Already June

I can’t believe it’s already June. I feel like May just started and now it’s already over. The last two weeks have gone by pretty slow since we got that three day weekend a few weeks back. I forgot to mention that weekend I went to a bar with a few friends that we had never been to before called Pearl and Caviar. They have ladies night on Saturdays so we figured we should check it out since we didn’t have to work the next day. Also, a new teacher arrived from Boston the day before so I thought it was only right to take her out and show her what Abu Dhabi was like! The bar was outside on a circular deck overlooking the water. I can’t stress enough how gorgeous it was! Extremely hot, but totally worth the gorgeous view. The picture doesn’t even do it justice. Across the river is the Grand Mosque so it was a little strange drinking while we were staring at such a sacred place.

 

 

The best part of that night, though, was the golf cart ride we had to take to get from the hotel to Pearl and Caviar. Every night out should consist of a golf cart ride. Actually, every day should consist of a golf cart ride.

    

This past weekend I went to a place that just opened called McGettigan’s because there was a semi-famous Irish singer who was performing there. His name’s Paddy Casey. I’ve never heard of him but my friend from Ireland is a really big fan of him. So many of us from work went! It was nice to hang out with people I don’t really see much. Some of them work at different schools as aides in public classrooms.

        

    

Also, today we had a very special guest take a tour of our school…Governor Deval Patrick! Seriously, the governor of Massachusetts stopped by Abu Dhabi and checked out the school I work at. Not many people can say their governor visited them in a country 6,000 miles away. But I can 🙂 The upper administration made a huge deal about his visit. Dress code was really strict, everyone was told exactly how to act and what they should be doing. A tour came through our classroom and watched our group lesson in the morning. We were doing calendar and I don’t think I’ve seen our kids more well-behaved than they were today. The tour loved that our kids all said hi to them when they walked in. They seemed to really enjoy our classroom. Thursday we have another VVIP tour coming through but I don’t think it has any ties to Massachusetts.

Until next time! xoxo

Music and Trivia

This week has been full of trivia, acoustic nights, and having a lot of fun with friends! It was also Staff Appreciation week this week! Our week started on Sunday with us finding out we would get early release on Sunday AND Thursday. That means we got to go home as soon as all the kids left around 2:15 instead of 3:30. We also had a meet and greet, team lunch, and a health and wellness fair after work. It was really nice to feel appreciated.

We won a round at trivia on Monday! We were Team Thato (that was our waiter’s name…he’s pretty awesome! And he loved that we named our trivia team after him) A few of my friends and I also went to trivia at a different bar downtown on Wednesday after getting dinner at Paul’s. Paul’s might be my new favorite restaurant–they have the most amazing french onion soup and creamy mushroom and chicken soup…with breadbowls!

Last night was the Justin Timberlake concert!! There were about 15 of us that bought tickets so a bunch of them went to brunch during the day and then I met up with them around 5:00 for happy hour at a place called Stars N Bars. It’s a pretty “American” place but I had never been there before so it was really fun to try something different. I would go back there, it was a lot of fun!

 

The concert was amazing! JT put on such a good show. The arena was partially enclosed but had no roof so we were just outside under the stars with great music all night. There was a point in the show where he was talking about how he just found out that his show 7 years ago was the first international show to come to Abu Dhabi. I hadn’t realized until then that this was the first time I was attending an international concert internationally. I’ve been to “world tour” concerts in the U.S. but this really was part of his world tour. I thought that was so cool to think about. I can’t wait to go to more concerts out here. Some really big names come to Abu Dhabi and Dubai. One Direction tickets just went on sale for next year but I think I’m going to pass on that one…

In other news, there’s a few movies that have been filming right here in Abu Dhabi!!! The Fast and The Furious has been filming for the past few weeks around the Corniche/Emirates Palace area but I think they wrapped up. Star Wars also just started filming last week. They used explosives to create a huge crater in the middle of the desert. I read that security is really tight around the area and they aren’t letting anyone who isn’t part of filming go near the movie site.

We also have a 3 day weekend this weekend which means no work tomorrow! The public holiday is technically on Tuesday but they gave us Sunday off. It’s weird to have a holiday tomorrow because I feel like I should be celebrating Memorial Day and not Israa & Miaraj Night. Right now, the only plans for tomorrow are to relax and go bowling in the evening. And of course, try to skype during DJ’s housewarming party!

Until next time! xoxo

Where Does The Time Go?

So two new classrooms just opened up on Sunday, bringing the total at our school to 12 classrooms. Unfortunately, that meant my case student and I were transferred to one of the new classrooms. The vision for our new classroom is that it is a high-functioning, pre-transition classroom. All 7 of the boys in our classroom are extremely verbal, intelligent, and in many ways like “typical” 5 year old boys. They’re all slated to attend public school in the near future (within the next few years). We’ve been working wicked hard to make sure all of the materials and data get transferred to the new classroom so that’s taken up a lot of my time this week. This week has flown by. The days go by much faster now that I’m in a new classroom. But that also means I have a lot more to do.

I think I’m going to love this new classroom. It’s so much easier than the classroom I was in previously because the kids are so independent and our focus is increasing their independence and teaching them how to socialize with their peers instead of teaching basic skills like eye contact and vocal imitation. I haven’t had to use a protective movement in over a week! I’ve even noticed a huge change with my case student– he’s talking more and doing a lot more things independent. I think this classroom is going to be so good for him because he’s around other boys who model appropriate behavior. In the last classroom, there was a lot of crying and flopping and I think that contributed to him acting out and having his own behaviors.

I attended the birthday party of one of my students last Friday. He’s my roommate’s case student and all of his teachers were invited. It was my first time attending any type of Arabic party so I really had no idea what to expect. I just knew parties over here are really elaborate and expensive. It was Mickey and Minnie themed because it was a joint birthday party for my student and his sister. As soon as we got there, the first thing we noticed was that it was all women and they were not wearing their abayas and sheilas (the black gowns and head coverings that women wear). It amazed me how gorgeous and fashionable all of the women were that were at the party. It was very clear how important their appearance was and that’s not something I’ve seen before since many of the women I interact with at school are completely covered. I thought it was really cool to see another side of the culture, one where women were free to express themselves. Most women traditionally need to be covered if they’re around males who are outside of the family.

The weekends seem so short here. It’s probably because I slept until noon yesterday and didn’t leave the couch until  we went to an apartment downstairs to celebrate some of our teachers graduating from the Masters program.

I’m not ready to go to work tomorrow.

Until next time! xoxo

 

Slacking

Wow, I can’t believe it’s been so long since I’ve written on here. The last two weeks have been pretty brutal. Between exhaustion, work assignments, hangovers, and being sick, I haven’t had any energy to write. But I made it back safe! I had to jump right back into work because I had a progress report due last week and that took up most of my time.

A lot has been going on since vacation ended so here’s the sparknotes version of the last two weeks:

On my flight back to Abu Dhabi, we were just about to take off when the pilot noticed “the engine wasn’t responding how it was supposed to” so we sat on the runway for an hour while the mechanics tried to fix it. They had to get a back up plane which made us leave 4 hours behind schedule which caused us to miss our connecting flight in Milan. All of the flights out of Milan were overbooked so we had to be put up in a hotel for the night. The trip should have taken about 18 hours but instead took over 50 hours! I was so excited to see my bed on Saturday night. I can officially say I’ve been to Europe though!

Because of jetlag, I woke up at 2:30 in the morning last Monday and couldn’t fall back to sleep. That’s when I decided to start running everyday at 5am which I’ve done pretty good with (unless I stay out until 3 am the night before). I don’t know how I stayed up for the NYU lecture that night. It was on Gandhi and his nationalist counterpart…not one of the more interesting lectures I’ve been to.

Last Tuesday, my roommate and I went to acoustic night to listen to the band. We made friends with a group of Scottish navy guys who thought it was a good idea to buy us Guinness all night. They were pretty embarrassingly drunk by the end of the night and I don’t have a very good impression of people from Scotland now. I can’t stand when people get  like that. I know my limit, you should too.

My friends and I went to a bar we’ve never been to before called Hemingway’s on Thursday (It’s Ernest Hemingway themed!) which was so much fun. It had a really relaxed and calm vibe. They had a really good duo playing music requests. There was a guy there that my friend sees every single day at Starbucks because he lives in the building next to us so we started chatting with him and his friend. They were pretty cool except his friend seemed kind of shady (he gave off the “used car salesman” vibe).

Friday I went to Coopers because of ladies night obviously. An Australian guy came up to our table and started talking to us because he was alone. He travels overseas for work and he kept talking about how much he missed his wife and daughter. He was wicked nice. It made me miss Australia a lot.

A bunch of us went to Coopers on Monday for quiz night! I’ve been wanting to do trivia out here for months and we finally got to go. There were about 11 of us from NECC there so we had two teams. Our teams came in dead last and second to last haha. We found out how awesome trivia was at Coopers when they handed all the girls 4 free drink tickets and the winning team of every round gets a round of free beers. I’m not really sure how they make money with all the free alcohol they give. We’re definitely going to start doing weekly trivia at different places.

I started feeling really sick on Tuesday, like almost to the point where I was going to call out (In two years, I haven’t called out sick once so that’s how you know it was bad). I should have relaxed and drank some tea at home but I ended up going to acoustic night both Tuesday and Wednesday like usual. At acoustic night on Tuesday, the band invited us to drink upstairs with them. They aren’t allowed to stay in their bar in between sets so they go to an upstairs bar to drink. It was really cool to hang out with them.

I was supposed to go stand up paddleboarding on Wednesday evening but my friend took a nap and didn’t wake up in time. Instead, we went for a walk along the Eastern Mangroves, bought some chips and dip, and just sat on the rocks and talked about life. It was really therapeutic. Then my roommates and I went to acoustic night. I planned on not drinking because I drank a lot on Tuesday and I still felt sick/had a fever but that changed when one of our friends in the band got us tequila shots. We went to another bar we’ve never been to afterward called Rock Bottom. It was awesome but it was a really late night.

Finally, we get to this weekend! I went to a lecture with my friend on Thursday night. It was a micro-festival about electronic music. For some reason I thought it was going to be about techno music but I was very mistaken. I don’t even know how to describe the “music”. The drummer from the band sat with us and then hung out with us at the reception after. He goes to every one of them like I do so we usually sit together. The three of us ended up walking along the corniche for a little while until he had to go to work. There was no way I was going out on Thursday. I stopped by a coworker’s apartment to wish her a happy birthday because she was having a birthday party but I didn’t stay very long. I went home, took some nyquil, and passed out until Friday afternoon. I’ve felt so much better since then so I think that’s exactly what I needed to get over being sick.

There was a fundraiser last night for our coworker who got a serious spinal injury playing rugby over vacation and now he’s in Michigan for rehab. It was a 70s and 80s themed party. It was so much fun! Almost all of our coworkers showed up to support Mike!

Today, I have no plans except to stay in bed and watch movies. First up is Into the Wild.

Until next time! xoxo

Guess Who’s a Licensed Driver?!?!?!

I just came back from getting my UAE license! The process was so simple. No written test. No driving test. All they needed was a translation of my US license and my passport. That’s it. My friend and I were out in less than 30 minutes. Now I can get behind the wheel and drive! I’m pretty sure I won’t drive any time soon and when I do it’s going to be out in the desert. And nowhere near the city. I’m just really excited that I now have the possibility of driving.

Also, yesterday was my last class!! I’m done with classes possibly forever (with the exception of my thesis and practicum seminars). It feels so good to not have to worry about schoolwork.

Also, I get to go to Fun City tomorrow for a class field trip. We get to play on rides all day. And we get Pinkberry for meeting our monthly goal. And all of the teachers are going out tomorrow to celebrate not having work for two weeks. So much to look forward to over the next two days.

Also, I’M GOING TO BE HOME IN THREE DAYS. I really can’t believe it’s so soon. I’m beyond excited to see all my family and friends. And my dogs. I’m super excited to see them.

Until next time! xoxo

Today Was One Of Those Days

Today was one of those days where I just wanted to cry at the end of the day. Not out of frustration or sadness, but because it was such an awesome day in our classroom. One of our kids that we’re toilet training self-initiated, my case student mastered 6 programs today, two of our students are so independent (like almost ready to be fully included in public school), AND one of our students ATE SOLID FOOD FOR THE FIRST TIME!! We’ve been working on a feeding protocol to get him to eat solid foods because he’s only ever really eaten a blended mixture from a bottle. We’ve been working since September and today he finally decided to eat a piece of cake. A big piece of cake. It’s days like this that make me really grateful for where I am and what I get to do. The kids are so incredible and it’s amazing to see their progress in such a short amount of time. For most of our kids, they hadn’t attended a school or center before coming to our classroom in September. Now they’re participating in circle time like in a typical classroom, independently saying hi to people, and appropriately interacting with each other. One of our students went up to another student at the end of the day to try to get him to dance. It’s such a big difference from the beginning of the school year when they lacked a lot of social and communication skills necessary for inclusion. I’m just so proud of all of them 🙂

I also finally have free time to write about my weekend! My weekend kind of started on Thursday because I spent all day at the zoo with my case student. He really hated it–about 10 minutes into the visit he was saying “I want bus” and “I am all done”. I felt kind of bad for the kid but we couldn’t really leave. I enjoyed it though. The only thing he did like was feeding the giraffes. He kept picking up the grass from the ground and feeding it to them. He didn’t realize the giraffe’s head was right in back of him at one point so he got scared when he turned around and saw a giraffe in his face. It was pretty funny.

I took a road trip with 3 of my friends to Al Ain for the day on Friday. Al Ain is a city about an hour and a half away from Abu Dhabi. It’s a more mountainous area with hiking and hot springs so we thought it would be a fun getaway. It was rainy and overcast that day which made it a perfect road trip/hiking day. We found out later that it downpoured in Abu Dhabi while we were gone and the mall flooded because of how much rain there was. Never thought I would say that about living in the desert. We stopped at a mountain called Jebel Hafeet and the views were stunning! It was a great trip. The best part about it was that my friend got her license and rented a car for the day. It felt so good to be in a car (not a taxi) with the windows down and our iphones plugged into the radio driving around with friends and not knowing where we were going. It made me miss home a lot and having the freedom to just get in the car and drive.

We also stopped at an oasis in the middle of Al Ain but there really wasn’t much to see there. Just a whole bunch of palm trees. When we got back, we all got ready to meet a bunch of the other teachers at a bar downtown called Captain’s Arms. They were celebrating St. Patrick’s day so we got dressed up in green and met everyone there. We were the only ones at the bar in green. After staying there for a little while, all of us went to a coworkers house to celebrate his birthday.

I expected to do homework all day on Saturday but I was stupid for thinking that. I got a text at 8:45 in the morning from my friend begging me to go to the triathlon with her…that started at 9am. I reluctantly agreed to it and had about 10 minutes to get ready (after a night of drinking mind you). Two of our friends participated in the triathlon so it was really cool to get to cheer them on. I’m glad I went despite being really hot and feeling gross. I saw the Brownlee brothers cross the finish line. They are arguably the top 2 fastest triathletes in the world and they’re 23 and 25 years old. What am I doing with my life? The coolest part was that they crossed the finish line together. My friend said that was because it wasn’t a race that mattered to them. Even though they got paid a lot of money to run in it.

After the triathlon, I went to a pet adoption fundraiser out in the suburbs. I knew a few people volunteering there so we decided to check it out. They had all of the dogs and cats outside that were up for adoption and people could play with them. They also had a lot of things for sale with some of the proceeds going back to the animal shelter. I bought a few pairs of earrings for a good cause. My friend also made a new friend…

Also, my dog needs one of these ASAP…

Until next time! xoxo

There Needs To Be More Time In The Day

You know what’s not conducive to writing a blog? This entire week. I had such an awesome weekend and did a lot of fun things, but do I have time to write all about it? No. Because I had 5 assignments due for my classes on top of an MBO meeting, a team meeting, and a parent clinic to prepare for this week. Admittedly, I could have procrastinated a little less and gotten the assignments done in a timely manner like a normal person would have. You live and learn, I guess. Right now, it’s almost 1 am and I should be in bed but I just finished summing all of my case student’s data. I’m too tired to write anything more but hopefully tomorrow I’ll be able to write about what a fun weekend it was!

Until next time! xoxo

Chantelle’s Going To Be Mad At Me If I Wait Any Longer To Write On Here…

I woke up this morning to a facebook message from Chantelle that said “Ummmm you live in Abu Daubi I think you could find something interesting to blog about?!?!” I’ve been so busy with interesting things that I keep forgetting to write on here haha. Also, our internet has been ridiculously slow this past week and my computer is acting weird so it makes it really aversive to do ANYTHING on the computer.

Last week was probably the longest week of my life. It was just all around rough. There was so much work to do for my case student, lots of homework, and so many sick and crying kids. The good part of the week was when I went to an NYU lecture on Entrepreneurship on Tuesday and a lecture on how educating poor females yields a high return on investment and even increases entire country’s GDPs on Thursday. These lectures are so much fun and wicked informative. Tonight’s lecture is on dark matter so it’s going to be a lot more scientific than I’m used to. I can’t wait.

After the week I had, I decided to stay in on Thursday night and catch up on sleep which I think was a really good decision. I went to brunch at Cooper’s with some friends on Friday afternoon. Remember brunch? That thing where you pay a certain amount of money and can eat and drink as much as you want from 12-4. It was a good time. We went right to our coworker’s rugby game after brunch. We stayed for a bit after the game to talk to our friend but then we went right to Yas Island because my roommate and I got free tickets to a fight night. It was wicked cool. They had 8 fights (boxing, MMA, Muy Thai). It reminded me of Here Comes The Boom 🙂

Saturday I was really excited to just lay in bed and watch TV. I didn’t want to do anything related to school or work. I ended up getting out of bed to go grocery shopping with my roommate and another friend though. It was one of the more fun shopping trips I think. We got a lot of cleaning supplies for our apartment and stuff like that. We decided to make chicken noodle soup because I mentioned that I can’t find it anywhere here. What kind of place doesn’t have chicken noodle soup? We got all of the ingredients to make it and then hung out at our friend’s apartment the rest of the night eating chicken soup, bread, and wine. It was a good way to end the weekend.

I planned to come home and enjoy a relaxing evening after class last night (thank goodness for daylight savings time in the US–our video conference class gets out at 8 instead of 9 now!) As I walked in, my roommate was walking out and asked if I wanted to come with her to the airport to pick up her family. Her father and sister are here for over a week visiting so we’re all really excited about that! They’re kind of like a surrogate family this week so I told my roommate I wanted to hang out with all of them because I miss my family. But, we didn’t get home until midnight because we picked them up and then went to their hotel and then went to eat at a cafe at the bottom of the hotel. Today was a little rough as well. I think everyone is ready for a vacation…

Until next time! xoxo

It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane!

Earlier I was debating whether or not I should write a post today and I decided against it until a really random event took place after work. I was in my room watching TV and my roommate came in in a hurry. She looked flustered and told me something was happening outside. My first thought was that there was a fight or a fire. She opened my curtains and kept talking about planes even though there was nothing outside. Then, all of a sudden, 6 jets came flying by our building and the smoke trails were green, red, black, and white (the colors of the UAE flag).  They just kept flying around doing spirals and making designs with the smoke.

At one point, they drew a large heart…which you could only see half of from my balcony…

And then they did long strips with spirals…

They also did cool loop-de-loops and tricks. It was like a personal airshow! I just read that they’re having airplane races at the corniche tomorrow and Saturday so I’m thinking it had something to do with that. Whatever it was, it was pretty cool to watch. Especially from the balcony of my apartment! I had no idea airplane races were a real thing but I guess it’s a pretty big deal. I’m curious to know how the racetrack is set up…

I also had some free time to skype with my mom tonight. It’s probably been a month since I’ve seen her so it was really nice to get the chance to talk to her for a little while. Except for the fact that we talked about how she got into a car accident with my car (it wasn’t her fault and she’s fine). The cost of the damages= $5,000. When I crashed my car, the damage was only $1,000 but that was entirely my fault for driving into a snowbank. Now that I think about it, it was exactly 3 years ago this month that I got into my accident. And now it has eerily similar damage 3 years later. The “best” (read: worst) part of this was that she let me know about the accident by sharing a picture of my damaged car on facebook. A week after the accident. With the caption “oh no Sofia’s ok don’t worry”. I could probably think of a 1,000 better ways to tell someone their car got wrecked 🙂

Until next time! xoxo

What a Weekend!

I feel like this weekend kicked my butt. Aren’t weekends supposed to be relaxing? A busy weekend only means one thing around here–a terrible week. This week has not gotten off to a good start…screaming kids, surprise clinics, mystery illnesses going around, so many assignments due…I’m ready for the weekend and it’s only Monday. But anyway, I’d rather talk about happier things. Like how much fun this weekend was! On Thursday, I went to a club on Yas Island called O1ne. It was so cool! It’s an oval building and the outside walls are entirely covered in graffiti. It holds the world record for largest graffiti wall or something like that. The inside is wall to wall LCD screens. The shadows of the people in the first picture actually moved like real people. I don’t think I can convey how awesome this place was. We went to see a pretty well-known DJ named Markus Shulz. I have never heard of him but I don’t listen to trance so that’s not surprising. It was definitely fun until about 2:30 when I started getting sick of the music.

    

The next day my roommate and I were debating whether or not we wanted to go to a yacht party with most of our coworkers on Friday afternoon. We finally ended up deciding to go which I’m really glad we did. From 1pm onward we were all on yacht, drinking and dancing, and having an awesome time relaxing in the sun. I can’t really think of a better way to spend my Friday afternoon, especially at the end of February when it’s freezing back home. It was similar to camping last weekend in that we could kind of forget we were in the Middle East and just do whatever we wanted, drink as much as we wanted, and be as loud as we wanted. Because we were on a boat with no one else around.

   

Today I got to go to the mall with my case student which was probably the only redeeming thing about this week so far. A few hours before we went on our trip out, he got my supervisor in a really bad hair pull.  Good thing the trip wasn’t contingent upon good behavior yet. Today was a test run for my case student to see if he would enjoy earning trips to Wanasa Land for staying on green all day. There’s these arcade-amusement parks in every mall called Wanasa Land that a lot of our students get to visit for having “perfect days”. He had a pretty good time. I was having a good time too until I volunteered to go on a ride with him. This ride was similar to Scream at Six Flags–it was a tower that lifted you to the top and then kept pretending to drop you. For like 10 minutes. Or at least it seemed like 10 minutes. It was actually pretty scary. I screamed every time it dropped us while my case student laughed. I think some guys on the ground were laughing at me too.

Until next time! xoxo