The Past Few Weeks

In all honesty, I should probably be doing homework. But in reality, I know that in the next hour and a half, I will not accomplish anything even with the best intentions because 1) It is Thursday, and 2) After having 3 classes and actually doing stuff during the day, I generally end up relaxing in this gap before going to capoeira.

Today I decided to be productive in a way, and catch up on some blogging, since right now one of the main purposes of this blog is to keep family and friends back home up-to-date with MLIAD (my life in Abu Dhabi).

I haven’t written in a while because things have gotten a bit hectic here. It is midterms week, and while I don’t have any official midterms, I did have an Arabic quiz and I have papers either due or needing to be started for all of my other classes. One thing I am looking forward to is to have a more creative schedule next semester- right now I have Arabic, and then the other 3 are all just a lot of reading and writing.

Because of the lack of creativity in my classes, I am trying to be involved with the artsy scene that is here. And for me, since I don’t really draw/paint/play an instrument well/sing (in the formats they have here), that means theatre. The thing is, I am not (currently) enrolled in any of the theatre classes. Since a lot of the opportunities are only for people who are in the classes, have taken the classes, or know the professor, my options for breaking into the theatre world were limited. Luckily, the professor is really nice, and after sending him an email, I am now on the list for all the theatre things. J One awesome experience was getting to see an open rehearsal for a new piece that is in the works.

That was right after the opening night for Floor Wars, a year long, multifaceted competition between the floor. I am on the 8^th floor, and our theme is Super 8 (superheroes). Another part of that competition was open mic night, where each floor put on an act. We decided to do a skit. Now, if you knew me in high school, you would know my view on student skits for competitions like this. I helped early on, through the years began to just act in them, and then finally I separated myself from the skits altogether. They just never ended well. And while I can say that Super 8’s skit was a lot better than anything from high school, the thing about being here is that people remember the skit the next day, even 2 weeks later. They will bring it back up. Consider yourself warned.

It might seem like I have a lot of time, but this past weekend (one I will fondly remember as the one where almost everything needed to be explained, for instance I built a fort and put Remi's phone in the fridge because I didn’t know how to silence it, and Tessa went to Bible Camp in Dubai) was the first that I really got to hang out with people at all outside of studying and class. We (and when I say ‘we’ I mean Farah but I was there), hosted an Arabic coffee party, and I got to have some nice conversations with people about things not related to grades, midterms, or J-Term.

Ah. J-Term. It is a class that we take for 3 weeks intensively in January. There is a ranking process, and I got my 3^rd choice, a creative writing course called Tales of Love and Death. I know it will be an awesome class, and I have always wanted to take a creative writing course but there were always schedule conflicts, but the process as to who got what course didn’t seem super logical. Still a bit disappointed that I didn’t get into the photojournalism class, but I will be learning vicariously through my friends who did get in.

Right now the Abu Dhabi Film Festival is going on. I have seen 2 films, Tahrir 2011 on the Egyptian revolution and The Temple, a commentary through narrative on faith and power. Both were amazing, and something that reminded me that I wasn’t at home is that people react to the movies here- very much like in a concert after someone finishes a solo, there is some clapping, the same happens here when an idea resonates with the audience.

Originally I was planning on going to Nepal during Eid break, but I didn’t realize that the amazingly low price tickets were part of a sale. This ended up working out in my favor, because I am going on a dhow snorkeling trip in Oman, and then because my friend and I will still have those visas, we are flying into Muscat, Oman for a few days (because of frequent flier miles the tickets cost a total of $35 USD, which is nothing compared to the cost of a bus both ways from Dubai to Muscat which takes 8 hours (time and $ cost). Then we are coming back after around 4 days, hanging around Abu Dhabi, and then going to a Brittany Spears concert.

Yes. You read that right J A lot of the students here won tickets, and I am going. Seeing as a lot of my cassettes and my first CD was Brittany Spears, it will be cool/interesting/kinda weird to see her in concert years later.

I was going to write a bunch about Arabic, but the summary is: I am slowly getting a hang of the language, I can write about me and my family and friends with limited use of a dictionary, and our class went out to Arabic breakfast this morning after my roommate decided to also get Arabic breakfast food (they were both different, and both AWESOME). I don’t love ‘traditional’ breakfast food, and so this was really good. And my class is really fun to be around, so it was a nice, non-stressful class the day after a quiz.

Off to the last capoeira class with this group. I have been here 7 weeks already. Which is weird to think about. 

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