Our First Orientation Day

Wow. What a long day.

Today I was awakened at about 7:30 when my phone started ringing. It was my friend Jeff. Jeff had an allergic reaction to some food he ate last night. Jeff needed to go to the hospital. Matt was tired. Matt had no idea how to get to the hospital. But Matt took Jeff to the hospital anyway.

When we got to the hospital, we found the emergency room. They took him right in since he was about to pass out, and the nurse and I helped him get onto the bed. They kept bombarding me with questions about his insurance, phone number, address, and so on (all in very broken English, mind you). I had to explain that we just arrived here 2 days ago and I met Jeff after we got here, and that basically I knew nothing about anything! But we were able to communicate the necessary information eventually, and since Jeff was passed out by then, I had to sign my consent for them to care for him. Yikes.

Since we had an orientation later today that I needed to be at if at all possible, I called our employer to tell them about our little situation. It took about 20 minutes to get the right phone number since the person at the front desk didn't know very much English either, but eventually I got ahold of them and they gave me permission to leave the hospital so I could go get ready for the meeting. I was a little nervous leaving Jeff there by himself, but they said they would have somebody check in on him if necessary.

There's nothing like making an emergency room visit to break the ice in a new city . . .


But anyway, I took a cab back to our hotel and got ready to go to our meeting, which was at a hotel conference center across town. We were told to be downstairs in the lobby at 11:00 to catch the bus. I was down there at 11:00 sharp. The bus rolled in at about 11:50. Kind of frustrating, but I am learning quickly that timeframes in Abu Dhabi are very casual and that nothing ever happens on time. In a way, this is kind of a relief, because usually I have difficulties with being on time too.

We all got on the bus and drove across town. This was the first time I'd seen most of the city in daylight, and I have to say that the city is very beautiful. There is a ton of construction going on right now, but there are also a lot of fountains and cool-looking buildings.

When we got to the Hilton (which was gorgeous by the way), they led us up to this big conference room. They were serving sandwiches, chicken, and an assortment of other things, as well as juice and coffee. I was pretty tired but wanted to stay awake during the presentation so I had 4 cups of coffee. It was amazing.

The presentation started after a while (about 15 minutes late, of course), and the HR director of the Abu Dhabi Education Council talked to us for a while about a variety of different things. I will try to summarize this presentation as best as I can:

1. We will not moving out of this hotel anytime this year. Since there are apparently no apartments available in the entire city (I think there are actually waiting lists for most places, which is crazy), we will just stay put where we're at. This part is okay with me, since my hotel room is pretty much an furnished apartment anyway. What is not okay with me is that because our places are already furnished, they probably won't give us the $6000 they told us we'd get for buying furniture and what not. We all threw a big fit about this since it was in our contracts, and I believe there is a petition in the works regarding this matter. We'll see.

(The nice thing about living in a hotel is that they still clean my apartment every day for free. I got back this afternoon and my bed was made, they had cleaned my dishes, and they had folded some of my clothes that I had thrown on the floor. I'm pretty sure this is going to spoil me. Forever.)

(The second nice thing about this is that basically the entire hotel will be occupied by the teachers who I will be working with in Abu Dhabi. It'll be 70 teachers living in one building!)

2. We have to complete a physical and police check tomorrow. Since I don't have any contagious diseases and I'm not pregnant outside of wedlock, I'm pretty sure I'll be ok. We'll see though.

3. We got our phone SIM cards that treat international calls as local calls, which is great. Now all I need to do is go buy a phone, and I'll be in business. The calling-my-family-from-Abu-Dhabi business.

4. They are setting up bank accounts for us and we will be able to access those in the next few days. Since they are not paying us until the end of the month, there was nothing really that exciting about this . . .

5. We'll have our next orientation meeting, at which we will find out who will be working at which schools, next week sometime.


After we got back from the meeting, we showed some girls who are going to be living at another hotel our rooms. They liked ours way better than theirs, and now they want to switch to our hotel. They're pretty cool, so I wouldn't mind if they switched either.

We all went to dinner at the mall this evening. I got Greek food. I can't remember the name of the dish I had, but it was good!

Then we walked around the mall some more, but we were all getting tired so we we went back to our hotel/new home after about 15 minutes. We are hoping to make tomorrow another "sneaky spa day." That would be nice after today.

Goodnight from Abu Dhabi,

Matt