenda.

The most exciting news of all is how the bank has lost $4400 of my dollars somewhere over (or under) the Atlantic Ocean en route from UAE to USA. This is a major bummer. But, I have resolved to remain steadfastly optimistic about its eventual recovery. I tell myself there is no way to lose in this situation: either the $4400 will be found and credited to my account, or I will take deep deep pleasure and satisfaction in the slow drawn out murder of the bank manager. I could almost flip a coin over which outcome I'd prefer.

Into the desert

So admittedly, my posts have been a little sparse lately, mostly because we've been having so gosh-darn much fun around here. Keeps a girl busy. To the updates - first and foremost, I implore you to examine the following photograph, taken from our balcony. Notice anything suspicious?

Take a look at the street sign which is half-covered in the lower-right-hand corner. If you look closely enough, you'll see a couple directional arrows pointing both straight and left. Now look up the road. Do you see anywhere to go straight or turn left? Mmmhmm. That's exactly what I said. Conclusion? Our neighborhood will soon be linked to that neighborhood over there by a brand new intersection. I'll put up another picture when it's done.

In other news, we did this on Friday:

Dune-bashing!! Hooray!! Talk about FUN. I think the only thing I've done that's more fun is skydive. To get better insight than a photo can give, visit Emmo and scroll down the page to the video and press play. Then come back here.

Next up, camel riding at sunset. Mmmm, camels.



After that, some henna in the desert safari camp.


Beautiful! While the henna dries, it's time to drink a bunch of fruit beers and dance our arses off with a scary-looking belly dancer. Wooo!

A Different World

Today I woke up early to fantastic news, briefly debated calling in sick to celebrate, decided to “do the right thing”, drank a few sips of champagne with Sis and Miss Leesha (who I trust continued to celebrate in my absence), and headed off to work.

When I arrived everyone was in a great mood.  Friends and strangers from all over the world were offering me their warm, heartfelt congratulations.  I headed over to the Starbucks (which serves as a sort of student union) to catch the acceptance speech on TV.   

Let me be honest with you…Can I be honest here?  I got a little choked up.  I mean, I think we can all agree there wasn’t anything particularly spectacular about speech President Elect Barack Hussein Obama gave to his worldwide audience.  For me, it was just something about the culmination of the campaign, all those happy people in Chicago and the experience of standing in a crowd of Arab, Asian, European and American students and faculty in the Starbucks cheering for a man on the far side of the world.   All of those students, who I expect might harbor some somewhat justifiable anger at the "arrogant imperialist West", were cheering for our new president.  I came to the stunning realization today, in the midst of sureal chants of "Yes We Can!" which were starting up from random groups of Arab students, that people all over the world look to America for hope.  Sometimes we make it difficult, but that never stops the world's citizens from wanting us to be that "city set upon a hill" that everyone talks about.  Today, for a change, I felt pretty good about that. 

I’m heading home now to celebrate.