ANZAC Day 2008 at Al Ain

At the going down of the sun and in the morning we remembered them.
All those young men and women who fought and died in the service of our countries; those thousands of people whose lives were cut short too early at one of the wars in which Australians and New Zealanders have been involved during our short histories.

While ANZAC Day ceremonies and events are held at Abu Dhabi and Dubai, nothing official had been planned for Al Ain. I decided to do something about it, so with the help of Australian expat Suzanne Bluff, we arranged with the old Al Ain Golf Club to hold a barbecue and to cater for an unknown number of visitors. (It was a ridgy-didge, bring your own everything do).

I prepared and circulated a short flier and the expat network did the rest. Not every Australian or New Zealander in Al Ain was here, but there were enough of us to have a really enjoyable time. Best of all, people met others whom they had not met before.

We had a very short memorial during which we read the Ode and observed a minute's silence while the Last Post was sounded from a 10 Dirham set of speakers. I'm loathe to call them Mickey Mouse speakers because they did the job admirably well.

The old Golf Club, nowhere near as salubrious as the NEW Golf Club, is never the less an excellent venue to socialise. Drinks are cheap, the surroundings used, but comfortable and of course, the company is what makes these types of events. The company was fantastic. Even the weather was terrific with a gentle breeze.

If you read this and you played a part in disseminating my flier ... many thanks. If you will be here next year after I have returned to our wide brown land, please continue the tradition.

Best wishes

Robin

PS: Click on photo strip to enlarge.

Getting Ready to Leave ... The Highs and Lows

The first sign that we are leaving Al Ain soon is the advertisements we have placed on the Higher Colleges of Technology and University of UAE public email boards. They've been fairly successful, we've sold most of the big stuff we wanted to sell. We do have a refrigerator to go, but feel confident that will move as the weather hots up. Selling the cars shouldn't be a problem either.

When we arrived here, with only a half dozen boxes of memorabilia from home so we wouldn't forget our roots, we got 30,000 Dirhams to set ourselves up. That's just under $9,000 AUD. We had no idea how far it would go or how much anything cost here so we bought some cheap stuff we later replaced. We never really used all of the allocation, but some day we'd be sitting back and I'd say to Christina something like, "Have we got a can opener?" "No", she'd say, "we need to get one". Sometimes when it was urgent we'd walk off to Al Ain Mall immediately and buy what it was we needed.

We had to buy a stack of curtains for the unit which has very high ceilings and consequently, long curtains, a stove, washing machine and everything, nothing is provided here other than the house.

For the first few months we didn't have a car, so we walked to the Al Ain Mall to do our grocery shopping and wheel it back in a shopping trolley. The roadways in our housing complex are paved with concrete pavers, so the trolley would bump, bump, bump all the way to A25 which just happens to be the farthest away from the mall.

Sometimes we'd use a taxi of which there are millions here and they are so cheap I don't know how they manage to pay for fuel, even though it's also cheap. I fill the 60L tank on our Nissan for about 75 Dirhams or $21 AUD. I'll get a shock when I fill up at home since our diesel Toyota has a 110L tank ... probably have to take out a loan on the house.

We are looking forward to ending our tour and getting back to Australia, our kids and friends, but the downside is that we will leave behind some of the loveliest people we have met who come from Canada, England, Scotland, Turkey, the US and even Australia.

We will also miss some aspects of the way of life. Al Ain is a lovely city with a mainly pleasant climate. We have lived very comfortably here where there is no tax on salary and everything is very cheap, especially food, although in the time we have been here, prices have risen quite a bit.

We have a lovely Indian lady, Rosie, comes once a week to vacuum and mop the floors and iron our clothes and a Sri Lankan fellow, Bubblo, who washes both cars every Friday morning and waters our garden every day. For these services we pay a pittance by our standards although when the Dirhams are converted to Rupees, the value for them is much greater than it would be for us in AUD.

Guess who will do the housework, water the garden and wash the car when we get home?

Our experience here has been one of the highlights of our lives and one that I recommend to anyone fortunate enough to have the opportunity.

Robin

More Lives Lost on UAE Roads ...

A couple of posts ago I mentioned how very dangerous it is here on the roads. Last Thursday another 12 were wiped out near Al Ain. The Gulf News item with photo is linked to the title above.

I think the most dead I dealt with while a Traffic Accident Investigation Squad officer all those years ago was five. I can only imagine what emotional impact 12 must have had on the emergency services and police officers here, despite Lou Safian's suggestion that, "Death and taxes are with us always, but death doesn't get any worse."

Over the weekend another pedestrian got wiped out on Sheik Zayed Road, the most notoriously dangerous road on the planet, especially for pedestrians.

At Abu Dhabi a foolish fellow drove himself and his young daughter to death when he lost control while using his mobile phone and drove into a pedestrian underpass ... thankfully it was 2 am and there were no pedestrians. You can bet that his two year old daughter was unrestrained or she may have stood a chance.

A large price to pay to answer a telephone message, which was probably unimportant anyway. Certainly not that important that you'd lose your life for it.

Despite millenia of evidence to the contrary, many people here think that Allah will protect them. There's no such thing as "have faith in Allah but keep the gunpowder dry" here, it's all, have faith in Allah. Period. Don't bother to do anything to help yourself.

Wherever he is, with six billion people to look after, it's obviously too huge a task to make any real headway.

There's also the equally crazy notion that whatever happens to you is "Allah's will" which absolves followers of the notion from any responsibility for anything, including their own lives; even wearing seat belts, because to do so, as one believer told me, "is to show that you have no faith in Allah."

For those of us who have faith in ourselves, belt up and drive sensibly while keeping a sharp eye out for the believers, all we can hope is that when Allah get's it wrong, we won't be in the firing line.

As Ned Kelly said before he dropped on the gallows, "Such is life."

Robin