A New School Year

The last school year ended well, except that I was away for most of the final six weeks recovering from an operation. The school will not be using any advisors this year, so the company has moved me to a new school. The new school is for girls from grade 6 to grade 9. This will be new for me, I have never worked in a secondary school, although I have worked with teenagers at Tafe. I am part of a much larger team of advisors, and will be working with the English teachers. I am sorry to be leaving my old school, just when you build up good relationships with the locals, they move you somewhere else.
I had a flying visit to Australia in July, I visited my son, then went to Queensland to see my parents. They then came with me to London, to see my sister and her family.
When I arrived back in the UAE it was still Ramadan. During this month you are not allowed to eat or drink in public during daylight hours, which means you can't even go out for a coffee during the day. With Ramadan now over, the shops and restaurants are back to regular hours, so I went to Dubai yesterday and was able to have lunch at the mall.
I did hit the shops rather, I got a beautiful quilt for our bed from Zara Home, it is white with a delicate silver detail pattern. It looks French provincial, which is a decorator look I love.
I'll write again when I start at my new school, it is an amalgamation of two older schools to one new location, so there will be lots of sorting out to do, and I am sure we will be quite busy.

A week off.

I've worked 12 weeks since the Christmas break, and now we have a week off. We visited the Al Ain Museum today, lots of pots from 2000 years ago, some interesting knives and guns, and some great photos from the early days of Al Ain. The exhibits were not very well labelled, so a lot of the time we weren't sure what we were looking at, or how old it was or where it came from. But for 3 dirhams to get in, not really complaining.
Not long after I arrived, I learnt that the speed limits shown on road signs were not the speed you get booked at. For example, the signs between here and Dubai say 120km/h, but you only get caught by the speed camera if you are going more than 140. This was a bit like an urban myth, passed on from expat to expat. Well, now they have made it official, the newspaper had a report that confirmed this, so now we can comfortably drive at 140 and not worry. Usually we don't go more than 130, the roads are very good most of the way, so we are there in around 75 minutes.
We are going to Dubai on Friday, as it is my birthday, and the one thing I want to do is go up the Burj Khalifa. I have pre-bought the tickets, saving 600 dirhams! I just hope it's not too dusty outside, sometimes there are such bad sandstorms that you can't see anything.
We came second at the quiz night last week, we came away with 2 bottles of wine.
Fifteen weeks until the end of the school year, we have the inspection, a bit like Ofsted, next week, and once that's over we can relax and just get on with helping the teachers and working with the girls. can't wait!

Term Two

Back in Al Ain after ten days in London for Christmas. London was beautiful, snowy, freezing and people driving on the correct side of the road! Term two has started, and at last I feel like I understand what I am doing at work. Great relationships with the teachers certainly helps, and the girls are as gorgeous as ever.
We have had a tiny bit of rain, funnily enough we had a weather warning from the office a day or two before, right around the time my home town was being completely flooded. It rained here for about half a day, just light sprinkles really, and the girls were squealing with delight at the novelty. A weather warning for a few drops of rain? Really?
Wednesday nights sees us at the Rugby Club, for the cheap curry dinner and the trivia night. We had a good win last week, beating about 15 other teams. The prize is dinner for 4, so we will go on Monday night with our team members, before we go to the Monday night trivia at the Hilton. Our team is fluid, but generally consists of Mark, me, Stacy (an American teacher) and Laurence (an Australian ADEC guy). On Mondays, my friend Alissa usually joins us, she works with me in the same position, but looks after Science and ICT, whereas I look after English and ESOL. The grade 4 and 5 girls have done really well at English this year, their work samples have been shown as an example to the rest of the company as to what an 'A' looks like. No other school has students doing as well as ours, so I'm pretty happy. My local English teachers are fantastic, they certainly get the best out of the girls.
Well, I have made it through half of the academic year, and am still very happy to stay on, so will keep adding to this blog.
Cheers,
Michelle

Long Weekend

I am at the end of a four day weekend, and ready to back to school for the last two weeks of term one. Mark and I decided it would be nice to see a bit more of the country, so we got in the car and headed north. We followed the map, and drove for about two hours, until we got to a place on the map called the "Friday Market". We stopped here because it looked quite interesting. We had been looking for a floor rug, and the Friday Market had floor rugs by the thousands. We inspected a few, before settling on an Iranian silk rug, 2 metres by 3 metres in size. It is quite traditional, and very beautiful. It looks lovely in the lounge room. I paid AUD 166, so was pretty happy. I talked the vendor down a hundred dirhams, and off we went.
We drove on to the seaside resort town of Dibba, but didn't like the look of it too much, so kept driving along the coast until we got to the Fujairah Rotana hotel, where we stopped for lunch. What a beach-side paradise. The restaurant was right on the beach, and there were lots of tourists sunbathing and swimming. We took a different road back, over the Hajar mountains, and through a spectacular tunnel cut through the mountains.
Today I had a phone call from my lovely librarian. She had been waiting to have her baby, it was due any day. Finally the baby had arrived, a beautiful baby boy she called Mohammed. Mark and I visited her and her husband in the hospital, we were fed so much that we didn't eat for the rest of the day. Mother and baby are both beautiful and well.

Signs around my school

My school is full of bizarre signs that have been translated by the social worker who doesn't really speak good English. This one had us in stitches for a few days. She has since asked me to help her with the translation of signs, which I happily do, although it does mean we don't have as much to laugh at.

Driver's Licence

I have finally received my residence visa, and applied for my Emirates ID card, so it was time to get my UAE driver's licence. Firstly, I had to get my Queensland licence translated. I knew where I thought I had to go to get it translated, but of course was in the wrong place, and finally found the building I needed. Mark came with me, and we entered the building only to find it was a supermarket, with a small department store downstairs. We asked for help, explaining that we were looking for the translator, and were directed to the back of the building. We entered a really smelly lift, and found the translator sitting at his desk. He looked to be about 85  years old, and took my Queensland licence and said "That's too small for me to see, you'll have to get it made bigger." He directed us to where the copying shops are, so off we trudged. We got my licence copied, and Mark's too while we were at it. We made our way back, going past a pet shop that had rabbits, chickens and parrots for sale. One of the parrots had a beak that was so long it had curled around. I wanted to buy it to get its beak clipped, but we are not allowed pets in the flat. The old man translated our licences, then directed us to go to the fifth building down the road to get the translation typed up. We went to the fifth building and couldn't find anyone who looked like a typist, so we went to the fifth door, but no typist. We made our way back to the old man who this time told us the name of the building we were meant to go to...of course it was the sixth building, why didn't I guess that? We had the typing done, then went back to the old man to get him to sign the typed version, and to pay him the 140 dirhams to do all this work. Three hours later, we made our way home, only to find that the typist had put the wrong date of birth on my translation. My god! Mark offered to return the following day while I was at work, then after work we drove to the other side of town, where the traffic section is, and I paid 200 dirhams and got my licence. At least the woman there let me see if I was happy with the photo she took. I didn't really care by that stage, and just took the licence and went home. No driving test, no eyesight test, just pay the money and you're done. But what a rigmarole!

Getting to know Al Ain

I've been here just over two months, and am living through my second bout of head cold. It feels good to just stand in the sun to dry out. The weather is still warm, but very pleasant first thing in the morning. Mum and Dad called in for a weekend on their way to London, we took the opportunity to be tourists in Al Ain while they were here. We took them to Jebel Hafeet, the mountain we can see from the lounge room window. It is about 1200m, with a Mercure Hotel part way up. From the hotel you get fantastic views of the oasis (when it is clear, a lot of the time it is dusty because of the sand). We took them to the palace museum, which is a large compound/house where the sheik used to live, and is now preserved for all to wander through. We took them shopping to see the amazing range of goods we have available for pretty cheap prices, and we took them to the Golf Club for lunch. The best thing though, was actually driving through the Oasis itself. We got to the gate, where a sign reads that you can only come in if you are a farmer or a tourist. Not for locals!! With our Australian accents, we easily passed as tourists, and headed on in. From the outside, the Oasis is fenced, and all you can see are the tops of the trees. From the inside, you see a warren of narrow roads, with meandering turns, so you don't know which way you are going. There are irrigation channels, as under all the date palms is where local farmers grow the fruit and vegetables that are sold very cheaply in the local supermarkets. We eventually found the exit gate, and were amazed at how large the Oasis is. There are a few more oases around the town, but not as big as this main one. Their visit was over too quickly, and now we just talk to them on Skype while they are visiting my sister. Mark and I will be heading off to London on December 17, for Christmas.