This is a foreign land. (6 and almost 7)

I wonder if there will come a time when I won't be surprised or in complete awe at this foreign land.  We've finished week 6 and almost week 7 and there are still so many things to wonder at.

Let's start with the Sunday before last.  (I'm not sure that I'll ever get used to having our Sabbath on Friday and Saturday our lone free weekend day.)  Sunday is the beginning of the school week.  Our villa wall is also the back wall of the kids' school.  It was a quiet morning until I heard crazy loud sirens and whistles and tons of alarms going off.  It sounded like something was descending on the house!  I ran upstairs so I could see over the wall to the school and found kids pouring out of the buildings.

And then complete silence.

It turns out the kids at ACS know how to do fire drills...except this wasn't a drill.  It was a real fire.  According to Chloe, the best part was, besides the alarms, the students were notified via intercom with: "there has been an incident in the school".  She texted me a lot of laughing emojis about that announcement as that is what everyone in her class started doing when they heard it.  I could hear the teachers explaining to the kids what happened (a small electrical fire in one of the gyms) from my window so I wasn't too worried, but Chloe sent me more laughing emojis when they sent everyone back to class with an airhorn.

Monday was playgroup for church.  I don't have any small children at home, but adult conversation is important for my mental health so a friend and I went together.  One of the best things we saw on our drive over was a Mercedes-Benz garbage truck.  Classic Abu Dhabi.

Tuesday we had yet another open house at the school.  One of the most interesting things Kanani's science teacher had on her wall was a "where are you from" map where half of her classes had posted their homes.  Our family is officially the only family at ACS from Alaska and we also come from the most northern part of the world.  In a school that represents so many unique places, my kids really bask in the prestige of this little piece of trivia.  Poor Kanani was a little irritated when another girl in her class stole her claim to fame by putting her picture in Alaska too (she said she had rights because her grandparents live in Delta Junction).  Most of these kids are third country kids and have a hard time defining "home" so I told Kanani to "let it go, let it go. The snow probably bothers her, anyway."

Wednesday we went out for dinner.  Going out on a school night is pretty much unheard of at our house, but neither Ethan nor I wanted to figure out dinner so we just did it.  (This is so unusual that I heard Jamila asking Chloe, "When did Mom actually get cool?")  We headed to the Sea Shell Cafe. This little restaurant had the most eclectic menu I've ever seen.  Chinese, Indian, American, Persian, Filipino, you name the country and it was probably represented.  Kanani had a "club" sandwich that was essentially a triple layered chicken patty sandwich on toasted white bread.  The boys and Chloe had burgers on some type of middle eastern bread (Reuben wasn't thrilled that the bun was yellow).  Ethan and I had chicken tikka which were delicious.  Jamila attempted a chicken parotta, which was similar to a quesadilla.  Everyone got an order of cheesy fries because they forgot that real cheese is a luxury around here and most people use processed cheese/velveeta/cheese-whiz for everything.  The cheese fries remained largely untouched.  My favorite thing I ordered was a falooda.  DIVINE!! I think if we go there again, I'll skip the real meal and just get the falooda.  It was chockfull of yummy fruit, nuts, ice cream, and all things delicious. I was so happy my trying-something-new experiment worked out for me this time!!  

**Napkins around here are a box of tissues....we maybe almost emptied the box.

On Thursday, a friend named Yoon came over to The Villa for lunch.  I met Yoon on the playground.  She is from South Korea and has a son in Mateo's grade and a daughter in Reuben's grade. We made sandwiches, had a salad and ate a yummy cake she brought.  Yoon is trying to learn English so we had some funny conversations trying to figure out what each of us were trying to say.  I laughed when she texted me a picture of a place that has piano tuners; there were three different languages in one text message!  Luckily, the most important info is in a language I can read!! 

**Reuben's face should be riddled with guilt here...he had snuck into the cake box and cut himself a HUGE piece as "an after school snack".  Instead of guilt, his face turned into despair when I made him share the piece with anyone who wanted some.  His stolen piece of cake was gone in about .05 seconds.

Friday after church we went to lunch with a family who is originally from Australia.  They grilled steaks and shrimp and sausages and made the most delicious salads ever!  I've never heard of putting sweet potato and spinach in a salad, but it really works.  For dessert, Monique (the mom), served us pavlova.  WOW!  I need to learn how to make this. After dinner, we went on a walk to the park.  It was still super hot and so we all came back drenched and sweaty, but I got a great picture of a classic Abu Dhabi treasure...so I count the walk as a roaring success.  Do you see the really tall palm tree in the night picture?  That palm tree is actually fake.  Abu Dhabi really cares about appearances and the people/government take pride in making sure that the view is beautiful.  They also want to be in the forefront of technology (this may or may not be a successful endeavor).  To marry these goals, the cell phone towers are hidden in fake palm trees.  Isn't that cool?!  I can just imagine if Alaska (or any state for that matter) tried to hide their cell phone towers in the main tree of that state...consider it...there could be ginormous Christmas trees dotting the landscape of the Last Frontier!  It's a little like playing Where's Waldo for me when we go on drives because some of the "Cell Palms" aren't as obvious.  Others, well, others are a single palm tree in the middle of a sand field, or a palm tree that is planted on the roof of a high rise.  Those are the best.

Saturday we finally got our dining room table delivered.  YAY!!!!  It took 5 little men and Ethan to carry it into The Villa.  I love it.  It is so lovely and big and perfect.  We don't have chairs though...when the rental furniture leaves, we are going to have to figure something out.

Week 7---already---

Saturday night, Ethan and I met up with another couple and we went out for Iranian food.  The Tabbouleh (a type of salad), the Lentil Soup (maybe it's called Shorba?), and the mixed grill (lamb, chicken, and chicken tikka yogurt) were super good.  People use a lot of tumeric and saffron here.  I need to learn how to incorporate these spices into my recipes.

When we got home, the girls casually told us that their bathroom ceiling was leaking.  Okay?  We called maintenance and they said they would be at The Villa at 9am the next morning.  It turns out it wasn't just a little leak.  When the maintenance guys took the panel off the ceiling, they flooded the bathroom and themselves!  The water had been collecting up there all night.  It's cause: a broken AC unit.  (I don't know if the video will work on the blog, but imagine a steady drip coming from the light fixture and the far corner of the empty hole.  These drips were after I turned off the AC in the bedroom.)  Luckily, the bathrooms are considered wet space so the ceiling is made of metal panels, there is tile everywhere else, and there is a drain on the floor.  I squeegeed the flood, put buckets down to catch the drips and called the AC repair guys.  Then, I rewrote my rules for my kids about when to call Mom to read: blood, barf, boogie man, and waterfalls.  (I am confident this scenario will be repeated since every single room has its own AC unit and water heater.  If it isn't the AC that breaks and floods the place, I bet it will be the water heater.)

Sunday went "swimmingly."  Monday Reuben got stung by a bee.  I was with him waiting on the playground before the morning bell rang and so we walked to the nurse's office together to get some hydrocortisone and/or Benadryl for the itching and pain.  Except, I guess Abu Dhabi doesn't have these kinds of medicines.  All Reuben wanted was a bandaid.  In the end, I have no idea what they put on it.  He didn't get a bandaid.  I'm guessing it was some type of hydrocortisone.  They also gave him an oral antihistamine that I also don't have any idea what was.  **Next time I'm going to have the nurse write down the medications' names so that when I go to the pharmacy, I can know what things are.  The nurse had him go back every 2 hours to check on it...he felt pretty special getting escorted down to the nurse's office by one of the cute little girls in his class; special enough that he gave himself a bloody nose on the playground the next day by falling off the equipment and hitting his face on the ground so he could go back to the nurse!  I was there then too...it was after school and we were waiting for swimming lessons to start.  According to Reuben, it turns out bee stings are better than bloody noses because you don't have to pinch your nose closed as hard for a long time with a bee sting.

I'm reminded daily in many ways that I live in a place that isn't always familiar.  Wednesday, I had two blatant reminders.  First: my brother sent me a google docs survey to fill out for our upcoming Pierce family reunion this summer.  He had to force the document to speak English because no matter what I did from my end, the survey would only show up in Arabic.  Then, I got a text from the government's department of education reminding me to have my kids answer math/science questions on their devices daily during a program called "Question-a-day"beginning 30 September.  Good thing for google translate.

The best part of the week, however, was this morning...Thursday.  I got my first package.  DHL worldwide delivered right to my front door.  This was a bit of an experiment for me.  I ordered a new book and a few scripture marking pencils for my seminary class from the LDS distribution site.  I purposefully didn't pay much because of the plentiful horror stories about things getting lost in the mail or left without notice at the post office (we don't have a PO box here, but sometimes things just go there anyway) or going to the wrong location.  But, it worked!  This is very exciting for me because now I feel a lot more confident about ordering things from souq.com (the Amazon of the Middle East).  I suddenly feel like Christmas may actually happen for my kids...I do not find joy in mall shopping.

Lastly, and this is the other best part of the week (and the reason I'm combining a couple of weeks into this post), we got word that our sea shipment is in port and, barring customs delays, will be delivered this weekend.  To say we are excited would be an understatement.  We were pretty worried that it had been dumped in the sea during the typhoons that wiped out pieces of the Philippines.  Here is to praying and hoping that everything is in good repair and that the piano can actually be carried into the house (the movers here are a lot tinier than the two huge Polynesians who hefted the piano onto their shoulders and casually walked...without a break...up the ramp into the truck)!  I am anxious to get a little bit of the familiar into this foreign land.