Newsflash: "Don't mind the gaze: you're not in London anymore" from The National

Each time I read The National and come across a bad piece of journalism I think "it can't get any worse than this."

Then the next day's edition hits the streets.

Today, this article discusses THE GAZE -- that omnipresent stare that western women who travel to the Gulf are warned about.

To be honest, I don't mind that much if the editors at The National feel the need to fill a few empty column-inches with editorials about how much women get stared at and whether it should or shouldn't bother them.  I DO mind, however, when rubbish like this makes its way into the presses.  So bear with me while I attack critique the journalist and her two fatal mistakes.

Despite professing to follow the rule of "never say never or always...", she has "come to notice that the western women who complain about the unwanted gaze are seemingly always [my emphasis] women that are by normal standards plain or self-conscious."  Hmm.  If I remember correctly, I've done a fair amount of complaining about people staring at me when I walk around the streets.  Guess that means I'm either plain or self-conscious.  A quick check in the mirror dismisses the first hypothesis, so I must be the latter.  Thanks, Madam Journalist, for pointing that out to me.

The second mistake is better.  Or worse.  Depending on how one looks at it.  Our journalist reports taking a blonde woman's "...complaints about the unwanted attention with a grain of salt...But then again, I am not blonde so I don't know.  Or maybe I know better because I am not blonde."

Let's repeat the last sentence:

"Or maybe I know better because I am not blonde."

Wow!  What a slam!  Well, that was my first thought.  My second just chuckled at the fact that the brunette who wrote that has a Master's degree.

This blonde has a Doctor of Philosphy.

One if by land, two if by sea

I guess that should be one if by air, and no doubt it would have been if they had planes back in Paul Revere's time.

It took me the better part of a day (not counting the past month's worth of enquiries to freight forwarders), multiple phone calls and emails, constant consultations of the calendar, and then a few more phone calls.

But it's done:  we've got air and sea freight locked down and scheduled.

Here's how it all works:

Air freight:

We, essentially, do nothing.  (I love this part)  A fella comes 'round to our house, looks at the stuff we're sending via air, confirms it will not exceed the maximum weight/volume, and then sends a band of little men around the following week to pack it up and take it away.  About two weeks later it magically arrives at our villa in Abu Dhabi.

Sea freight:

We do pretty much everything.  Pack up the boxes.  Hire a local removals company to be here when the container arrives.  Inventory everything that goes in the container, seal it up.  Ten days later it sets sail for the UAE, with an estimated transit time of TWENTY SIX days (Ben Hur wasn't available for the rowing crew), passing through the pirate-infested waters around Somalia:

A week or so after arrival in Abu Dhabi, and maybe, just maybe, without some hot-headed bureaucrat deciding to rifle through everything we own looking for porn, we'll have the fun of unloading the container and setting up house.

That is, yours truly will be setting up house while Mr. World Traveller heads over to the states to renew his driver's license.

I hope he has to fly economy.

Newsflash: "Abu Dhabi reveals cost of parking" from The National

According to today's National, "meters start in October in effort to reduce congestion and haphazard parking -- and to persuade commuters to leave cars at home."

God, I love these newspaper pieces.  They are just so much fun.  This one tickles me because the snippet on the paper's homepage implies that commuters actually have the option to leave their cars at home.  You know, maybe they could take the metro, or the el, or the Abu Dhabi-Dubai shuttle.

And they could, if any of those things existed.

How to find a house in Abu Dhabi - Part Three

Actually, this is more of an update on the progress being made at our villa, which is, in a word, not much.

Despite the fact that Abu Dhabi is a hotbed of construction and probably has the world's largest concentration of cranes, they seem to do things backwards there (soon to be "here").  The latest report on the metamorphosis of our villa from its present state of filth to something habitable by mid-August is this:  they're painting it.

You might think that this is fantastic news.  That's because you live in a place where painting is done last.  Not in Abu Dhabi!  T/here the tradition is to pick one's way around the rubbish left by the previous lot of piggies family and paint the spaces in between.  Once the paint job is complete, they will presumably move on to those niggly little details like repairing the plumbing and air conditioning.  And maybe (just maybe) after that, they'll send in a crew to get rid of the crap that was left there by a pack of people who appear to have had less evacuation notice than the residents of Pompei.  But there's a bright side:

At least they stripped off the wallpaper before they started painting.

Ramadan 2009

As if 120-degree weather (that's 48.9 C for you metric folks) weren't bad enough, we are going to be arriving in Abu Dhabi about five days before the start of Ramadan.

I'm sure you're all curious as to what Ramadan actually means, so I'll tell you:

According to the Ramadan Awareness Campaign, it's from an old Arabic word meaning "scorching heat."  How appropriate that this year it will occur during the scorching month of August.

We're not muslim, but there are elements of Ramadan that will necessarily affect us while we're in the UAE.  For instance:

• We can't drink (not even water!), smoke, eat, or chew gum in public or in front of muslims during daylight hours.  That includes in our car.
• We'll be working approximately two hours a day less than normally.
• We'll have to cover up our shoulders and legs when out in public (so my husband won't be able to wander the streets wearing his usual wife-beater).
• Many bars and restaurants, particularly the food courts in shopping malls, will be closed during the day.
• There won't be any live music or dancing.

But there WILL be sales.  Lots and lots of sales.

So if you want to find us between 20 August and 18 September (approximately), I suggest you look in the furniture stores.

Newsflash: H1N1 health certificate required for expats

Or maybe not.

Consider these two news articles:

Gulf News, 27 July:  "Malls to be provided with thermal scanners"

The National, 28 July:  "Ministry denies call for swine flu certificate"

At first glance, you might shrug and say "so what."  Two completely different pieces of news, right?  Well, not in that bastion of journalistic talent out in the desert.

There are so many things wrong with this I don't know where to start.

The first article, despite carrying the headline about malls and thermal scanners, leads with the following:

Abu Dhabi: Expatriates who are working in the UAE and are on vacation abroad will have to produce a medical certificate that proves they are not infected with H1N1 virus before returning to the country. The move will be implemented from August.

Expatriates who are working?  What about tourists and expat housewives?  And what if they're working expats who didn't leave to go on vacation, but on business?  What is the issuing authority of the medical certificate?  Is it time-sensitive?

Farther down (much farther down), there's a little snippet having something to do with putting thermal scanners in malls.  Then there's some other stuff about incoming flights.

Huh?  What school of journalism did this guy attend where they taught him to generate a headline based on the content of the pre-antepenultimate paragraph in his article (which, by the way, has more than four paragraphs)?  This really upsets me.  Almost as much as having to type out "pre-antepenultimate." If you're not laughing yet, be sure to check out the byline:  this fellow is the Abu Dhabi EDITOR.

It gets better.

According to today's National, the Ministry of Health denies all claims that it resolved to implement a system where returning expats are required to produce H1N1 certificates.  It also denies that thermal scanners will be installed in malls.

I am waiting with baited breath for tomorrow's Gulf News.

Musings on the moving process

Oh, what I'd give to have a bunch of little men come and pack everything up and make it all magically appear in Abu Dhabi.

Instead, here I am watching my Excel moving workbook give birth to even more worksheets -- one for the box inventory, one for the list of stores in Abu Dhabi that we'll need to hit upon arrival, one for the pre-move list of things to be done, one for the list of things to bring in the container (and another just like it for the things that are going by air).

There are manila folders for moving expense receipts.  Folders for vital records.  Folders for stuff that's neither expense-related or vital.

There are piles of moving blankets, carefully stacked and balanced -- all 100 of them.

There's a notebook with daily to-do lists of at least ten items on every page, some of which I manage to get done.

A sea of boxes exists in the dining room, carefully parted so that I can open and close the window and blinds without having to sign up for the Cirque du Soleil Acrobat Training Program.

Decisions about what clothing to move by sea, by air, and by checked baggage consume the better part of my mornings.

We ring the property management firm in charge of turning our wreck villa into something habitable by mid-August on a daily basis.  We're told that it "will get done, so stop calling."

The list goes on.

I'm not trying to make you feel sorry for us.  We clearly brought this on ourselves.  You see, there are two types of relocation packages offered by employers -- the Luxury Package and the Adventure Package.  Sure, we could've rented a brand new villa out in the middle of nowhere a lovely new development, arrived with a couple of suitcases, gone on a spending spree at Ikea, and saved ourselves all of this trouble.  Instead, we chose the road less taken.

And discovered that sometimes the 'road less taken' is less taken for a reason.