Emirates ID - success?

I think everything went smoothly yesterday. The man and I mosied on down to the ID center, turned in our forms, got fingerprinted 6 ways, and paid 640 dirhams, and left with the promise that our cards would be arriving in the mail. Note to aspiring cardholders: when you live in the country on a visa which explicitly prohibits working, the correct answer to the question, "are you working?" is "no." This small snafu doesn't seem to have caused too much trouble, but it was a little touch-and-go there for a minute.

The whole thing was really pretty quick and easy - it took about an hour, our name somehow didn't end up on the appointment list but they saw us anyway. I feared it could have been a 6-hour odyssey, like so many horror stories I have heard, but I think they're getting the kinks ironed out of this system now.

While at the center, we had Al Jazeera on the TV in the waiting room and got to see some live coverage of the Obama inauguration. Although the text and captions were all in arabic, I was able to make out a repeating headline: "Obama will be the leader of the American soldiers tomorrow." Out of the 500 or so words I now know in arabic, one of them is "leader" and one of them is "soldiers". Add to that list "ambassador", "socialism", "prime minister", "on strike", "tank", "printing house", and "slaughter animal for sacrifice", and I'm just about ready to become a diplomat.

We got home in time to catch the end of Obama's remarks online, and crack open a bottle of champagne. Hooray!