Big foot...

Just a warning... If you are a woman, and your feet are larger than a size 8, most stores in Abu Dhabi will not have shoes that fit you.  They will also look at you either in awe, or with pity, wondering how you managed to get those big clown feet into their store without knocking over all the displays.

I know.  I've been there.

My name is Lynn, and I have ginormous feet.  US women's size 10 to be exact.  UK size 42, which actually does sound kind of ginormous.  And it's not like I knew that 42 was the UK conversion for US 10.  The first store I went into had to look that up, because apparently no one has EVER come into the store looking for shoes that big before.

I was truly amazed when looking for shoes for Hannah.  She's 13.  She's 5'8".  She wears an 8.  Sometimes an 8.5.  Apparently she has ginormous feet, too.  It got to the point where we wouldn't even look at the shoes in the store we entered, we'd just ask if they had the size we needed.

Size 8.  Really?

There are close to a bazillion malls here.  For a place with so many malls, maybe they need to have just one store somewhere that sells shoes to people who haven't had their feet bound?

No photos of my feet in this post, because I'm guessing you would run away screaming in horror from the sheer size.

The first time I ever got lost in Dubai...

There I was... all alone.. driving to Dubai to watch one of Hannah's volleyball games.  I had already prepared myself for the drive by printing out the directions from Google maps, and by using the GPS on my old android phone.  I should probably let you know that I had been a licensed UAE driver for, like, 5 days.  What could possibly go wrong?

First, Google maps directions over here are ridiculously vague.  Not really any street names to speak of.  Honestly, the first four directions on my way out of my apartment building were:

1. Head north.
2. Turn left.
3. Turn left.
4. Slight right.

I'm not even kidding.  At least I had the GPS telling me when to turn left.  Most of the time.  It also gave me extremely helpful directions whenever I needed to enter a roundabout:  slight right, then turn left.  Wow... thanks for that.  I'm not even going to go into how people have a tendency to drive like lunatics here... that's another post for another day.

Anyway, I make it all the way to Dubai, and, no lie... I am three minutes from my destination.  I'm so proud of myself that I've made it this far.  I would have been able to see the school I was going to had I known what to look for.  I'm pretty sure you can guess what happened next.  I missed a turn.  My trusty GPS failed to tell me "slight left."  And I couldn't actually pick up the printout from Google and read it right then.

The next thing I know... I'm completely lost in a city I've never been to before.  A huge one, at that.  One where lots of people speak English, but most of it is broken.

I ended up calling my husband.  This is sort of how that conversation went:

•  Me:  (crying) I missed a turn and I don't have any idea where I am and my GPS lost it's signal and I don't even know what to do.
• Him:  Woman.  You can't see when you're crying.  Find a safe place to pull over and call me right back.
•  Me:  (still crying) I've been driving around lost for over 20 minutes, and I haven't found a safe place to pull over yet.  I'll call you back.

The rest of the conversation we had when I called him back is pretty much meaningless.  I stopped crying and eventually found a place to pull over.  I even found the school I needed to get to.

It probably seems a little strange to be so worried about getting lost.  When you're in a country where streets aren't marked well, and people drive like complete crazy people, and there's not always places to turn around, and there's entirely too much construction going on at one time, and you've been warned that one wrong turn can take you 50km out of your way... possibly into the desert... you kind of get a little freaked out.  Anyway, that was a really long run-on sentence.

One thing you do here is take small victories whenever you can find them.  I found where I needed to be, despite driving 30km in a giant circle, arriving at my destination 20 minutes late with smudged mascara.  Score!

Oh, and just so I can post a photo... because blog posts are always more fun with a photo, and I didn't think to take one while I was there because apparently I was too busy crying... here is the school I was driving to:

 

Photo from Gems World Academy

Nice, huh?

Not quite PRIME, but pretty darn good...

One of the things I knew I'd really miss when we left the US was our Amazon Prime membership.  It allowed me to purchase many things I probably didn't need but thought I did without ever having to leave my house.  And then I'd receive it in two days.  Because, you know, I probably couldn't have survived if I didn't receive it that fast.  And then my loving husband pretty much sold all of it on craigslist.  And then he wrote a book about it.  And now I have to hear all about what an incredible author he is.

The point is... I love Amazon Prime.  Alas, two-day shipping no longer applies to me.  Turns out it was only five-day shipping to the UAE.  That's pretty impressive, in my opinion. 

 

It cost a bunch, but we got what we needed.  Or maybe we didn't really need it.  But we got what we wanted and couldn't find (yet) over here.

Leaving on jet plane (part 2)...

I figured I should get this part written before I forgot about the really fun parts of it.  This is part 2 of our trip all the way from the US to Abu Dhabi.  When we left off, we were sitting in O'Hare Aiport, and we had just finished our $100 dinner while sitting on the floor near our gate... waiting anxiously to board our flight.

The airline first announced that Business Class was now boarding.  At that point in time, I kid you not, I have never seen anything remotely like what I saw.  Virtually all of the people that were waiting in the gate area... a couple hundred, I'm sure, crowded into line in the walkway.  And when I say crowded, it's because I can't even come close to thinking of a word to describe it.  And I use the term "line" very loosely. It was seriously like cattle being herded.  At that point in time, I had serious questions about how we were ever going to be able to board the plane in a timely fashion, let alone find any overhead storage space. 

One thing I've learned over here is that there are some cultures that can not even comprehend the concept of personal space.  AT ALL.  They will seriously be all up on your back while you're waiting in line.  I often wonder if, for the lack of a better way to describe it, someone ripped a really stinky SBD (silent but deadly) fart, if a little more space could be created.  Alas, I can't accomplish that task on demand, so I may never know. Anyway, there are tons of people waiting in a huge, jumbled mass that doesn't even come close to resembling a line, and the gate attendants are literally SHOUTING for people to form a line and allow the people whose row numbers have been called to board.  Not a chance.  I'm not sure if it was just a language barrier, or if people just really didn't care.  I seriously thought there might be a revolt.  They called for families with children 5 and under to board.  Praise God.  Seriously.  And then I sort of internally freaked out trying to figure out how we were going to get through all those people.  Against all of my better judgement, I decided that since we were already sitting on the ground reasonably close to the front of the herd... we would just enter at the front of the line.  Turns out, it worked, and we were able to leave the herd behind. 

We found our seats... we had the four in the center section, and the aisle seat right next to them.  I was worried when I saw our seat assignments online that since there was a wall (bulkhead?) behind us, we wouldn't be able to recline our seats at all.  I was pleasantly surprised to find we could.  The girls were also thrilled to find little pouches in their seat pockets. 

The little pouch contained a sleep mask, some earplugs, a pair of socks, and a toothbrush with a single-use thingamajig of toothpaste. I can not even describe how awesome they thought these were.  Until the flight attendants dropped off a little activity bag for each of the girls.  It included things like cards, a puzzle, colored pencils, a game, a coloring book, and stickers.  Way more awesome.  Even more exciting, though, was that THESE little beauties were on the back of EVERY seat.

Photo found here

 

 

Seriously?  Best. Thing.  EVER.  They were entertained for the vast majority of the 14-hour flight.  There were movie choices for adults or children... there were even games that they could play with the little phone/handset thing.  With the exception of a few times I had to grab coloring books and crayons out of someone's backpack, these kept my children completely entertained.

 

No one ate dinner.  I don't even know what it was, except that it was "vegetarian" because they ran out of chicken, and no one wanted fish or lamb.  The flight attendants felt sorry for us, I think, and were sweet enough to find other snacks and stuff to feed the girls. 

 

Everything went well for about the next 8 hours.  For some reason, my children had the insane ability to stay awake for the entire day up until this point.  As they started to fall asleep one after the other, things got really pleasant.  For a little while.  Then, bless their little hearts, they were just so uncomfortable to be sitting and trying to sleep that Hannah and I tried to come up with creative ways to keep them happy.  I would hold one on my lap (yeah, there was so much room for that!)  Hannah would trade her seat with one of them.  At one point in time, the two littlest were laying (or is it lying?  I can never remember that rule) next to each other in on the seats in between us. 

 

About an hour before we arrived, I called Caleb from the airplane.  That was fun... I was trying to be as quick as I could because it cost $6 a minute.  He had told me before we left to go ahead and get the internet on the plane so we could keep in touch while we were in the air.  Only... no internet on the plane.  I HAD to speak with him because he was hoping to have our preliminary residence visas waiting for us at the airport, and I would have to have them stamped at immigration, along with our passports.  I needed to know where to pick them up.  So I tried to be really quiet while talking to my husband from something like 35,000 feet in the air. 

 

Anyway, we made it.  Finally.  We got off the plane, got through customs and immigration, got our luggage, and found Caleb.  We walked outside, and I gasped.  It was so hot and humid, it literally took my breath away. 

 

After about 10 minutes in the humidity, I decided that I would not be able to have bangs in Abu Dhabi.  So I'm growing them out.