When “Opinions” become “Facts”

In any school, you may be placed on a “team” with people you don’t like or have anything in common with. This is not a problem because you are not forced to share an office/dining hall with them. You have your required meetings and then spend the rest of your prep or lunch with your friends. Since the seven LTs are the only Native English speakers in the school, though the Arabic teachers have been great, we don’t “hang out” with them. We are STUCK with each other. Familiarity breeds contempt and things came to a head recently. 

We are pretty much from different worlds and have different outlooks, experiences, and opinions on EVERYTHING. This would not be a problem if we all had non-confrontational personalities. Nope. Only one is like that. Then you have me, the freak! As the screaming match was going on 2 weeks ago, I loudly (yes I can talk over anything) commented that I thought I was coming down with something because I had agreed with the one PITA 3 times that week. That defused her and she started laughing but the other….slam, stomp, and gone. We don’t have to agree, we just have to agree to disagree. GTFU. Your opinion is your opinion. Nobody else has to agree with you. The Australian teacher and I, who disagree the most, decided it might be fun to add some Xanax to the water bottle the following week. 

This is how they celebrate here!!

Cut to this week, where celebrations for National Day overshadow our ability to teach. This year is an important milestone as it is the 40^th year for the United Arab Emirates.  Seriously, think of the 1976 Bi-Centennial but on steroids!! I know Lou is reading this…remember the fireplugs around our neighborhood being painted red, white, and blue? That’s NOTHING! People have painted their cars red, white, black, and green. I drive down the highway doing a 120kmh slalom around the decorations that have blown off other vehicles.  For our “big” National Day celebration today at school, I was the only English teacher wearing UAE colors….the ginormous red, white, black, and green hair clip went over well, though it was a little difficult to get my head it the Yaris this morning!! Thanks to Iza Marcrum for loaning it to me.  It seems to have scored me some Wasta!!

National Day Bow Clip

Here we go with more opinions and facts….we were given a calendar for the school year BUT were also  told that things change at a moment’s notice. We expected this to happen for the Eid Holiday when it was expected that a 5 day weekend would turn into a 9 day weekend. It was even alluded to in the local newspapers. NOT! So when the word started getting around that there would be a change in the calendar and we would be given this Thursday off, nobody believed it!! People STILL don’t believe it, though it has been declared a National Holiday. There were teachers who took the mistaken 9 day weekend for Eid , I am wondering if those same teachers will show up for work on Thursday. Good Luck with that.  I will be sitting on the beach. 

There is school tomorrow but we have been told that none of the girls will show up. The same has been said for next week when we are “supposed” to be reviewing for their exams. I figure with the way things have gone, all of my girls will show up! Let’s hope not….

A Study in Contrasts and Contradictions

First off you have to understand that 73% of the population of Abu Dhabi is ex pats (foreigners like me). Going to the beach it is very obvious. The westerners wear their normal beach attire and I even saw one thong bikini on the beach. I have seen WAY TOO MANY men wearing Hoagie Crushers. UGH! The Arabic women are covered. The Emirati women wear the black abaya and black sheila while others (Syrian, Jordanian, Pakistani) wear jeans and colored sheilas. Under the abaya, the women are often wearing skinny jeans and some of the most ridiculously high FM heels I have ever seen. While in Dubai Mall one Saturday night, I saw the teenage girls in the bathroom putting on more make up than I have ever seen on an American teenager. This is the plastic surgery capital of the world!! There are dermatology and laser hair removal centers on almost every block.  Make sure it’s perfect and then cover it up….

Arabic but not Emirati

The biggest contrasts are in costs. In NJ I got my acrylic nails filled for $13 and a pedicure for $23. Here, an acrylic fill costs $49 so I let them grow out, but that same pedicure costs $18. A 60 minute full body massage costs $38 versus the $60 it would cost in NJ. Housing costs here are out of control. Our housing was handled differently this year than in previous years and therefore we are not exactly aware of the rental expense but similar units in the area, which is the actual island of Abu Dhabi City, rent out for $60-100k per year while Emiratis receive free housing. Contact lens solution costs $17 a bottle but getting all of my work clothes dry cleaned each week only costs $11 with free pickup and delivery. The fact that the delivery guy isn’t hard on the eyes is just an added bonus. People are paying upwards of $30 for frozen chicken BUT you can get a whole cooked rotisserie chicken for only $2.  Delivery of enough food to fill 3 adults Thursday night cost less than $9. The best: a Whooper Value Meal Large only costs $8 delivered to your door!!  

Birth Control Pills ($10) and Antibiotics ($51 for Zithromax or free with a prescription) can be obtained without a prescription but heaven forbid you need anti-depressants or Xanax. Some teachers went to get prescriptions filled for Prozac, Paxil, etc. and found that insurance doesn’t cover them and the bill: $164 for a month’s worth!!  

At the malls, of which there are 7 in the city that I KNOW of, The Ed Hardy Store is displaying a Love Kills Slowly bikini in the window in right next to a store selling abayas and sheilas! You can pretty much buy a hookah anywhere but my alarm clock cost $33 and it isn’t even a clock radio!!I had to search high and low for a coffee maker with a timer that cost me $19 but it only makes 2 cups of coffee. If I could stand instant coffee, I could get an electric kettle that takes 30 seconds to boil water for $2. 

Midget coffee maker

You are “supposed” to have a special ID to purchase liquor that proves you are not Muslim. This is true at many liquor stores but the ones where you see Emiratis walking in and out…nope they don’t check! We haven’t even managed to figure out where to get this ID. We just know that Spinney’s checks ID!! Needless to say, I haven’t been there. The ID rule is waved for hotel bars. There are Ladies Nights at every hotel bar in the city and the drinks are FREE!! There are at least 3 every night!! Went to a “Wine Tasting Event” at the Crowne Plaza Abu Dhabi last week; for $24 we got unlimited wine, cheese, and antipasto. Well, it also cost $5 each way for the cab!! They have this every Monday night. I know what’s for dinner on Monday nights. 

Wine Tasting at the Crowne plaza: Kim, Iza, Mary, and Moi.

Our Eid Break ended on Tuesday so it was back to school for Wednesday and Thursday. We had 40 students show up on Wednesday and they were sent back on the buses within an hour. There were 5 who showed up Thursday and they didn’t even get off the buses. Can you imagine doing that in the U.S.? Districts have been sued over early dismissals for snow!! We were fed…both days. Our Arabic teachers are wonderful though that is not the case at all schools. Wednesday was a traditional Arabic breakfast and Thursday was a traditional lunch: goat. Yuk. I managed to pile enough other stuff on my plate that my dissing of the goat was missed.

Midnight Runners, Parties, and all that stuff!!

Yes, I do get to the beach every Saturday!! Check out the blue water of the Arabian Sea (don't call it the Persian Gulf here) behind me!!

When we sign our contracts, they are for 2 years. We get our salary, our housing, and a $5400 furniture allowance. The furniture allowance has to be paid back at a prorated amount if you don’t stay for the full 2 years. For this reason, many teachers who are unhappy chose to do the “Midnight Run” where they wait until payday (or text out sick while elsewhere), transfer the money to the states, lock up, and fly out. We have had several of these, one of whom I actually did know personally.  There are others who do things the right way and give notice and pay back the furniture allowance. Females who are placed in boy’s elementary schools and don’t have experience in anything but upper income schools are the least likely to last here. It’s not that the kids are from low income families; quite the opposite is true. The problem is the behavior and the lack of consequences. My high school girls can be a major pain in the butt at times and there is no discipline there. I have been told to threaten with a nonexistent loss of points and to make them write “I will not be late for class” or whatever the infraction is 100 times IN CLASS. So I am supposed to make the girl miss more instructional time. NOT. So basically I do nothing. Lucky for me, that year I spent in Trenton prepared me for this. Unfortunately it did not prepare me for the other teachers. 

The 7 Native-English speaking teachers (called LTs here) in my school share an office. We have our own desks, computers, printers, and internet. This is more than many of the schools have given their LTs so I am happy. BUT we have only this space to use for our preps, our 30 minute break, and our 20 minute break. We do not have our own classrooms as I explained in a previous post. This would be rough even if we all got along….which we don’t. We have one teacher who has been at the school for a year who is originally from Buffalo, one who taught in Al Gharbia for 2 years and has lived in 32 different countries, one from Australia where she taught in the Bush, one from the UK, one from Texas, one from Arizona, and me the Jersey Girl. I had a rough time dealing with the one from Australia for a while but she and I have come to a truce. Two of the others are absolute PITAs: “There is too much noise in here, you have to stop talking”, “This is the way this should be done”, “I don’t want to be friends with any of you, I don’t like you”, “I am not going to insult your intelligence by explaining what I mean”. OMG can we get a man in here so we could stop the back biting? 

On the home front: Last Friday I was rudely awakened at 3:37am by a man ringing my doorbell wanting to see Erica. When I told him there was no Erica, that he had the wrong apartment, and to go away his response was “What are you going to do” Call security?”  At that point another man appeared and attempted to get the door open. My cell phone and whistle were already in my hands so I called the police, 999 here by the way. As soon as my visitors realized I was on the phone with the police, they got out of Dodge. The police were great and even transferred me to an officer who spoke fluent English. In the end, I went right back to sleep after dealing with the police. In the afternoon, after I got up (!), I contacted the contact people for the complex, the Housing Coordinators at ADEC, and posted on the FB site for the 4 “Teacher Towers” here. I was more concerned that a single female who had not been married to a midnight-shift-working-member-of law-enforcement might actually have opened the door while half asleep. Yeah, I do have to thank Karl for all of the security measure he pounded into my head during the years I was home alone all night with the kids. I later was told that it was all a mistake and that several teachers had gotten drunk at a bar and the 2 males had just been trying to check on a drunken female LT. Seriously, was this supposed to make us all feel better? We have drunken morons living among us.

Let’s get to the “What happens when trailer trash skanks move to a foreign country” part of the blog. We have had problems with cigarettes being thrown out of windows onto other people’s balconies, people just sticking their trash into the trash room and not taking the extra 30 seconds to put it in the Rubbish Hopper”, and now evening-hour-liquor-fuel ed-pool-parties. Seriously…in a Muslim country where you can get arrested for public drinking. Several friends and I had dinner out on Friday night and decided to take a dip in the pool after dinner. We all went to our respective apartments to get changed and head up. Since I am on the 19^th floor and the roof is technically the 21^st floor, I was there first. I heard the music from the elevator but was not prepared to walk into empty beer, vodka, and wine bottles all over! There were 4 LTs there, who very quickly got dressed when they realized we had an 11 year old right behind us. There was a broken beer bottle in the corner that was not near anything it could have fallen off, so it had to have been thrown there. The bucket and ladle from the sauna were floating in the pool and had obviously been used to throw water all over since there was water dripping from the window and puddles all over. It reminded me of Animal House. Seriously….minus the togas!

In previous years, the LTs had been scattered all over the city wherever they could find apartments available. This year they pretty much took over a complex of 4 newly built towers in downtown Abu Dhabi City. This unfortunately gives some the feeling that “Big Brother” is not watching and that they are free to break all rules of decency. Yes I have turned into The Church Lady!

The “Cooker” or “My Blond MomentS”

Over here they are not called “ranges”, they are called “cookers”. Not to be confused with having an actual chef in your house! My apartment complex was just finished, and I mean JUST. There are still things that aren’t done….like the hole in my bedroom ceiling, the exhaust fans that don’t work, and the glue/insulation/mold that is pouring out of my walls!! Oops, off track! So, the building has gas connections in the units BUT no gas. It has not been brought in from the street by the city. Since I prefer cooking with gas but baking with electric, I thought ahead and ordered a cooker with an electric oven, 3 gas burners, and one electric burner. Unfortunately this was not a floor model and the salesman wrote up the wrong model…and I didn’t check! My bad! So the cooker gets delivered and the stove is all gas burners. After trying to get the cooker switched out, I gave up trying to argue with Carrefour and bit the bullet and bought a two burner electric hot plate. 

Is it insulation? Is it glue? Is it some weird Middle Eastern Mold?

Then I hear about this wonderful thing called a gas cylinder. Voila! I pay one of the hubbies to get the tank and the connections and to give me gas! I came home that day so excited to cook on my stove. But, I decided I wanted something that involved the oven. I turn on the oven and put my chicken in and go about my business. 20 minutes later I open the oven to discover the chicken is still frozen. What’s up with this? I figure the hubby must have disconnected my electric to the oven without realizing that the oven is electric. So I message him as I take my chicken to the neighbor’s to bake it. 

Isn't this attractive? But...I have GAS!!

When I come back, he is at my door laughing his ass off. His assumption was that I had forgotten to turn on the switch for the cooker. Yes look at the picture….you turn the power on and off. It’s like that for the washer/dryer and the hot water heaters too. Nope, I’m not that STUPID!! He turns the thermostat up and OMG I have an oven that works. Seriously, the last time I used it, it was set at the right temperature. I never turn it back to zero. But…he did after he tested it. So, back I go to get my chicken out of Melissa’s oven. He threatened to post my stupidity on Facebook so I beat him to it. 

Yes you have to turn on the electric before you can turn it on!!

Then, last Saturday night I tried to boil water for pasta. The gas comes out, I can hear it and smell it but the burner won’t light. So I message the hubby again. I decide to make something in the oven instead. When I turn it on to preheat it, NOTHING!! Dang! I never flipped the switch! OK message the hubby back and tell him it’s all good and not to even ask!!!

I think I should stick with take out!!

The Difference in Schools (NO I am not in NJ anymore)

The first thing to note is that males and females do not attend the same schools. KG schools (3-5 year olds) are separate entities except in only a few cases. 1-4 Grades are grouped together as Cycle 1; 5-9 grades are grouped together as Cycle 2 and have not been included in the New School Model so the Native English speaking teachers are not there yet. 10-12 grades are grouped together as Cycle 3. That is where I am, teaching 10^th and 11^th graders. 11^th and 12^th grades are grouped by either Art or Science. Think of it as regular or honors tracks.

School starts for me each morning at 7:45 with Assembly, where the girls line up outside and say their pledge, sing their national anthem, and read passages from the Quran. The first period teacher lines up with them. Here is the BIG difference, the students do not change classes, the teachers do. The classes are 55 minute periods and there is one 30 minute break and one 20 minute break. There is a prayer room where the girls may go and there are also prayer rugs available in each classroom. I have only had one occasion where a girl has asked to pray and that was during independent work and not the actual lesson. There is only one bell for the change of periods so I have to zoom between classes that are not close to each other. Often the girls “take a break” while teachers are en route and are very hard to get back in. They are even harder to get back in after break. The bell rings and none of the girls move. It is not a matter of defiance but of culture. Things do not operate on our Westernized timetable here. Nobody monitors the halls and there are no substitute teachers. Sometimes a teacher will be asked to cover during an open period, but very often the girls are left on their own.  We had been operating without one English teacher since school started, she finally started last Tuesday. 

There is no real schedule in the sense that I am used to. I have 3 different sections of students that I teach for a total of 8 meeting a week. Do the math…..I have a different schedule every day and there is only one class that I see in an actual block of 2 class periods and that is only once a week. I have to look at my schedule to see where I am going each period. But then on Sunday, my brain thinks it’s Monday and on Thursday my brain thinks it’s Friday. It’s a lot to get used to. The main learning is done in what they call ECART but I know it as Project Based Learning. The actual graded packet has been provided to us by our advisor and then we supplement as needed with reading materials. Some teachers in other schools are flying completely blind. Our advisor is great and we have tons of resources while other schools do not have dictionaries. There are 6 Native English speaking teachers. Five of us are new this year including the new-newbie, one is in her second year at the school, and another is one her third year in the UAE but her first year at this school.  We each have our own computer, but no internet yet. InshAllah, it was to have been taken care of weeks ago. The Arabic teachers, some of whom are Emirati, have been very welcoming to us. That is not the case at all of the schools, as Arabic speaking English teachers are being forced out. 

Two weeks ago when I left in the morning it was a little foggy out here in the city, but where I exited the highway into Al Nahda (aka East Camel Funk), the fog was terrible. School started very close to the end of second period since the only girls in the school on time were those with “drivers”. The buses do not run until the fog lifts and visibility is improved. I am told that the fog will get very bad early in the year and that I will not be able to see off my own balcony. Apparently I am not to rush or call in, it is accepted that we may very well be late on those mornings. In the US, we were expected to know there was going to be fog….and leave accordingly!!