Ramadan is coming

And Foreigner is getting fat.

Ok, maybe not fat, but definitely chubbier than I used to be and decidedly more squishy than I’d like to be.

Undoubtedly, a part of the reason for this is the canteen at work. The food is goooooood. It’s not amazing, sadly, but it is good considering it’s canteen food and cheapity cheap cheap cheap.

Every day there are at least three different kinds of salad, soup, a couple of curries (which are made with proper spices and everything, I crunched down on a cardamom pod the other day) and various other “regional” dishes that cater for all the nationalities that work where I work. It’s pretty groovy and very difficult not to eat loads.

They also do deserts. They have a whole display case of deserts that look a-may-zing. Cakes and mousses and doughnuts and… this




What this is I’m not entirely sure. Maybe a different angle will help…




Nope. Doesn’t help.

In the office, we agreed that the most likely answer was a frog, or frog-like creature, that had been run over. Note the bulging red eyes…



… and the delightful addition of cherries in the mouth, which I like to think of as the guts being squeezed out while the poor creature was mercilessly squished




What it definitely is, is some made up of scraps of pastry that were quite possibly left over from making something (or somethings) else and while this appeals to certain waste-not-want-not sensibilities, I cannot help but question the sanity of the mind that conjured up and then executed this delightful sweet-treat.

AHEM! Moving on.

So yes, Ramadan is coming, and in fact might already be swinging by the time I get round to posting this entry* (am so excited, got a friend coming to stay this weekend). What with O being Muslim flavour I am quite used to the whole fasting thing, and even kept him company by attempting to fast myself last year, but the one thing I am sure of is that Ramadan is going to be a very different experience in Abu Dhabi than it is in the UK.

Some things that I do know:

> Eating/drinking/smoking when in public is out of the question (not that the smoking is an issue for me anymore, 2 months and 14 days without a cigarette today!).

> Restaurants, cafes and other places of consumption that are open to public view will be closed between sun-up and sun-down.

> Shops and things will have odd hours, but what these are I don’t yet know.

> Getting a cab anywhere at any time is going to be EVEN MORE of a nightmare than it is now (woe, woe is me!).

> There are going to be massive Iftar (break of fast) feasts laid out across the city. Hotels will charge and mosques will not. Anyone is welcome to these and I cannot wait to try one out. Iftar tents will be accompanied by music and shisha tents. I imagine it to be like a big, month long party.

> Night becomes day with everyone coming out after breaking fast and staying up late late late.

I’m looking forward to this, my first Ramadan in a Muslim country. I’m going to try fasting again and see how I go without drinking in the heat (by far the worse out of not eating vs. not drinking).

It will undoubtedly be an experience and one which I will, of course, tell all and sundry who are bored enough to be reading my ramblings here.

And don't forget! Run-over frog-like creature sees and watches you...!




*Ramadan actually starts on Saturday, so Ramadan Kareem everyone!

The end of a looooong chapter

At the end of last month I went back to London to attend my graduation. Along with many other “graduands” that month I had my moment where I walked across a stage, shook a hand and sat back down as a “graduate”.

However, this was not my first time. Oh no. Not for the first time did my poor parents have to sit through a multitude of boring inspirational speeches and a long list of unpronounceable names (miraculously pronounced correctly – I have always wondered just how many days the announcer spends practicing those names) just to see those few fleeting seconds that stand to mark the time, effort and – lest we forget! – money that went in to earning that particular academic diploma.

This was my third graduation ceremony and I can now legitimately call myself Dr. Foreigner (PhD, please don’t think I can help if there is some kind of heart related emergency). Aside from the red and blue gown and the ridiculous floppy hat the ceremony was much the same as the previous two – except it also wasn’t.

Pretty early on in my path down further education I knew that I wanted to be a lecturer. I loved the subject I was studying, it engrossed me and I found my most of my lecturers utterly inspiring. It was the perfect life! The university environment is dynamic and exciting, colleagues and peers are interesting, students are enthralled, the holidays are good and research in exotic locations is the cherry in the amaretto sour!

So I did my BA and found my groove. Pursued said groove into an MA straight after that and then got offered funding to do a PhD right back at my home uni with one of my favorite lecturers from my Bachelor days. Perfect. And it was… for a while. The subject area wasn’t exactly in my groove, but the region was (Africa baby!) and the future looked bright, shiny and right on target.

I had a lot of fun studying for my PhD. I met some firm friends, I lived in a wonderful part of the world for a heart-wrenchingly short time and had some experiences that I would not trade for all the world. I also learned a lot about myself and one of the things I learned is that academia is not the right place for me. Or rather, I am not right for it. All of things that I loved about being an undergrad were still there, but the more time I spent in the university system the more I came to understand how it really works.

The interesting colleagues and peers are also competitive and not exempt from office politics as I had previously fantasized. The students are very often there for the cool or because it’s what you do, innit? (apart from the Trustafarians who are going to save the world as soon as they finish this joint), not because they are on a quest for knowledge. The holidays are spent in the office, catching up on research and writing that there is no time for during term-time because of all the admin that comes with teaching. Then there’s the research. While the locations are exotic, you need a certain something to be accomplished when it comes to research. My sister told me that if you don’t have an axe to grind it will always be a struggle, and she is absolutely right.

I do not have an axe to grind, and that coupled with all the above eventually led me to the conclusion that academia is not the place for me. I loved the teaching, but I am simply not cut out for the rest of it. The revelation came to me about 2/3rds of the way in to the whole shi-bang – far too late to quit, after all the time and money, but too soon for it to be nearly over.

So there began the struggle to the end. I won’t go into how bad it was (very, very bad), but I will say that I’m amazed O stuck with me through it since he basically propped me up, emotionally and mentally, day to day and it was not an easy job.

I completed. The thesis was accepted and I got my diploma.

Looking for work before and after we moved to Abu Dhabi was a little… stressful. I hadn’t yet (and probably still haven’t) come to terms with the fact that I am not going to be using my degree. I am not going to go in to teaching/lecturing. It is difficult to let go of the plan that an 18 year old girl had and worked for, even though the girl is now 10 years older and in a different place in her life. It is difficult to let go of all the hours of studying, writing, wringing of hands, pacing of floors, tears, tantrums and little glories when a chapter/paper/article was finally finished. Lots of highs but so many more lows. All of this had to be put aside and I had to start thinking about what I could possibly want to do (didn’t have too much of a clue), what was I qualified to do (not very much) and what could I bear to do until I found out what I actually wanted/could do (my job search criteria included “job description doesn’t make me want to cry”).

We landed in Abu Dhabi and after a couple of months I landed in a job. It isn’t an ideal job *understatement* but it pays me a wage which is so vital out here. I am still trying to figure out what I want to do with the rest of my life and I look for jobs every single day.

Nearly a year later and I returned to London to attend my graduation ceremony. As I said, the ceremony was much the same as the first two – overly long speeches, uncomfortable temperatures (too hot for this and the first, too cold for the middle one) but this one was without the sense of excited anticipation that the previous two had. Before, when I walked across a stage and shook a hand, I was about to enter into a new and exciting phase of my long-term goal. I had a goal! I was moving onwards and upwards and very much looking forwards. This time there wasn’t so much anticipation, excited or otherwise. I felt sad for what wasn’t right for me and what I wasn’t right for. I looked backwards at what I was leaving behind with a certain measure of regret but knowing full well that, despite any romantic notions I might still hold on to about being an academic, it is not the life for me. Full stop. So walking across that stage and shaking that hand wasn’t the start of a new stage in my life (as the inspirational speakers so often suggest). It was the end of an old one. The closing of a chapter. Maybe even of a book that I have to put on the shelf now, for once and for all.

Despite this sounding very maudlin, and for which I apologize but is the way it is, I had a wonderful graduation trip. I hadn’t seen my family or friends in an age and I got to spend four whole days back in my fabulous home city. I had a lovely celebratory dinner with the family (lovely in spite of the food I might add) followed by drinks and a little bit of dancing in my fancy graduation clobber – though I left the gown behind. The rest of the time I mooched and munched, went to the museum with my dad and shopping with my mum. Aside from the whole graduating thing I had a list of three tasks and I completed each with aplomb: I ate my body weight in dim sum, attempted to drink my body weight in Café Nero (but didn’t succeed, which is probably a good thing for my blood pressure!) and splurged in All Saints. However, I didn’t see enough of any body and cried my heart out on the plane home - which was doubly embarrassing because we had cashed in some air miles and got ourselves upgraded to business class baby yeah! (very nice, but definitely not worth the cash cost!) and I had wanted to seem terribly sophisticated and like I belonged there *sigh*

I am proud of my achievement – but I am also very aware of what I went through to achieve it, and I can’t help thinking that if it was meant to be it shouldn’t have been that hard.

Basically, what it all comes down to is that it is Dr. Foreigner to you – got it?

Absentee Note

Dear Internet,

Please excuse Foreigner for being absent for the past month.
Things have been at the same time hectic and slow in the land of sandstorms lately, and she has not been able to come up with anything interesting to say.

She is, however, cooking up a couple of things that might make up for it.


Yours truly,
Foreigner's conscience.


P.S. There might be something really, really, cool happening soon. But not wanting to jinx it, Foreigner kindly requests that you keep your fingers crossed for her for the next couple of weeks.
F.C.