First and Second Days

Well, it's been almost 36 hours since I arrived in the UAE. Things have been going pretty well so far. The heat here is pretty much unbearable, but Kendal (student from AU, person I traveled with) and I are getting by. We have to walk a lot of places, especially on campus, and the walks can be brutal. I don't see a lot of other people outside, so I wonder how everyone else gets around.

The campus is beautiful (I have a few pictures up). My room is really nice and includes a bathroom and small kitchenette. All the residential halls staff have been really nice, though they have a lot more rules here than at AU. There's curfew (midnight Sunday-Wednesday, 1:00 AM Thursday-Saturday), and I have to sign in every night which is a lot to remember. Every building is air-conditioned quite well which is nice, and I can control the A/C in my room. On campus there are a lot of Western food places like Starbucks, Burger King, Pizza Hut, KFC, and Dunkin Donuts. There's also Mexican and Chinese food and two mini-marts to buy basic food and supplies. Much to my disappointment, though I was able to buy pasta and ketchup, both items taste extremely different than the ones in the US, and I'm not sure if my taste buds can make that drastic an adjustment. Pizza Hut and the Chinese food place have been good so far, and I have Rice Krispies, Chipsohoy, and milk that is suprisingly very edible.

I haven't been here very long, so I haven't done much exploring yet, but Kendal and I managed to get into Sharjah on Thursday to buy some food. The whole trip was quite and experience. Every taxi we called was busy. Since we didn't (and still don't) have cell phones, we had to make all the calls on a school phone that can only call locally. When we ran out of local taxi cabs, the residential advisors were nice enough to call some non-local taxis for us with their phones. Eventually we got one, though he took almost two hours to show up. We ended up going to a very large mall to go to a store called Carrefour (French Walmart type store). Picture your average Walmart with about 2,000 people of all kinds running around in it and you will understand what shopping at Carrefour is like. Regardless, we managed to get the bare necessities we needed to get us through until the next trip and then went outside. The mall has a pre-arranged taxi area to get a taxi; unfortunately, the line can get very long, and we had to wait for well over an hour in the heat for our turn for a taxi to come. The workers there were all very nice, handing out water, and ensuring no one cuts the line. Still, it was a hassle to wait so long, especially with cold milk getting warmer by the minute. As fate would have it, after waiting so long for a taxi, as soon as we got one, more than five other taxis appeared all at once (we had been previously averaging about one taxi every five minutes). After fighting traffic, we finally got back, and I soon went to bed.

On Friday, I met up with Kendal again, and we walked around campus for a little bit. A lot of stores are closed on Friday, including several food stores on campus. We tried to go into Dubai to go shopping at the Mall of the Emirates but were then informed that we should go to new student orientation at 5:00. Given the unpredictability of the taxi situation, there was no way we could go and make it back in time, so we stayed. The orientation was more centered around freshman, but we were able to meet a lot of interesting and very nice people. After the session was over, we walked around campus since the temperatures were now in the more bearable range of the 90s (earlier we had been walking around when it was 104 degrees with a heat index of 122). I was able to take some pictures and discovered that this campus has a good amount of stray cats. Aside from those cats and a few birds, very little animal life appears to exist around here (no bugs!).

Tomorrow, Kendal and I are going to try to go to the Mall of the Emirates and our school bookstore to get our books for classes. Sunday is the international student orientation which will probably be much more informative than today's new student orientation. We are also signed up to go on a Sharjah city tour and a Dubai city tour later next week with the school. So far things have been very enjoyable and I have been having an excellent time. More to come!