Counting down the hours

As I am packing right now I am thinking about the few things I will actually miss about this here place I affectionately call, World's Smallest Shithole, or the Latin term, Ruwais.

First and most importantly/obviously, I am going to miss Tang is it's abundance here.... Not really, but I did used to be obsessed with the tasty orange powder drink. I was pretty convinced that if I drank enough I would grow up to be an astronaut. Instead I just grew.

Anyway, the real list of things I am going to miss:

1. My kiddies. In no specific, yet completely specific order: tied for first- Ghina, Hessa, Nitish, and Zayed Zeail. Coming in second: Merssal, Alreem, Zayed Al Hosani, Bryan, Eman, Tariq, Mutia, Jacob, and Weam. Third, for indefinite reasons, Masud, Sevina, Pradita, Abdul Rahman, Rahaf, Nekesha, Waad. And rounding up the end: Danis, Mugesh, and Asad. Oh and Ariha, rhymes with diarrhea. She is the last last, in fact, she goes on the list below. Is it mean that I kinda want to send 4th place to the list-of-things-I-won't-miss... Welp too late. It's done in mind.
   
2. My friends.
   
3. The smell of the Arabian nights. It actually smells like warm jasmines. It's what I hope Agrabah to smell like.
4. Being a local celebrity. If I wasn't the girl on the bike, I was the blond harlot, or the teacher that went to jail.
   
5. Being stared at because I was pretty. (Or slutty looking... whichever they thought, I was okay with the little attention that boosted the self esteem.)
6. Getting to the front of the lines because I am a helpless girl.
   
7. My vacations. I had a lot and I got to go many a places in the span of a short time. This year, I have seen the Taj, the Great Wall, and the Great Pryamids, not to mention, I live in the Middle East.
8. My bike. Although her tires weren't meant for this heat, she did me well, and deserves a loving home.
9. Same, same. Ask me later and I'll explain if you want.
10. Tang.
    

Thing I am not going to miss:

1. Choueifat. This school has a backwards thought on teaching, let alone kindergarten. I shouldn't have felt stressed if my kids were out of their seats. I should have been able to encourage it. I shouldn't have to sneak treats to them and they shouldn't have to be in school 7 hours a day with only 1 hour of art a week. This school is an idiot mess, and I feel sorry for any graduate of it. They truely missed out on a childhood.
   
2. The drama that goes with being in a ridiculously small town. Too many people up in your biznas!
3. My living situation. You don't know how lucky you are when you get assigned housing with (or near) awesome people until you get assigned housing with lame ones.
4. Being uncomfortable in anything western thing I wore. No, not my cowboy boots and chaps, I'm talking about my ankle baring skirts and my elbow showing shirts.
5. Sweating.
6. Being thought of as a helpless girl.
   
7. My 4th and 5th place kids.
   
8. Crappy internet and phone.
9. Missing my family and friends.
10. A 25 hour journey to get here/there.
11. Not being able to buy any fruit or veggies that taste good.
12. Taking on lame British/Irish slang.
13. Not speaking proper English because I can't speak proper Arabic.
14. Rudeness and racism. I am guilty of it too. It is something that inadvertently happens when you are abroad too long in a place that is enveloped with it.
    

Well it looks like I am going to not miss things more than I am going to miss them. Guess I am meant to go home. Even if I was going to miss more things, I would add some more on the no list to prove I belong at home.

See y'all in a matter of hours (or days, but really a day is 24 hours, so technically....)

Worst Weekend Ever!

This past weekend was my second to last in the UAE (THANK THE GOOD LORD TOO!). It was awful. To do it as long-story-short as possible I'll organize it with bullet points, but first you should know that Jasmine and I had tickets for 6:50 am on Friday and 7:50 pm on Saturday. Also we were planned to stay with our friend Dianne (from India) who just moved into a 13 room villa/mansion. Okay, bullet points, here we go.

• Forced to take the early bus from Ruwais to Abu Dhabi at 6:50 so less sleep. (boo hoo)
• Bus forgets to pick us up, regardless of us having a ticket. We take the crap school bus instead at 7:40. It's a Tata without working AC. It's 110, but 10 am.
  
• Text Dianne to let her know what time we are getting into AD (around 11).
• Get dropped off at the mall, but we are toting around luggage for the weekend in Abu Dhabi, so we go to drop it off at Checked Baggage.
• The dude working Checked Baggage will not accept our stuff, is rude, and screams at us saying "[we] are using him." (This is his job. Like I could understand if he worked at security or something, but no. He is employed to keep bags safe... Plus he was a total douche)
• Call Dianne, and her phone is off (noon now).
• Get lunch, fairly decent.
• Get a wax. Most painful wax ever. She was all thumbs and I'm pretty sure she burnt me.
• Continue to call Dianne with no avail. Call Dianne's housemates. They haven't seen her all day.
• Go to another mall where we can get mani/pedis. Jasmine's pedicurist, named Juvi, makes 3 of her toes bleed profusely.
• Give up on Dianne, book a relatively cheap 4 star hotel. The Novotel.
• Get a text from Dianne, a text! not a call! saying "sorry, I didn't have my phone all day." So we call her and she doesn't answer. So we call her again, and she turns off her phone.
• Leave for the Novotel. They won't let us check in because we don't have color copies of our passports, and they wont except black and white or our drivers licenses. EVEN THOUGH I have checked into a hotel in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Sharjah with my license or my photo copy. I even called the Meridian in Abu Dhabi, and he spoke to the manager and she was all "yeah, we let them check in."
• 3 hours later, after calling our housing manager, Ahmed Saab, to yell at him for taking away our passports to cancel our visas, crying with the manager, Khalid, eating dinner and drinking a bottle of wine, Khalid has confirmed with Ahmed via email, that we are in fact real people blah blah blah, so we check in. It's 11:30 now.
• Get ready to go out. Get in a taxi, tell them Rock Bottoms so we can dance and get shitty, they take us to Heroes where we can't dance, but can get shitty. (Whatever...)
• Heroes is fine, until KHALID comes up to me and is all trying to be our friend. I cuss him out being like "F you. F the Novotel. F the fact that you couldn't bend the rules even a little. Buy us a drink and lots of them!" So he did.
• He leaves when the bar closes and we leave it at that. We get in a taxi, tell them Rock Bottoms, he takes us to Zenith. Khalid is there again!
• We go to Khalid's place, next door to the Fing Novotel, we're friends, but not for long. He gives us late check out at 6 pm.
• We go back to the Novotel, it's now 5 am, and we're tired. We go up to our room and the lights don't work, and they won't work until they get a technicality in there. They make us move rooms down the hall. NO apology, NO compensation, NO discount, NO sympathy that it is 5 am, NO free breakfast, NO nothing. So I scream at the manager that this is a 4 star hotel, a chain, and there are expectations when you check in. I also reminded him that there was not even a sorry, and if people aren't fit to work in the service industry they shouldn't, but I am sure that he just figured I was a whore and drunk. Apparently the Novotel is the prostitutes choice.
  
• Wake up to0 late to go to the Grand Mosque, which I have been wanting to go to all year. Go to the pool instead until 4. Barely get a sun burn, but get a righteous tan.
• Go to the mall for dinner.
• The bus leaves without us.
  
• Have to get a taxi home. (Not too bad)
  
• Nearly get killed on our way home. Like 2 semis and a tiny taxi. You do the math.
• In bed at midnight.

ANYWAY, I know it doesn't sound like that bad of a weekend on paper, but it was just like anything that could go bad, did. And people were abnormally rude.

Also I vowed to RUIN the Novotel, or was it DESTROY it. Either way, I am going to need some advice on how I would go about taking down a hotel. Like I want jobs lost and lives devastated. Any ideas Crimeballs?

Only 8 more days. Single digits y'all!


*** PS I did not proof read this, so forgive the grammar and/or spelling mistakes, not to mention the pure whininess of the whole entry.

A step by step pictorial of me eating a weird fruit

Okay, so I don't know what it is, but I have seen it in the market for months, and being the risk taker I am, I had to buy it and learn how to eat it.

It has tough plum colored skin with a pretty little green leaf stem. It looks like a fruit or vegetable from a Japanese game. Harvest Moon anyone?! Oh only Jeremy and Shasha. Okay cool.

Attempt 1: Bite into it.


Fail!!
Bitter as the harsh realization that it is not in fact a plum, but more so tastes of bile and cactus and migrant workers' hands.


Attempt 2: Open it up wit my finggies.
A surprise fruity garlic-shaped lychee-like meat found beyond the spiteful demon purple flesh.


Let's have a taste.


Avoiding some seeds, but enjoying the juice! Tastes similar to a good loquat. If you don't know what that is, look it up, or ask Brad. We would steal them from my neighbor down the street on Pasado when I lived in that giant green house in IV. But I digress. Actually, to digress a little more, Stephanie and I want a dress made to match the seed of a loquat. It is a beautiful bronze shiny color. I would actually be satisfied with just a nail polish made of it, but again, I digress.


Seed!
Or stones as the Brits call it. Those idiots make everything sound like we're in the Renaissance.


Success!!
Quite a delish treat!
Would I buy them again? Yup. Would I recommend them to a friend? Already did. Would I make another pictorial documenting me discovering a new exotic fruit? Only time will tell.

Alright, it's time to go home!

Today, being the clutz I am, I burnt my arm from the popcorn I was making. So my immediate reaction was to run it under cold tap water.

Oh but wait. There wasn't any.

That's right ladies and gents, the weather has officially made all of the pipes in the whole of the country warm, and therefore there is no such thing as cold, or even luke warm tap water... ever.

Give me another reason ya know.

Oh and to top it all off, I am on my THIRD throat infection since Xmas, and thus sound like a pubescent boy taking another Z Pack.

Life is such an adventure!

On a brighter note, I come home in 2 weeks! That's 14 days, 10 hours, and 45 mins if we wanna be exact. Which we do.


See you so soon!

Nicknames:

As you know I like nicknames. Most of the time, these truncated forms come to me with ease.

Names I can take credit for:
Shasha for Shasha
CP for Balls
Reikman for Amie
Graceford for Grace
Jimmy for James (joint effort with the help of Reikman)
Jerimias/Germ for Jeremy
Rubinslut for Hayley (it came to me in the shower)
Skanky Henke for Brandon

Names I use but cannot take credit for:
Luscious for Laura (thank you Boner and Total Douche Bag)
Matt Ralph Naked Bush Breaker/Mr. Chocolate
Evi for Evan (that was all Mortimer)
Mortimer/Mortimus for Shannon

Anyway, I have been doing the same for my kids. And although my kids laugh at them, they do not necessarily understand why they are hilarious. Even my helper doesn't know why I think some of them are so funny. So now, obviously every kid wants their own, but they all have weird names and nicknames that usually flow like liquid silver are backed up like well.... I'm not going to mention any names, but I will tell you they needed to use a suppository in my parents bathroom. Will you help me and be my suppository?!

My class list complete with current nicknames:
Hessa: Baby Hessa, Madame Hessa, Hessa Baby (then I start singing "Santa Baby")
Ariha: Diarreha (not to her face of course... but man I don't like this twirp)
Mutia: smart, beautiful, just started wearing her vail, Indonesian
Waad: dick Waad (never have I called her it, but it would definitely work)
Pradita: Pradita, Pradita (sang like "Maria Maria" (you remind me of the Westside Story...)
Rahaf: a twin, really bad teeth, Emirati
Zayed Zeail: Z Bag, ZZ Tot
Zayed Al Hosani: very short, does not like to be called small, Emirati
Danis: cannot understand what he says because he mumbles, has a missing thumb nail, Indonesian
Merssal: Everyone's Favorite, Merssal
Abdul Rahman: Uncle Fester, has a LOTS of hair that flys get trapped in (Venus Fly Trap maybe), Emirati
Nitish: Nitish The Dish
Masud: Masud The Dude, Madoodle the Noodle
Asad: Asad The Bod
Mugesh: Debbie (he has a pink girl backpack that has "Debbie" a Barbie-like character on it)
Bryan: smart, rambunctious, white teeth, Philipino
Tariq: can't say green or blue, instead leeb and lube, curly hair, cute
Jacob: black, cries, smells like farts often, laughs like Eddie Murphy
Ghina: Ghina, Ghina Pumpkin Eater
Sevina: Sevina Morales (apparently a big singer in the Philipines, thanks to Irene, I and now you know this)
Eman: yaman (an Irish way of saying dude, the girl version would of course be yawon, but really is that an of course. And seriously, the Irish use it like it is nobody's business)
Nekesha: Nekesha, Nekesha (again, sang like "Pradita, Pradita"
Alreem: beautiful, kiss butt, Emirati
Weam: beautiful hair, ham for the camera, Emirati


The ones in bold do not have solid names, therefore I have provide enough distinguishing characteristics so you will be able to properly help me out.

Thanks.