Settling in

No doubt the life here is what dreams are made of. However during the week I am cooped up in the office and have no sense of what is going on outside. It gets cooler (about 20) in the evening and dark fairly quickly (about 4.30pm) so the week is like any other week anywhere else in the world (during the summer months).

The weekends are special. It’s like being on holiday, especially the weeks where I bring no work home.
Last weekend I decided to keep myself busy as it was a time I didn’t want to be alone (3 years since Javaid passed away). I had a house warming gathering last Friday so spent the day cooking. Had a few friends over from work, about 8 of us and 2 kids. On Saturday we watched the football. The week has been a bit difficult emotionally, spent some nights in tears and especially the 17th but that’s not a bad thing.

When a Polish colleague came to my party last week he came in full Arab gear and looked really good. It was a good effort on his part. Afterwards we played crazy golf as I have this at my compound. He forgot he was wearing this long cloak and decided to jump across the stream that runs between the different sections of the golf. Before we could stop him he took the leap and found his legs wouldn’t open as much as he would like to get him across (because of the cloak). He is a big guy so I had visions of him not making it across and landing with a big splash in the stream. Luckily the front part of his foot caught the edge and I don’t know how but he managed to get across.

The football match between Brazil and England was pretty uneventful with Brazil winning 1-0. The most exciting part was the entertainment outside the stadium and watching the opening and closing ceremonies. The most fun part of the evening was our attempts at Mexican waves. The wave would start at one end of the stadium and go around until it got to one section of the Stadium where there was a lot of white (ie a lot of local arabs sitting) and they wouldn’t get up or raise their hands. The section of the Stadium was the VIP section and they obviously weren’t going to make fools of the themselves. So you would follow your eye across these parts of the Stadium and miraculously the wave would continue from the next part of the Stadium. It was fascinating watching it happen again and again with a pause in between. Part of the opening festivities included a Beatles look alike band and a troop of Queens guards making a mockery of the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace.

This Thursday our boss took us out to lunch at the Sheraton, a nice restaurant by the sea. This was to celebrate our department winning the best implementation award of the year last month. In the evening Slawek had a house warming party so the same crew landed at his place and he cooked for us, that was nice. This weekend I have lots of work so I found a nice spot on the beach at the Four Seasons hotel and sat at a Poolside restaurant having tea and cakes and working on my laptop.

When I used to travel to the middle east men in white cloaks and women in black seemed as though they were from another planet. I used to compare them to aliens as in Men in Black, because they didn’t interact with ex pats and holiday makers. Now that I work with them they are just like normal people. A work collegue had a head teachers meeting last week. All staff in girls’ schools are women and all staff in boys schools are men, so he was at a meeting with a group of girls’ school principals and they were all in black veils, and he couldn’t recognise who was who. One of them (when no one was looking), quickly lifted her veil and said ‘its me’ and put it down again. He found it so amusing. You hear some funny stories about how the girls make contact with the boys here. I am told that the girls put their telephone number as part of their Bluetooth name and have Bluetooth on. This explains why during meetings they are continuously looking at their mobile phones to see who else has their Bluetooth on and if they have received any texts.

Next week is the speed boat racing championships here and they are having qualifying rounds this weekend. So a lot of activity on the cornice with helicopters hovering around. The weather is nice during the day, still around 27, with a cool breeze blowing, just perfect.