All Alone

A friend of mine and her mom shared a funny story with me once. It was definitely one of those you "had to be there" moments but it was sufficiently funny that we all still laugh about it today. Seeming as you had to be there to fully appreciate it, I am not going to do the story any injustices by attempting to retell the story in lame attempt to convey it's humour.  I do still, however, have to provide you with the gist of what happened.

My friend is a bombshell! When I say bombshell I really mean it. Blonde, blue-eyed, and a body to die for. I mean the girl is in her mid-twenties and looks sixteen. Anyway, one evening my bombshell friend is at a club with some friends  having a good time. When it came time to go home, her mom, a regular occurrence for many of South Africa's youth, came to pick her and one of her friends up at some ungodly hour. At this point both girls are relatively hammered and  are chatting to my friends mom about their night. The second girl, who isn't a bombshell, starts to complain in a sing-song manner that 'she was all alone' because my friend had basically ditched her for some hotty.

Anyway, this got me thinking about being alone, what it meant exactly, and how it means different things to different people. Some people can be alone while being surrounded by hundreds of people at a popular night club. Others only feel alone when they are by themselves. I guess we all feel differently about being alone and feel that way based on many factors. Being lonely and feeling all alone are really the same thing and I have never felt more alone than when I was in Abu Dhabi surrounded by people.

I am a loner! I enjoy doing things by myself and I really love my on company. I have take vacations on my own and had a meal at a restaurant alone. I am not some weird hermit, I just like to be on y own sometimes. Mostly I enjoy others company and I love to be out and about. I visit with friends regularly and am, in fact, seldom home. I think most people feel most lonely when they are forced to be on their own because they do not know how to be by themselves and just be comfortable in their own skin.

When I was living in Abu Dhabi, I met such a girl. She lived in the adjacent room to me. She had her bedroom door open 24/7 so that whenever anyone walked past she could engage them in conversation. Being her neighbour, this drove me a bit mad a times as I had to pass her door on my way in or out. There were ten of us living together and she'd often stop someone for a chat, often and very inconvenient times. At other times though, it was such a godsend because I just wanted to hangout and chat and she was always keen.

One of the best and worst things about living with nine other people is living with nine other people! It's a blessing and a curse. There is almost always someone to talk to or do things with. As a result you get used to not having to entertain yourself. You become easily bored and when you do find yourself alone, you have no idea what to do with yourself. Couple this with the fact that the people you are living with are basically strangers, who know little about you, and you have a recipe for loneliness.

So it was on such a night where I found myself physically alone that I had never felt lonelier in my life. Sitting outside on the stairs, I knew exactly what it meant to be all alone.

When Life Laughs in your Face

I have always been a meticulous planner. I enjoy the mundane task of organising. I couldn't do it permanently but doing it here and there brings a sense of order and joy to my life. I have been organising and planning my life ever since I can remember. From the epic thrill of creating lists to the satisfaction of seeing a job well done, I enjoy every second of planning things out precisely.

Most young girls dream of a white wedding. They plan carefully and thoughtfully down to every last detail. Some, the extremists, do so much planning that all they have to do is 'insert groom here'. I have simply never been one of those girls. Instead I have chosen to plan out my life in exquisite detail. For any sane person reading this, this should be a completely laughable matter. It is impossible to plan things out in entirety.I am not suggesting that you shouldn't have goals laid out. The road of life will be exceptionally long if there were not attainable pit stops along the way.

To accompany my ritualistic planning I have also developed very finite ideas along the way. My world has become very black and white so to speak with little to no grey area whatsoever. My finite ideas are so concrete, and have been from such a young age, that I should have had a bed at an institution on standby long ago.

I believed, not hoped, that by the time I had reached my current age I would have moved out, met someone to share my life with, I'm talking Mr Right now not Mr Right period, and have been relatively happy and settled. Instead, I find myself in quite the opposite situation.

I took this huge leap of faith only to find myself having belly flopped into the ground. So I picked myself up and tried to make further plans for my life. I thought I'd be on the next pane out on yet another adventure. When this too did not happen I went back to the drawing board and planned away again. So far nothing has worked out the way I planned. I'm not just speaking about recent failed events. I mean I might as well rip up every draft I have ever had and take every finite idea I have ever had and  flush it down the toilet.

The same way some little girls make plans for their wedding when they are far too young to understand the full concept of marriage and all it entails, I have found out that no amount of finite ideas and planing will ever make this journey of life any easier. I have come to realise that you can make as many plans as you like, but if they are not what life has in store for you, you'll get the biggest fright of your life because it is at that precise moment when life laughs in your face! HARD!

No Direction

North, South, East, and West. Left and right. Throw in a couple of prepositions here and there and you can direct people to where they need to go. People say that women have a terrible sense of direction. I am definitely the exception to this rule. I have always had a good sense of direction, not only in how to get from one place to another but in life too. If living in Abu Dhabi has taught me anything, and it has taught me a lot, it's that direction, both in navigation and in life, is actually a very fickle thing.

No one uses addresses in the UAE. Ordering food or booking a cab is truly a mammoth task. Anywhere else in the world you would simply give someone the number of your house, your street name, and your suburb. Pretty straight forward. However, this simple practice cannot be used in Abu Dhabi. You have to use landmarks and the names of major streets only. Abu Dhabi is supposed to be an easy city to navigate because it has the traditional iron grid system. All roads running East to West are odd numbers and all roads running North to South are even numbers. All streets are numbered regardless of their name. You need to know both the name and the number of streets in order to direct someone to where you live in case they know the one and not the other.

Once you have mastered this numbering system and have identified your land marks it should be fairly easy to tell someone where you live. This is not the case though. The problem is two fold; one, if you have no real land marks, because you live in the 'burbs, you're screwed and two, the people you are speaking to on the phone do not understand simple prepositions, "Turn right into the last road before fifteenth street." is impossible for someone to understand because all they understood was "fifteenth street" and  "right". 

In essence, everything that is thought to be logical and common sense turns out to be not that logical nor universally understood. The same can be said about life in Abu Dhabi. Cultural differences aside, things just don't make sense because all logic is thrown out the window. Even crossing the road has become a difficult task because the island separating the road has a fence down the middle between major intersections. Therefore, you are forced to walk, completely out of your way, to a busy intersection to cross the road to walk back to where you where only on the other side of the road. This is supposedly done to force people to cross at pedestrian crossings. Seems logical at first glance but the nearest intersection has a death-trap traffic circle, round-about - depending on where in the world you are from. This death-trap consists of a three lane traffic circle where you have to yield to cars that are in the circle and trying to exist. Cars are coming from all sides and deciphering which way they are going to impossible. Indicator? No such luck. So it's a case of waiting for a big enough gap, saying a little prayer, and running like your life is in danger because, well, it is! Not only do you need to be in fear of a car hitting you but you have the added worry of one car taking out another car and the collision taking you out because a car is somersaulting towards you. Not very safe or logical now is it?

Thankfully I am back home, unscathed, where directions make sense once again. The only problem being, I now lack it in my own life. I am at a crossroads where I don't know which way is North or South, up or down, right or wrong. I now have no direction.

Night time shenanigans and Arab time!

It was the first night in Abu Dhabi and after the longest two days of being awake it was finally time for bed. Everyone in my villa, exhausted, tried to have an early night as we had to be up and ready for school the next day. Again, fuck you hindsight, that probably was a sign too. 

When I woke at nine that night, disorientated, to a loud banging at my bedroom door I was beyond annoyed! 

The villa we moved into was opened mere hours before our arrival to it. It was also not one hundred percent complete. There were issues with the air-conditioning in some rooms, other rooms needed to have vital pipes installed in their bathrooms, and so on. The villa was also in desperate need of a thorough clean but that would have to wait until the weekend.  

When I put on pants and unlocked my bedroom door to discover the culprit of the noise so that I could shit on them with all the wrath of fire and brimstone, I found Azam, the watchman of the villa, running around from one room to the next with two or three men following him around like lost ducklings. I made eye contact with one of my villa mates. While my mouth hung open in disbelief, she managed to read my mind by answering my question before I had a chance to ask it.I have been told by numerous people that I have a very animated face. So much so that I cannot play poker as a result of my face betraying me. Apparently, Azam was supervising these lost ducklings of his in fixing various problems that we had encountered in our rooms and bathrooms. The banging was a successful attempt at waking me up so that they could get into my bathroom. For the life of me I do not know what needed to be fixed in my bathroom, but I am sure it could've waited until I returned home from work the next day. And so Azam and his men went to work while we returned to our beds and left our doors open for him in the desperate hope that we wouldn't lose out on much more sleep as a result of this disturbance. Azam finished in my room last, after ten that night, and I was grateful to go back to sleep properly. 

About two nights later, I had a second dose of night time shenanigans when after eight the yellow school bus parked outside our villa and two British girls got out and started offloading their belongings. They were moving in in the not so middle of the night. I left them to it for about thirty minutes before finding out who they were and what their story was exactly. 

I quickly learnt that people in the UAE have no respect for time. African time and Arab time are pretty much the same thing. If someone says that something will be done today, best you believe it'll get done tomorrow at the earliest and five minutes is more likely to be a couple of hours. Arab time is an absolute pain in the ass with the exception of one instance; the malls! Malls in the UAE are open for shopping, food, groceries, movies, etc. until late at night. Because of the intense heat in the summer months especially, people tend to sleep late or be dormant, hibernating in their homes until it becomes cool enough to venture out. 

Now I have come to expect night time shenanigans when Arab time is involved.

Abu Dhabadoo!

I had been toying with the idea of going to teach in the UAE since about 2010. It took me a long time to around to making this move become a reality because my PGCE, teaching qualification, took so long. I really am the queen of procrastination! Only I could start a two year qualification and complete it four years later! As I have said previously, there were a couple of false starts where I enrolled and then completed one assignment, or none, and then didn't bother to life a finger until the following year when I re-enrolled. I also managed to take a semester or three off sporadically.

At the end of 2013 I finally completed my PGCE and in the January of 2014 I fiercely pursued a job in the UAE. Teaching overseas was something that I wanted to since I left New Zealand in 2009, but it wasn't until my bosses deception and unfairness caught up with me in  January of 2014 that I made up my mind. I was going!

After months of waiting, not so patiently, I was finally offered a job in July for a school in Abu Dhabi. I jumped at the opportunity as I have visited the Middle East to see my best friend on occasions and had long decided that if I could find employment in Abu Dhabi, as opposed to Dubai, that I would take it. I signed the contract and two months later, a month after I was supposed to start, I finally left!

I opted for a quick goodbye to my folks at the airport before I ran off start my new life. Truthfully I hate goodbyes, I really am a big softy at heart, and I would have much preferred to have had a friend take me and literally drop me off with lightning speed that would make Speedy Gonzales proud. I knew that my parents would want to be the one's to hold my hand one last time before bidding me adieu. It's funny that even my best efforts to put my parents on the sidelines from an early age never deterred them from wanting to coddle me for as long as possible. For people that don't show or discuss much emotion they really have turned out to be a soppy bunch!   After checking my luggage and saying goodbye to the parental's as quickly as ripping of a band-aid I went to meet some of the people that I would later call friends and who were flying out with me as they, too, were heading for the land of sand.

As it turned out, nine of us were flying out to teach at the same school in Abu Dhabi. Our tickets had been purchased for us by the school,which is standard practice in the UAE, but we did not sit near each other. This did not lend itself to bonding or getting to know each other during the eight hour night flight. This inconvenience did not, however, deter us from bonding quickly once we arrived.

Etihad is a good airline and I enjoyed flying with them. I did not, however, enjoy the slightly smaller airplane with a row of two seats on each side of the three seat middle row. I have been extremely lucky in the past, managing to get three and sometimes even four seats to myself when flying. Obviously the flights have not been that full. Unfortunately for me, this was not the case on this occasion. In addition to the plane being so full it was a sardine can, I had the luck of sitting next to a bloke who was built like a brick shit house! I am talking full on heavy beard and thighs so big some trees would find themselves blushing at their own inadequacy. He was a mammoth of a man that couldn't have been too comfortable in his puny-in-comparison seat. Needless to say, it was a squished and awkward flight for me.

Eight hours later and zero hours of sleep on the plane, we touched down in Abu Dhabi to my relief. I couldn't wait to get off that plane and regain some of my personal space. Once I left the air-conditioning of the plane, I soon regretted being so eager to leave my cramped seat.The humidity was like running into a brick wall at full speed. It engulfs you immediately. Arriving at the airport was a complete shock to me, not only due to the humidity, because I had landed in Dubai before and was now comparing my experiences. The Abu Dhabi airport is very "third-world" and "primitive". We were shuttled to the airport building from where we had landed on the tarmac. Upon arriving inside the building, I actually expected to see ceiling fans! Thank God there were no ceiling fans and my skin relished in the coolness of the air-conditioned building!We were met by the principal of the school and after arse-ing around, ready to collapse from exhaustion, we finally made our way from the airport to where I would call home for the next two months.

After a day and a half of no sleep, a quick snack of processed cheese, and a run around trying to find a room that was suitable for a humans habitat, there was just enough time to shower and change before we had to leave to attend a meeting at school. Looking back on events now, fuck you hindsight, I should've seen the signs then! The meeting took place in the schools auditorium. Sitting directly behind me was my new H.O.D. When she spoke, to know one in particular, loud enough for us to all hear, that we should get on the first plane back to South Africa, I should have done just that!