Settling in at Cassell's Hotel

September 10th, Cassels Hotel, 2007

I’ve spent the last two days settling into Abu Dhabi and my office. It’s not nearly as hot as I expected and its actually fairly pleasant to walk outside. We just moved to a new office a little bit away from downtown and it’s hard to catch a cab there, so we’ve been walking part away part. One of my intial fears was not being able to spend any time outside, so I’m so glad it’s cooling off.

The new office is great. It’s a small villa we share with two other Emirates Foundation supported projects that all fall under a loose heading of being civil society-promoting. There are a lot of people “my age” (the quotations imply an ish), both emirate and expat, working for them. The neighborhood the villas are in remind me a lot of the ritziest neighborhoods in Tanzania, with the gates and the palm trees and the bright peaches and turquoises.

Workwise, I’ve gotten a lot done, which is satisfying. It’s so much easier to be working on site than through email. I haven’t had much time to explore much, but yesterday I went to Ikea with my boss, Rachel, after work to look for new office chairs. Ikea, except for the clientele, is more or less the same everywhere. I thought about how many times I’ve gone there in the past two years, testing out beds, running through the strip curtains in the kids section, falling backwards into case of pillows. Sometimes I went there with Doug or Katie just to get lunch. Usually I only left with a corkscrew, some thumbtacks, or once a storage compartment that was supposed to hang from the ceiling. I got home to realize there was no space in my dorm room to put it up. This time I bought crucial things such as hangers. Rachel hasn’t lived in the United States since she was in college, so she was surprised by the wide variety of things you could find there. We didn’t buy office chairs, but resolved to come back.

I also picked up some groceries at a grocery store in the basement of the mall. There were two full aisles of yoghurt products and a really good assortment of microwaveable Indian food, my summer dinner staple. We then went out for Iranian food, and ice cream. It was all around delicious.

I suspect it’ll take a while to get into the rhythm. Ramadan starts tomorrow, and I’ve heard that businesses shut down and people sleep during most of the day while fasting, only coming into work between ten and two. Apparently there are street festivals at night. I’m going to go explore them with Ahmed later this week. Today I did some ‘normal’ things like making dinner and working out.

Right now, I’m washing down microwaveable Indian food (yes, I’m aware this may not sound like making dinner, but it totally is because there’s no microwave, so I had to make it on the stove. Now I’ve mastered that, maybe I’ll branch out into stir fry tomorrow night) with some diet coke while watching Al Jazera.

I’m not positive how I’m going to use this space yet. I really like the idea of a blog rather than mass emails because it feels less like an imposition and I’m likely to update more quickly. However, I think work is going to eat up a lot of my day and there’s only so much I can really say about that. So far, my biggest challenges include getting in and out of cabs in a pencil skirt without showing my knees and learning everyone’s name. I’ve definitely introduced myself to some people twice. I suspect that once I get in the rhythm, there will be more posts about thoughts or specific moments in the day. Until then, expect a little tedium, loyal readers.