Sand in my Shoes

Week 3 of work is complete.  I was actually really busy and it looks like next week will be the same which is a good thing.  I like to be involved and feel like I am actually helping accomplish something.

 

I just keep thinking of more random things about my life over here and figure I'll share them as I go:

• One of my new daily routines is cleaning the sand out of my heels when I get home from work.  I guess this should not be a big surprise as I am living in the desert, but it definitely was not something I had thought about.  Luckily, it isn't as much of an issue inside the city, it's mainly just a problem at my job because the little bit of paving that we do have (parking lot) gets covered by the surrounding sand that blows everywhere.

• So far, there are two foods at the grocery store that I like here much better than at home.  First is the yogurt, it reminds me of what my french mom used to buy me when I studied abroad in Paris--it's so rich and creamy, it's really more like a dessert.  The second is juice, well maybe I don't like it more here, but I have discovered this wonderful strawberry juice which is actually pretty cheap.  I don't remember ever seeing strawberry puree juice in the grocery stores back home.  It's almost like having a strawberry smoothie (but with no prep work).



yummmm

• Clothes dryers are a bit of an american thing, but they do have them here. They just combine the washer and the dryer into one machine. I don't know why, but this just scared me a little bit, I was afraid that it was going to ruin my clothes, so I put off doing my laundry for a week or so. Eventually I decided that I needed to just give it a try...but I could not turn it on! It was so frustrating because there are like 5 buttons and 3 different knobs, none of which have words so you don't really know what they mean. So I called down to the front desk and asked to have someone come up and show me how to use it...they never came.
  It's a good thing they didn't come though because I would have been so embarrased.  The next day when I went into the kitchen (that's where everyone keeps their washer/dryer here) I noticed this suspicious little switch up on the wall...yes that's right, I had to flip the switch in order to be able to turn it on. It's just something that I would never even think about having to do in the US, but here there are switches for pretty much anything electrical...each outlet has one, the stove has one, and now I know that the washer/dryer has one.
  Even still, it took me about 10 minutes to get it going, and I still wasn't even sure if it was automatically going to dry my clothes or what it was going to do. I made the mistake of starting it late at night, so I fell asleep and then kept waking up to its weird noises thinking that it was destroying my clothes. Anyways, come morning my stuff was still damp, but I looked up the owner's manual online and figured out how to dry...I don't know why they make it so complicated.

So that's the switch up on the wall
And, yes that's my "Arabic" Tide :)

 

These are the buttons/knobs--I usually think of myself as
someone who can figure these sorts of things out, not so this time

• I spent yesterday evening and today looking for a place to live, and hopefully I will do the same all day tomorrow.  I really need to make a decision sooner than later, so I am hopefully I will be ready to decide tomorrow.  We'll see.  This is the one thing that I really haven't liked about living here--looking for housing is miserable.  It's expensive, the real estate agents are incredibly unreliable (show up late, don't show up at all, change their minds when they can meet you, make you walk a block to meet them because they don't want to leave the air conditioned grocery store that they're in, the list goes on), I don't have a car to drive around and see these places, etc.  Anyways, hopefully this will be my last complaint about looking for housing.

• I really enjoy big thunderstorms and rain.  Maybe not quite as much as I did when I was younger, but I do still like a good rainstorm.  Obviously, I won't be seeing much of that over here, but on our ride into work on Friday morning there was a report of accidents around Al Raha Beach (half-way between the city and where I work) because there had been rain that morning and the roads were slick.  I didn't really believe it, but then when I was out later in the morning it RAINED!  Really, truly.  However, rain here isn't really as much of a good thing because it just means that it is going to be that much more humid and sticky.  Oh well.

My First Emirati Rain