A few firsts.

September 17, 2011

Oh man… just a few weeks in, and I’m already losing the consistency in my journaling. I’ll try to be more diligent. The rest of the week was spent finishing up my classrooms, with a few more meetings thrown here and there. As I was mainly finished with my decorating, I was pretty bored and very glad to see 2:00 pm roll around on Thursday. I had bus duty one afternoon with the 1^st graders (lining them up by bus number and taking them to their buses), and I signed my full contract again. (This one was for the school’s records. The last one had been for the Ministry of Education or the Ministry of Labor or something, and I had signed that back when I did my blood tests last weekend at Public Health.)

Side note: Apparently you do the health exam every 3 years when you work here, which is no big deal. It’s very basic. “Do you have any health or skin disorders?” No. “Are you pregnant?” No. *Stamps card*. “Please move to the next station”. Next they drew a blood sample, which in itself is really no big deal, but I was still terrified from my last blood donation experience when I fainted. It went by quickly, my card was stamped again, and I moved on to receive a chest x-ray, and then my health exam was finished. So simple!

Moving along now… We went out with the group Thursday night, and I tried out a church Friday morning. It’s pretty close to my school, and I’m sure that when the weather cools down, I could walk there. There were probably 200 people in the English service I went to, with one right before, and about a zillion services throughout the week in other languages. It was a nice service, but I don’t know if it’ll be my regular church or not. It was very traditional, with hymns and a Bible-lesson sermon. Aside from missing my friends and family, yesterday was the first time I’ve been truly homesick for something: I miss the Stirring. I hope I can find something a little more contemporary, but if not, I’ll continue on at this church and supplement with the weekly Stirring podcast.

I went with Tracy to the boys’ school to get a letter from the Business Office Manager to the bank saying that we can open accounts even though our visas are pending. He had some people in his office, so we sat in the waiting room for a while. After about 20 minutes had passed, and 10 people had gone in (seeming to interrupt the work he was doing with the other people) he asked if we needed him. When we told him what we needed, he was like, “Why you not come in then?!” It’s a different attitude than home. If 10 different people had interrupted a business manager in a meeting at home, he’d be irritated. It’s normal here. Well, lesson learned. If we had known, we wouldn’t have waited so long, and would’ve made it to the bank before they closed. (The banks here have seriously the most ridiculous hours… They close at 12:30 on Saturdays, and at 1:30 the rest of the week. I don’t even know if they’re open on Fridays.) We missed the bank by like 5 minutes!!

Tracy wanted to go down to Zayed Sport City (not too far from our place) to watch the Ireland v. Australia World Cup Rugby match, so went down there to eat lunch and watch the game in the Clubhouse. My first rugby match! Let me tell you… it’s very confusing, but pretty interesting. Tracy’s going to teach me about rugby, and I’m going to teach her about American football. W00t! Now I just need to find a place that shows NFL games, and we’re set.