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.