Summer trip home 2013

I will fly out on Monday, August 5 to DC.  I will stay with my niece Gina and her family for five days and fly out early on August 10 for Iowa.  I will stay until the day after Labor Day.  I have a direct Chicago to Abu Dhabi flight.

So I get Etihad from Abu Dhabi to DC and Etihad from Chicago to Abu Dhabi.  When you have to spend 16 hours on a flight it is good to be on the best airline for it.  Yippee!

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Being the geek I am, I check four websites almost every day:  Expedia, Travelocity, American Airlines and Cleartrip.  On the weekends I check several more.

For two months I consistently saw the flights I wanted at roughly Dh 6000 ($1600).  All was good... I didn't want to book until I knew for sure of my dates.  Two weeks ago all good flights on Etihad disappeared.  Not a little higher in price, but simply disappeared.

I panicked.  I've researched countless other options.  All would cost $3-400 more and have some long layovers.

Miraculously, the good flights became available again last night so I grabbed them as quickly as possible.

Take the good days with the bad

June 2013 will be a month I will remember until Alzheimer's sets in.  Every single day for the first 12 days I got bad news.  Friend in a car accident, friend held in jail for hitting a Pakistani on a bicycle, a person I respected in Nepal killed in Thailand.  Seriously, bad news every single day for 12 days.

I also learned that the class that I thought I would be teaching this summer - strategic management - was not going to happen.  I felt screwed and had no problem telling my new boss that I felt screwed.  I think I might have yelled it.  I yelled at him on June 9th, 10th, and 11th.

So I was very surprised on June 12th to get an email, "Could you see me at 9AM?"

His proposal?  We co-teach the summer course.  

I accepted.   

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I am beyond-the-moon happy.  I know every one of the students.  I know the good students and I know the pieces of shit.  This is a class I have wanted to teach for all of my time here.  In less than two hours of this appointment I have received an email asking, "You won't be using the testbank, will you?"

Awesome.  Life is good.

Meet the cat

A few weeks ago I came home to find a very scared kitten in front of my door.  I took her in and thanks to some food and kitty litter from a friend she seemed quite at home.

She loved nesting in a pot where I had repeated killed plants.

I put signs around my compound.  No leads.  She was in heat and switched from going, "Meow" to "Mee-row-wer."  The local vet charged me Dh 1300 ($350) to have her spayed and get her shots.  It seemed high and later found it was more than twice the price I should have been charged.

The next door neighbors thought they'd be able to take her... but after two weeks of trying their other cat just wouldn't accept her.

Exasperated, I posted on a local animal welfare page on FB.  Less than two hours later I got a call from the cat's real owners.  They came around to get her.  The son offered up, "Yeah, she got out when Dad was drunk and forgot to shut the door."

Mom chimed in, "She hadn't tried to run before but the day before this happened she went into heat.  That night was her chance to go on the hunt."

Then, most astonishingly, they insisted on reimbursing me.  I said, "Look, I did this out of the goodness of my heart. If you want to pay some or pay half that would be great, but not necessary."

They insisted on reimbursing me fully.

This is as close to a Hallmark story as my life gets.

Student presentations

Presenting in English is hard for non-native speakers.

So I had to stifle a laugh when a student used this picture:

Too bad she didn't use common sense.

Later, another student talked about her internship by writing, "I learned to toke with my colleagues."

In the US I'm sure there are colleagues who enjoy toking with each other.  Here I will assume she "talk."

International Day

One of the reasons I love living here.

Today I had a group of friends over for brunch.  In this picture there is an American, a Canadian, an Australian, a New Zealander and mother/daughter Brits.

I left them in my apartment to continue having a good time as I met up with with two Afghani students for lunch.  (I didn't mean to schedule both on the same day.)  I wish I had a picture from that but suffice to say it was the hottest lunch I've ever had - over 100 degrees where we were eating.

Later I met up with two Pakistani guys who often cut my hair/shave.  Today was supposed to be a day off - I had planned to take them up the nearby mountain, but their boss decided today was not a day off.

And tonight I've been talking with a friend from Egypt.

A day spent with people from seven different countries?

It would be 8 if I included a brief conversation on FB with my Sanjaya in Nepal.

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In my conversation with Abdelrahman (the Egyptian) we were discussing how much people change or don't change.  I honestly don't think I've changed that much even though the idea of coming here scared the shit out of me.  That was fear of the unknown.  I'd like to think I'm still pretty much the same person but with new experiences.

When it rains, it pours

At the last minute my boss decided that he would teach the course I was planning to teach this summer.  He informed me that the old course I teach *might* be put on the schedule.

It's June 4 and I don't know if I will be teaching summer school.

So not happy.

Depressing, depressing day

The past month has gone much better than I could have expected... But today, wow... today was not good.  The first story is upsetting, but hardly surprising.   (If you don't like long posts just skip to the second story below the ****.)  The second story... well, read it.

First, in my classes I give three quizzes and only the best two count.  My best student this semester showed up to take quiz 3 and I said, "Why are you here?  You pretty much had the full mark on the first two quizzes."  He said he wanted practice for the final.  I watched him take the online exam.  The system automatically scrambles the questions so no two students get the questions in the same order.  I saw the questions he was getting and they did not match what he was supposed to get.  There were 26 students in the room and 26 taking the test.  He was clearly logged in as another student and the other student was logged in as him.

I typed on my phone, "I don't know whose exam you are taking but I will figure it out."  I placed it in front of him and he typed back... "Okay I can let you know."  By that time I had it figured out.

That students cheat is certainly nothing new to me.  That they take it to the extremes of actually doing another student's test is also not surprising.  I don't even know why it upsets me so much.  Too many of colleagues literally avert their eyes to "miss" the cheating going on right in front of them.

As the class was over he followed me and tried to explain/justify what he did.  I stopped, looked at him and flatly said, "It is best that I don't talk to you right now."

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Story #2
Following this I had lunch with a guy whose story I can't tell tonight.  I simply don't have the energy but I can summarize the end:

"I feel nothing. I wish I could die.  If someone killed me I would be thankful but then the cost of transporting the body back to Sri Lanka would be an even bigger burden on my family.  Is it too much to ask to be killed and dumped in the desert?  After all I've been through I don't even feel pressure anymore.  I hear the sad stories from home and I don't cry.  On the outside I smile but inside I am dead.  I am 26 years old and I have created such a burden for my family that I know they'd be better off if I had not been born.  I came to the Emirates 3 months ago. Just before I left my mother told me when she was pregnant with me she went to have the pregnancy ended but the nurse gave her the wrong dose of medicine.  I was not even supposed to have been born and everyone would be better off if I hadn't been born."

How, exactly, did I meet this guy? He works in the mall next door and I asked him to lunch because he always has a great smile.

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Today was Day 56 of working out. 8 weeks down... and today was pretty much the hardest day to feel the energy to do it.

Working out

This week I hit day 50 of working out.  I used the elliptical for an hour and burned 735 calories.  My goal:  100 days.  Day 100 will be July 17th - my brother's birthday. 

I definitely feel better.  So far it's worth it.