Week 3: It's all relative

I walked to work this morning at about 7:45 and was sweating to an uncomfortable degree by the time I reached my office – only about ¾ of a mile in total and about half of that in the shade. Wow, it’s hot and getting hotter. It’s about 8 pm as I write this and weather.com says it’s still a muggy 91 degrees. So, I suppose that relative to a sunny August day at around 3 pm and in direct sun, it’s not too bad. But relative to what I’m used to for June 1^st after sundown, it’s hot. That’s the thing though, isn’t it? It’s all relative.

I got to thinking about relativities last week as I walked past the construction site across from my hotel. It was early in the morning and the crew of construction workers was showing up by the busload. I saw a handful of them digging around in the bushes in the median in the street and chuckling in a slightly amused, slightly embarrassed way when they noticed that I was watching. I wondered what in the heck they were up to – elbows deep in bushes - until I saw one of them pull a yellow helmet out of the brush. They’d all hid their helmets in the bushes the night before and were laughing as they dug them out before heading to work! I chuckled too and thought how at ease and comfortable they all seemed. Most of these workers come from Asia (Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, etc), are way from their families most of the year, live in poor housing far from Dubai, and commute over an hour a day to work under the sun and in the dust. People say the reason temperatures in Dubai frequently reach 49 celcius (about 120 Fahrenheit) but rarely reach 50 is because by law the workers get a day off at 50 degrees, so “coincidentally” that doesn’t happen much. Sounds terrible to me. And so I wondered – what must their other alternatives be such that a labor-intensive job in the heat of the desert sounds relatively good? That I don’t know.

This weekend I split my time between Dubai and Fujairah. Weekends in Dubai are Friday and Saturday which is very strange relative to the US, but relative to the Thursday-Friday weekend in Saudi Arabia and Oman…well, at least we get one day of overlap!

On Friday morning I went to the famous Mall of the Emirates, which is a huge shopping mall relative to Iowa’s largest mall in Coralville.

Mall Lobby

Yay for toy stores

It’s also home to “Ski Dubai,” the indoor ski resort I mentioned in Week 1. I didn’t try the skiing just yet, but I did check out the slope. Relative to the monstrous mountains of the Western US, it’s pretty puny. But, relative to the big hill in Wisconsin where I’ve also skied the last 2 years, it actually looks pretty cool. Not too shabby for desert skiing!

Friday afternoon I drove ~2 hours to the other coast of the UAE and for a 1-night stay near Fujairah at the “Sandy Beach Motel.”

Photos crossing to the other coast:

Had I gone there 2 weeks ago, I probably would have thought it was great. But, relative to the 5-star resort in we stayed at in Oman last weekend, this place was a drop in the bucket.

The rooms, pool and beach were nice but sadly some sort of oil spill down the coast left a bunch of blotchy oil spots throughout the water. I walked out of the ocean with a big glob of oil stuck to my leg – disgusting. I even saw one woman with a sticky glob on her head. I was only partly amused in thinking this was a trade off of living in an oil-rich country…

Friday night I sat at the pool bar to have a drink and some dinner. Some old guy across the bar badgered the waiter into letting him give me a drink on his tab despite my repeated refusal. I couldn’t tell what he was saying in Arabic, but it must have been much more abusive that my polite declinations in English because the waiter always gave in to the old guy and not to me. I guess relative to what I’ve experienced in the US and in other places this was, well, normal. Frankly, everywhere I go there is an old guy trying to buy the young girls drinks and some unlucky waiter or waitress stuck in the middle!

Saturday I went scuba diving off Fujairah and it was FANTASTIC, even relative to the dives I’ve done in Hawaii and Puerto Rico. The first dive was to a ship wreck about 90 feet underwater. There was a school of at least a 500 fish hovering around and many other individual fish, as well. The water felt cold as we descended so deep, but I realized as I quickly got used to it that it was not cold at all. It only felt cold relative to the surface water, which felt like a HOT TUB as we came back up. The second dive was really shallow – about 15 feet – over a big wall of rock and coral. We saw tons of fish, eels, 4 turtles and 3 sharks!

Aside from weekend adventures, the work here is going fine. We are working hard but not too hard and the team is getting along great. I guess I would say all relativities aside, so far, so good.