The camel in the Pizza Hut Parking Lot
On the bus ride from Abu Dhabi to Al Ain (about 100 km) I got to know my future colleagues a little bit. I was the only American math teacher among them. All other Americans were ESL, and all other math people were ex-pat Arabs, who had obtained their graduate degrees in the States, and most had earned citizenship, but they had the swarthy, semitic complexion, and they spoke Arabic. This was probably a good thing, since the bus driver spoke very limited English. That turned out to be a relatively rare occurance though. The population of the UAE is approximately 80% foreign, and English serves as the lingua franca for communication between Arabs, Westerners, and South Asians (Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, and Sri Lankans, who make up most of the work force).
One of the ESL teachers had visited a friend who taught at UAEU before, so he had some idea of what the town was like. Our body clocks were all screwed up, so even though it was around midnight by the time we checked in, we were hungry and not at all tired. Kevin said he knew where we could go to get a drink and something to eat, so a few of us piled into one of the cheap, ubiquitous UAE taxis and headed to the Intercontinental.
This turned out to be my first of many, many visits to that esteemed establishment. The pub and all the fancier restaurants were already closed, but the nightclub was still open, so we went there.
The Intercon, as we came to call it, had a pub, a nightclub, a disco, an Indian restaurant, a seafood restaurant, another one with varied cuisine (steak, Italian, French, etc.) and a few other small places where you could get coffee and pastry and such like. In addition there was a gym, several swimming pools, tennis courts, pool table, and more. There was something going on there constantly. I'm not into exercise, but most of my colleagues joined the gym, which also gave them access to the pools and tennis courts, etc.
The other big hotel in town was the Hilton. While the Intercon was geared towards singles, the Hilton was more family-oriented. They also had a number of bars and restaurants. I started going there a little more often after some of my friends formed a rock band and got some gigs there.
Those two five-star hotels were the only places in a city of about 200,000 where you could be served an alcoholic beverage. There also wasn't a whole lot else to do, unless you enjoyed going to movies in Hindi with Urdu subtitles. (The Indian film industry, based in Bombay, and dubbed "Bollywood," produces more movies than the US. And there were a *lot* of Indians in the UAE.)
Anyway, the next morning, we assembled for the beginning of our orientation, and to start processing paperwork. Everything you do there requires a passport-sized photo. They had told us there were numerous places to get them taken so not to bother bringing any. They had not bothered to check with the people in charge of the paperwork though, who expected us to have some already with us. So, it was off to the photo studio. Over the next several days they ran us through residence visas, physical exams, blood tests (more HIV testing), getting our furniture allowances (I have money now!), opening bank accounts, etc., etc.
As I mentioned before, the furniture allowance was about $7000. (Technically it was DH 25,000 where the UAE dirham trades at a fixed DH 3.67 to $1, or about 27 cents. The allowance was depreciated at 20% per year, so you had to stay there 5 years if you didn't want to have to pay anything back.) As soon as we got our checks, they took us to the bank to open an account. The default bank happened to be owned by the president of the university. I don't recall the name of it anymore, but it was a major investor in the whole BCCS business in the '80s. When I opened my account, they let me withdraw as much as I wanted right away. I really didn't have a clue what the dirham was worth or what anything cost yet, so I took out something like DH 5000, or more than $2000. I still wasn't sure if I was going to like it there, but I figured there was no way they could go into my pocket and take that money away, and it was enough to buy a ticket back to the States.
We had it a lot easier than the people who first went over for the BUEC startup in 1990. They had to wait weeks for their money, and were reduced to begging credit from the merchants for their furniture. Eventually the merchants balked (the university was notoriously slow about paying debts. More about that later.).
By this time, some more of our colleagues had arrived. I found that I wasn't the only American math teacher, nor was I the only person who had never worked overseas. ESL teachers pretty much have to go out of the US to find any kind of meaningful employment, and everyone on my flight had been to 3 or 4 other countries before that one. At first, I felt like a virgin in a roomful of nymphomanics.
Then they started our real orientation. Because females were not allowed to leave the country for college, the girl's campus evolved into a much larger entity than the boy's campus, so all activites took place there. One problem though: it was on the outskirts of town, with nowhere to eat nearby, and none of us had cars yet. The first couple of days they brought in catered lunches at what seemed to me to be a very reasonable DH 20 each. Some of the verteran teachers complained though. In one of our full faculty meetings, one even proposed that you could buy a goat or sheep in town for DH 150 and that would be enough to feed everyone.
Amongst and between all the paperwork, orientations, and faculty meetings, we also had to pick a place to live. This consisted of driving us around in a bus (still the same driver we started with) to all the places the university already had leases on and letting people choose. The nicest place I saw was in a new development, but it was supposed to be for women only. Time was running out. Everything else was out in the middle of nowhere, and most of them were enormous. They would have been spacious for a family of 6, and I was single. They were also all in these huge developments, and there were no street signs! I heard of some cases where people picked an apartment and then it took them 2 days to find it again. Then they showed me a place next door to the hotel where we were staying. I knew I could find it again, and it was only 4 bedrooms (actually 3 plus a maid's quarters), so I took it.
At the end of the week (their work week runs Sat. to Wed.), a bunch of the veteran teachers took us newbies out for pizza. This was the first sign of normality I encountered. In addition to Pizza Hut, they also had a ton of KFC's, and Hardees. My second year there, we even got a McDonald's.
Going to Pizza Hut in a Muslim country is not quite the same as over here. Have you ever considered how many pizza toppings contain pork? Ham - of course not. Italian sausage? Out. bacon? Nope. Pepperoni? Well, yes, but beef pepperoni, which just doesn't taste the same. So we were limited to that, veggies, and prawns. From then on, I made my own pizzas, and loaded them with all the pork products I could find (again, not easy in a Muslim country).
So everything felt almost normal. There we were, sitting in a Pizza Hut, at a big long table full of Americans (and a few Canadians), eating pizza. What could be more American than that? Then I looked out the window. Here came some old geezer leading a camel through the parking lot. He had apparently just bought it at the camel souk down the road (one of the largest in the world), and was taking it home. Suddenly it hit me: "You're not in Kansas anymore." (Sorry, I couldn't resist. I don't think I've ever actually been to Kansas.)
Next Installment: I can do this.