First Weekend

It's the weekend, and I slept very late. One of the peculiarities of time and cultural differences is that just about the time my friends back home are waking up on Thursday my week is essentially over and the weekend is beginning. Of course, the flip side of that is that when my friends are dragging out of bed on Sunday my week has already started and I've taught my first round of classes. I've now been here a week, although it feels like a month. I have some vague plans for the weekend: 1) need to rally and workout, 2) actually unpack and put my clothes away in drawers, 3) my Kiwi friend Liane wants me to go with her to some yet to be determined bar to watch the New Zealand team play rugby (actually sounds like a lot of fun), 4) maybe catch a taxi to the British Club tonight - a couple new friends of mine have invited me there for some celebration, and 5) my friend Tony and I are looking to catch a bus or hotel shuttle downtown tomorrow so that I can start a bank account, shop for a local phone and buy a couple clothes that I somehow didn't pack (I can remember in the midst of repacking being disgusted that I had somehow thrown four black belts into my suitcase, and then managed to somehow take them all out, and now I have none).

Life in the Desert

Here's an odd little contraption that one finds in the all the hallways of the hotel. It's a little humidifier that pops on now and then. It also has a cleanser as part of the "mist." It spins around and the water gets sudsy. The weather here is odd - it's hotter than bloody hell, but we're also on the gulf so the humidity is stifling. So, you're sort of humidifying and fighting the effects of too much humidity at the same time.

Saj

I found a new lunchtime treat at the campus. Normally I just grab a banana, a container of fruit, and a bottle of water at the campus (now, this may change once all the shops open up in the Promenade). In the big central areas the first floor will be reserved for restaurants and coffee shops and a beauty parlor, with the second and third floors for the classrooms and offices. Since there are so fewer men than women I'm wondering if there will be a lot more shops in the female wing than the male wing, and if there will be "gender-specific" differences (there is a sociology study waiting to be written). I load up on fruit at breakfast and lunch, knowing that "supper" will just be snacking at happy hour (and they don't have a salad bar). I broke with tradition (as much tradition as you can build up in a couple days) and tried the saj, which is a Lebanese treat. It is a wrap that is baked on a special grill - think of a two foot wide convex grill, sort of a large black contact lense - and then filled with goodies. I had the combo saj, which is cheese and some sort of very spicy spread. Absolutely delicious. It's much like an emaciated shwarma, if that makes any sense.

Monkey is Popular

In my continuing, and exhausting, effort to chronicle Monkey's travels throughout the Middle East (and, truthfully, they may not have been a greater traveller in the Middle East since the time of Ibn Battuta) here's a picture of him at happy hour on the balcony of the Radisson Blu. He was swapping stories with Tony, Peter and Liane, all great story tellers, and he was holding his own. I didn't bring him tonight and they were visibly disappointed.

Good Night From the Other Side of the World

In the nearly four-hundred posts that comprise this blog (is that even possible - although I can remember asking the same thing after three-hundred) th eone which arguably received the most positive feedback was a series of pictures I took and posted (without commentary) of the sun coming up over Port Elizabeth in South Africa. Let me post a few pictures of the sun going down last night. We're on Yas Island and the sun was setting back towards the Abu Dhabi, so it's not quite as romantic as if it were setting over the Persian Gulf itself. Still, they are nice pictures. We end up sitting on the balcony on the eighth floor every night and the heat, even after the sun goes down, is just incredible. As long as the run is going down there is a slight breeze, but when it disappears usually the breeze stops and it becomes even worse. My friends tell me that insix or seven weeks it will be like heaven. Right now it feels like an oven - and, no, it's not a dry heat.

The New Abu Dhabi Campus

Doubtless I will be posting about the new Abu Dhabi campus of Zayed University all year, so I won't spend too much time on it now. I think I'll just post a few pictures to break the ice (and what I wouldn't give for some ice - it was around 108 today with whithering humidity). When I agreed to spend a year teaching at Zayed I made it clear that I didn't want to go to Dubai, not simply because Dubai is just a bit too crazy for my taste, but also because their own new campus is out in the middle of the desert. Of course, now that Abu Dhabi has a new campus it is also out in the desert. With that in mind, I came prepared to not like it. Actually, I like it a lot, although everything is still being madly thrown together. My brother, who watched the video, said it looked like something somewhere between a remarkably posh mall and the mother ship, and that I definitely had to go there. My office is in the male wing - there are two equal wings with classrooms and faculty offices and shopts on both side. Simply because you're in the male wing it doesn't necessarily mean that you'll only be teaching the male students and vice-versa. It makes it a bit complicated because if you're in the female section and are teaching a male class you can't really ask your students to come visit you in your office hours, so you end up having "branch" office hours in separate adjunct offices in the corresponding wing. Thye library and fitness building will have certain hours reserved for the different sexes. It's a delicate mix, and one that you would expect with a country that is struggling with modernity like the UAE is. I guess some people get frustrated by this, but maybe it's because I'm an historian (or maybe it's because I've read so much Marcus Aurelius), but I take a more flexible view of the pace of change (and, yes, I know how strange that sounds coming from anyone who has seen me blow up at a faculty senate meeting because people are being slothful - and by that I mean everyone I've ever met; I guess the difference is that we have a million natural advantages so I have trouble accepting our sometimes glacial rate of change, and am more forgiving of other parts of the world).

My First Day

Today was my first day at the new campus and I really couldn't be happier. The driver showed up right on time this morning to pick up the Radisson Blu Five (Tony [British], Peter [British], Tanya [Serbian], Liane [New Zealand] and yours truly) right on time. The campus seemed to be around twenty minutes away. Right now it's just in the jmiddle of a big stretch of desert, but I suspect, much as with our first house in Atlanta, very quickly the city will catch up and bypass the campus. It is huge, especially considering the fact that there are less than three-thousand students. If you haven't taken the opportunity to watch the video embedded in an earlier posting be sure to do so. It's still pretty chaotic and a lot of things are being delivered on the fly, but I think it's going to be a great experience. I'll post more pictures of the building itself later. Right now I'll just post a few pictures of myself (breaking one of my cardinal rules of never posting pictures of myself, although my friends are always scolding me for not doing so) and my new office. Because, in addition to teaching a couple classes, I'm also serving as the Assistant Dean for Curriculum I received a really nice office. Zayed, and especially my friend Jyoti, have made it clear that they want me to stay and they are doing their level best to make a compelling argument. A couple of my new friends were giving me a little grief over how big my office is, and I responded with a) telling them that they'll really be impressed when I have the wall knocked out as part of my expansion plan, and b) they were still welcome to come by at any time to watch me from a distance behind the velvet rope (and anyone who has ever taught we me could see that coming). I do have to say that the adjoining office where my secretary is housed is pretty posh as well - apparently, from what I can gather, I have the Zayed equivalent of Darlene McGrath, which means I've hit the jackpot. There's also a picture of the bizarre view outside my window, which is sort of a microcosm of the generally surreal feel of this entire adventure. I'm amazed at how happy I look in that picture, although, doubtless, very soon I will cause mischief and it will be everybody else who is frowning. If history teaches us anything this wll turn out much like "Ransom of Red Chief," with Zayed paying Champlain to take me back.