The flights were a bit long, but not long enough for some of you to never come and visit! We haven't really gotten a chance to enjoy the beach resort we are staying at, which is a bummer as we have been super busy trying to organized.

I haven't started teaching yet but will do so on Sunday. The UAE working week is Sunday to Thursday which means that technically there are two Friday nights to go out and explore the Abu Dhabi nightlife. So yeah, we've been doing an orientation all week and it is really hard to think of everything. I have had to choose things to care about and things not to care about. For instance, I chose to care about teaching related matters like procedures for failing students or cultural information for male employees (never touch female students, ever!) and chose not to care about the reference section of the library or the general overview of the secondary school system of the UAE.

Teaching will be difficult, I will be teaching academic English to army officer cadets. I have heard that there are a lot of classroom management issues to deal with and I have been told that some of the first lessons will be teaching students English phrases like "Ahmed, stop kicking Mahmood". Repeat ten times. There is low motivation and little desire to complete homework (or any work) so I am already missing my Japanese students. Will I regret leaving Japan? No, see the next paragraph!
Our apartment is huge, absolutely enormous. The living room alone is 10m x 4m and then we have 3 other bedrooms. I think we'll lock the doors to two of the bedrooms and just attempt to furnish the rooms we'll actually use at first. The apartment building has a lot of restaurants around it and optometrists. We are in the optometrist area, others are near the plumbing supplies area.... Glad we didn't get assigned an apartment near the car stereo area. Our apartment buidling has a pool, squash court, sauna and steam room. Not many other places have these so we are quite lucky.

The traffic in Abu Dhabi is terrible, horrendous! Drivers are crazy and don't bother looking out when turning and forget about using an indicator to turn. The rules of the road and the social laws are completely different. Taxis are pretty cheap so I'll be taking one of those to and from work each day.

The people I have met so far have been really nice, although I haven't actually met any Emirates just yet. I have met a few Arabic people from Syria, Jordan and Palestine. I don't actually expect to meet Emirates besides my students because although they've opened their country to foreigners, they apparently live a secluded lifestyle. There are rules for them and rules for the foreigners, there are ways of doing things for them and different ways for us. I'm sure I'll learn about them as i go about.