I Can Do This
Knowing that I was probably going to be in the UAE awhile, I took advantage of the maximum allowable luggage restrictions for an overseas flight: 3 pieces. There were some size limits, but a standard camp footlocker fit them just fine. I carefully distributed all my possesions among 3 of them so as not to be missing any crucial items if one, or even 2 should go missing.
After I got them all packed, I discovered (or remembered) I had to have an inventory list of the contents for customs. Arrgh! I taped a copy inside the lid as well.
I packed up a few more footlockers to ship over. Everyone kept telling me to send them by sea, as it was a lot cheaper than air freight. That would have been true if I had a lot more stuff, but there was a minimum of half a shipping container, and it would take several months for my stuff to get there. I checked around and found that Emery had the best rates and would come to the house to pick them up. They were giving me a $500 shipping allowance anyway.
Once I got the keys to my new apartment, I hired a couple of the housekeeping/maintence crew at the hotel to bring the footlockers over with a dolly. I became pretty good friends with one of the them, a Bangladeshi with a master's degree in philosophy from the U. of Bangladesh. He spoke English, but his accent was so bad I could barely understand him most of the time. His situation was typical for a lot of the work force there. Way overqualified to be essentially a maid, but the pay for a maid in the UAE (still incredibly low by Western standards) was so much better than what they could earn back home, there were waiting lists a kilometer long of people trying to get work permits there.
As a Westerner with a residence visa, I was entitled to sponsor someone to work for me as a maid, but as a single man, I wasn't allowed to have a female servant living in my apartment. (Actually, any female. Too much likelyhood of hanky-panky. They were extremely concerned about prostitution over there. Sharja, one of the more conservative Emirates, even went so far as to forbid any woman from making hotel reservations.) Many of my colleagues with families had maids though. I hired my Bangladeshi friend to come in every couple of weeks.
My building had 8 apartments, all occupied by UGRU faculty. Although there was only one entrance, there were 2 elevators that went to separate parts of the building, so there were 2 apartments per floor. The lower 2 floors were taken up by a supermarket with a separate entrance. My apartment was on the second floor. [But wait, Chris. I thought you just said the lower 2 floors were a supermarket? Indeed I did, but that whole area of the world was ruled by the British for many years, so they adopted the British practice of starting at the ground floor, with the one above that being the first.]
An apartment over there is supplied empty. I really mean empty. No appliances. No air conditioning, in a place where the summer temperatures exceeded 120 degrees daily. Luckily, I had the DH 25,000 furniture allowance. I spent a fifth of it on A/C. They did make one concession to the heat. Buildings were built with big rectangular holes in the wall of each room, with electrical outlets next to them for window A/C units. I got one for the kitchen, the living room, my bedroom, and a 2nd BR I planned to use for an office. (The 3rd BR I used for storage.)
Of course I had to have a refrigerator, but I don't really bake much, so I decided I could get by with a microwave, a 2 burner hot plate, and a large toaster oven, instead of a stove. I prefer gas anyway, and although the country is sitting on a sea of the stuff, there were no gas lines anywhere. I would have had to go with a propane tank inside my kitchen, and I just didn't trust them enough to make one that wouldn't explode.
Laundry was also a interesting situation. It was nearly impossible to find a fully-automatic washing machine there, and the ones there were, were hideously expensive. Instead, they had semi-automatic ones, with separate tubs for agitating and spinning, and you had to transfer the clothes from one to the other by hand, sopping wet. Dryers were practically unheard of, since it was so dry there, you could hang things out on a clothesline and they'd be dry in a couple of hours. Even luxury highrises had clotheslines out on almost every balcony.
I did a little cost-benefit analysis though, and determined I could send my laundry out to be done for a year for the cost of a washer. I found a laundry service a block away that would wash, dry, iron, and fold or put on a hanger all my laundry for DH 25-30. There was usually a 2 day turn-around, but I was such a good customer, when I asked for it, they'd do it the same day. When I had my broken leg, they even picked up and delivered.
Then there was carpeting (which they just glued to the floor, with no padding), curtains, LR suite, TV, VCR, bookcases, BR set, linens, towels, dishes, cookware, etc. The supermarket downstairs was very handy. What they call a "supermarket" over there is more like a small department store. All the food was on the first (sorry, ground) floor, and the upstairs had jewelry, dishes, cookware, luggage, shoes, small appliances, clothes, electrical doodads, toys, and office supplies.
Since there wasn't an honest-to-god tree (except for date palms) for thousands of miles in every direction, wood was a rather precious commodity. There was no way they were going to use it for something as mundane as holding up the walls of a building. Everything there was made from reinforced concrete. This meant 1) it was very hard to mount anything on the walls, and 2) there were no closets. Apparently it was too complicated to pour the concrete with that many nooks and crannies. So I also needed a wardrobe. Unless you wanted to pay outrageous prices, any wooden furniture was made from particle board. As I mentioned before, I searched for a week until I found a BR set that wasn't so loud it kept me awake. In the meantime, I slept on the couch.
The UAE, like most of the rest of the world, runs on 220 V/50 Hz current, which meant that nothing I owned in the States that used electricity would work over there. For the first year I got by with a walkman, diskman and a pair of powered speakers for music. (I did bring all my tapes and CDs with me. I didn't figure vinyl would take too kindly to 120 degree temperatures, so I left the records behind, but taped all my favorites first.)
The second year I bought a really nice Kenwood "midi" system for about $1600, which I still have, as I made sure to get one with universal power. That thing has so many bells and whistles it takes graduate degrees in both acoustics and electrical engineering just to understand the owner's manual.
Shortly after I got into my aparment, I received notice that the stuff I shipped had arrived at the terminal in Dubai. I got my next door neighbor to drive me up to process it through customs. Before they'd even let me see it though, I had to go through the Israeli boycott gauntlet. The rules have relaxed a little now, but at that time they not only would not do business with Israel, but they wouldn't do business with any company that did business with Israel. So I had to sign all kinds of forms testifying that I didn't have anything that had any connection with Israeli goods. (BTW, I never told anyone I was Jewish.) Then I had to track down a customs inspector in this huge warehouse to inspect my stuff to make sure I wasn't bringing in drugs, bibles or other pornography. I was OK because I knew I was going back for my sister's wedding and could bring anything else I needed after I got the "lay of the land."
Because the Muslim sabbath is Friday, their weekend was Thu. and Fri. and we only taught a half-day every other Wed. so I only had to take 4 days off to go to the wedding on a Sat. I got a puddle jumper out of Al Ain (just about the smallest international airport I've ever seen - 2 gates) on Wed. afternoon, connecting with a 767 to Heathrow from Bahrain. I got a deal from the travel agent, where Gulf Air put me up overnight in London. I had a day to recover from the jet lag before wedding activities started, and took off again on Mon.
Now, who would have figured that there would be fog in London at 6 am on an October morning. Apparently not my travel agent. The flight was delayed 2 hours, causing me to miss my connection in Bahrain by 5 minutes. The airline kindly bought me a 1-week visitor's visa and put me up for the night in downtown Manama, as there were no more flights to Al Ain that day. I shared the shuttle bus with a British petroleum geologist from Abu Dhabi, who also missed his connection on the way back from his 30 days "off time." We had dinner together, and then went to the nightclub on the lower level of the hotel.
So there I was, in a tiny country where I didn't know a soul, sipping an ice-cold Heineken that had just been served to me by a Russian bartender, listening to a Reggae band from Zanzibar, and talking to this petroleum geologist I had just met a couple of hours ago like we were old friends. I had just flown a third of the way around the world and back in less than a week. And believe it or not, I was feeling very comfortable and at ease, like I was in my element. It was at that moment that I thought to myself "I can do this. I can *be* an ex-pat. In fact, it's kinda cool."
Next Installment: "filet mignon" on a dhow.