I love not spending money on a cell phone

If you know anyone who needs to find a good way to trim the bills, tell them to get a pre-paid cellphone. I know that in the States we think of pre-paid cellphones as ghetto, trashy accessories for drug dealers and people with bad credit, or sometimes really cute little hoppers in West Baltimore, but I'm telling you, it's an awesome concept. Here in the UAE, I'd estimate that at least 90% of cell phones use pre-paid minutes, and even the post-paid plans are charged on a per-minute basis (no "monthly packages"). It's so cheap!!! I spend probably, on average, about $6 a month on cell phone minutes. Granted, I don't do a whole lot of text messaging or yammering on for hours, which could maybe bump me up to $10, $20, or $30. Still, what's a cellphone plan in the US these days? $60 a month? Ridiculous. I'll never pay that much again. I don't think people sell SIM-cards though, just pre-paid phones. And can you get a cool phone, or only a janky one? If you can only get a janky one, then there's a gap in the market here and someone with some entrepreneurial spirit needs to start selling sweet high end phones and seperate SIM cards with cool numbers and cheap minutes. It's a no-lose formula for riches and fame.

In other news, my mom's going home today (awww) and I bought tickets for the Dubai Tennis Championships. Unfortunately I was late this year (no sitting up on the internet waiting for the opening bell to snag tix) so it was all sold out except for the early rounds, day 1 and day 2, which also happen to be workdays. Hopefully we'll be able to go down in the evening and catch some action with the players we like.

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!

Mom in Town

My mom's in town, so I've been driving her all over timbuktu and back seeing the sights and shopping the shops. She is terrified of the traffic and amused by the fact that we pay someone $0.80 a day to wash our car at night while it's parked in the lot.

Today we did a little bargain-shopping at the Blue Souk in Sharjah which didn't really go so well in terms of the bargains, no thanks to madame 'oh that's a fair price I don't think we need to negotiate anymore!'. I'm quite sure we paid about twice as much as necessary for everything, but hey, she feels she got a good deal, so I guess that's all that counts.

In more bureacratic news, I went over to the Taawun mall registration center today in order to "pre-register" for my Emirates ID card. In case I haven't already mentioned it, the Emirates ID card is a new ID requirement for all nationals and residents. Everybody has to sign up, pay an absurd amount of money (luckily I'm reimbursed by work), get a retinal scan and a thorough fingerprinting, and a photo, and then get issued this handy little ID card which I'm not exactly sure what will be used for. Before you go for your biometrics, you have to enter all your personal data into some database of theirs and get a barcode sheet printed. It used to be you could do this online for free, but now due to the completely inadequate bandwidth of this agency, you have to download a program to create the barcode sheet. To use this program, you also have to download some version of Adobe and some version of Java, and even after you install all this software, the program doesn't actually run. So after much consternation wrassling with the program this week, I finally bit the bullet and went to the center in person to pre-register on site, which actually costs 40 dirhams. What a racket. Anyway, I pre-registered and got my barcode sheet, which I have to bring with me tomorrow when I actually get the physical manifestation of my soul fully mapped and registered with the UAE government.

Anyway, while I was there, there was this little paper that looked like a warning written in arabic taped to the back of the girl's computer. The headline read: "Fii Daqiiqa Wahida", which as far as I can tell, means "In the First Flour". I asked the girl what the hell that meant, and whether "Daqiiq" had a second meaning that I don't know about, and she just smiled and nodded and said, "Daqiiq!" Which I figure meant, "I have no idea what the hell you're saying!"

We'll see if things go smoothly tomorrow with the completion of this card-getting process. There have been so many horror stories... people who have gone 3 times and waited hours each time only to be turned away for one reason or another... I've got my fingers crossed.

Sabado Gigante

It's Saturday today, and Stanley is being required to attend at work, it being the beginning of a new semester over there, so I'm home alone with some time on my hands.

Our neighborhood is really shaping up over here - they just opened a Subway around the block (delivery starts in a week) and it looks like they're putting in a park across the road. The roads are all paved now and most of the buildings still under construction are nearing completion. On our block we've got a host of restaurants, a hospital, a foreign exchange, a mosque, a car rental agency, a Starbuck's, a couple of small grocery stores, a ladies saloon (haven't tried), a gents' saloon (adequate), a dry cleaner, and a travel agency, and now we're about to have a park up the road cattycorner. The main things we're missing are two: A larger grocery store, and a bar. Other than that, it's pretty good.

I also just learned that Stanley can make use of the ladies only fitness center on Saturdays, which means I've now got a squash buddy. Mmmm, squash!

It's one more week until I have two weeks off and my mom comes to visit. Can't wait!

A couple of 3-day weekends later...

The news this week is that there was no news - no New Year's party, no ringing it in all night long or wild stories involving jail and philipino boys in skirts. HH Sheikh Mohammed cancelled all New Year's festivities in Dubai to mark, with a solemn note, the on-going tragedy in Gaza and to demonstrate our solidarity with our suffering brethren. Then today the ruler of Umm al Quwain (another emirate) died in London, leaving us with yet another reason to be somber. Despite the somberness and indeed the attention we are paying to what a cruel f*d up world it is out there, we managed to find some time this week to enjoy life's simple pleasures.

For starters, while one of us was slaving away at work for 3 days this week, another one of us was enjoying his leisurely Christmas holiday break at the beach. Said someone went to Hamriya beach (about 30 minutes drive north of town) three days in a row, and relaxed in the gulf and read books on the sand and made the other one of us a bit jealous. On that note though, I am getting quite attached to our little car, which, although a crappy piece of tin, successfully takes us everywhere without protest.

Then we went down to the Creek park in Dubai after sundown last night to see the sights. It's a pretty sweet park with a nice corniche so one can walk along the water and enjoy the view while small children of various nationalities trace figure eights across one's walking path on those nifty little roller-shoes.

The reason we went to the creek in the first place though, was to absolve ourselves (ok MYself) of the humiliation that comes with pulling in a pathetic 92 when your bowling partner is enjoying one of the best bowling nights of his life with a 192. The Dubai International Bowling Center is not far from our house, luckily, so I'll be back. Just you wait. 

And life goes on.