Wednesday, March 9, 2016:

Another fun-filled day comes to an end here in Dubai, city of.....torrential downpour!

Yes, that's right, folks, it rained here in this brand new city and the whole town shut down because they have no sewer system to hold the rain, so it piled up feet high in the streets and cars got stuck everywhere.

But, let's start at the beginning.  Mehemmed overslept, so I had African breakfast alone.  Livers and beans, eggs, tomatoes, hot links, sweet rolls, hot milk with oats and instant coffee.   At 8 o'clock I woke up sleeping man and we walked a few blocks and hopped on the Metro (subway) to the Dubai Mall.  There we met a boy who glommed onto us for about an hour.  He was a high school boy, born and raised in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, but of Lebanese descent.  He was a globe-trotting boy, affable and smiling, with oodles of stories to tell.  He, like most people around here, speaks five languages.
We went outside in the rain and took turns taking pictures of ourselves under the Burg Khalifa Tower (the highest building in the world!-named after the king).  When the boy left, Mehemmed and I went to the world's largest aquarium and were wowed by the tunnel we walked through with sharks and stingrays- and divers swimming all around us.  

When we finished that it was time to go back to the hotel on the subway to pick up our luggage.


At precisely noon, Mehemmed and I checked out of the Florida Hotel, paid our hotel bills and heaved our luggage into the first cab that popped up.  Little did we know that because of the unexpected and totally debilitating rains that ensued, we would be 1 hour late for our teaching appointment at the GEMs World Academy.  (It took us two hours to get there because traffic, again, was completely back-to-back for the entire 16 km way.   It should have taken us a half an hour.)

So when we arrive at the school,  streams of cars of parents are pulling their students out of the school.  The school looked, as Mehemmed remarked, like a trade center.  The main building was closed.  Cars were backed up and double-parked everywhere.  It was pandemonium.  Some guy told us the school had shut down (this is a school with 2,000 children) and all parents had been contacted to take their children home asap due to the mounting water pile up on the expressways and even minor roads.  When we told him who we had an appointment with, he led us through a side door of the next building, through a courtyard with an inch of water to wade through and into the main foyer of the school.  International flags hung everywhere.  There was a coffee bar.  Gold spiral staircases beckoned us from across gleaming floors....but everybody was running around willy nilly, shelter skelter, as if a nuclear threat were imposing.  Children dashed about, ushered by hustling parents, briskly dragging their offspring to the nearest open doors.  (These were blond children; in an Arab country.)  Teachers fluttered about, answering questions, advising people that the school would be closed tomorrow, too.  Pure chaos.    We found our way to the woman with whom we had an appointment.   She, stellar and lovely, sat behind a desk with two telephones in her ears,  people handing her soggy notes, parents questioning her,  kids running in circles....and us.

"Should we wait, or leave?" I inquired, "And by the way, I'm Jacki.  It's nice to meet you."

"I'm kind of busy,"  she kindly remarked as two more staff came to her with cell phones and wet notes bearing phone numbers.   "The whole school is closing."

"Does this happen often?"  I asked.

"This has never happened before,"  she replied.

Mehemmed and I looked at her, still unsure why a couple of inches of rain had caused such turbulence in this opulent landscape.

"The roofs.....the walls....they're leaking,"  she said.

We agreed to contact her later,  took a few pictures of the bedlam, grabbed a few brochures, and headed out.  Our taxi driver, another Pakistani (this time whom had excellent taste in music with which he would later entertain us in his cab) trailed behind us.  We still had our luggage in his cab.

Now What?

It was 2:00 p.m.  Let's go to Rachel's, the woman with whom I would be staying for the next five nights.   That ride- a mere 6 km away, took us ...........get this:  FIVE HOURS.

Mehemmed vacillated between keeping his spirits up, sighing, and saying he was bored.
He is a sweet man, but now his whole free day would be taken up sitting in non-moving traffic, until 6 p.m., when we reached Rachel's.

In the cab, Mehemmed reached back over the seat, dug around in his frayed black backpack and pulled out a magnet with the word Azerbaijan on it.  "I brought something for you,"  he said, "I didn't know it was going to be your birthday."

"It is the perfect birthday present!"  I exclaimed, truly meaning it.

I pulled out a little silver pouch I had bearing white pearls and handed it to him.  "These are for your mother,"  I said.

"They are beautiful," he grinned from ear to ear.

Then the conversation got really good with our cab driver Sadiq.  He told us the real inside story, the nitty gritty, the under-cover reality of everyday life between the genders, which, of course cannot be repeated in any shape or form in this blog, because it is family oriented.  But I can say, it went on for several hours.  Mehemmed and I learned a lot about Arabic culture, Pakistani culture, Saudi culture, Jordanian culture, and more.  We had discussions about the Islamic faith (which both of them practiced),  Protestants vs. Catholics, Hindu worship and more.  It was quite lively, to say the least, although between the seven languages being spoken in the cab, there WERE times when no one had any idea what the other person had just said.  And Sadiq, never wanting to displease, would often launch into a vast diatribe to answer the simplest question which just required a "yes" or "no."  Never wanting to say no, he once exclaimed, "OF COURSE....maybe."   And this is how we spent the afternoon of my third day in Dubai.

It lead around to the fact that Saudis (and Iranians) still cut the hand off the perpetrator of theft.  In Saudi Arabia no woman  is allowed to drive, while in Dubai, only women may have tinted windows (for privacy).

So we got to Rachael's, went for a mile walk in the dark down a road with no sidewalk, ate Turkish food at some outdoor cafe, walked a while with another wanderer, got in a cab with a LOUD TALKING Urdu message, and now I'm going to bed.