Canadians, the Chicken Big Mac, & Brittany

Two weekends ago, I had the privalege of attending the Canadians in Qatar Thanksgiving at The Ritz. As most (I hope ALL) of you know, no, I'm not Canadian. However, in true Canadian fashion, they opened their doors to non-Canadians everywhere! It was a chance to get dressed up, have some thanksgiving food 6 weeks early, and dance the night away...and we did! It was a great time. Basically like a wedding, only no bridal party to wait to eat for and sadly, no cake. The DJ was great and we busted moves all night! I couldn't help but crack up when more than one Canadian that night said we Americans do Thanksgiving the smart way...always on a weekend and right before Christmas :) Ahhhhh that we do.

Before going to the Canadian Thanksgiving, Alli and I decided that we wanted McDonalds for lunch. This was exciting for me because I hadn't tried any fast food since moving here. I've heard it's always interesting to see how the food is different. First off, in Doha, McDonald's will--get this-- deliver. (I know. Don't get me started.) Alli and I think we should take advantage of this little feature because A) it's cool and B) it's movie day and we're still in our pjs. First hurdle? Finding the phone number. We googled it and got started. After dialing 2 for english, McD's then put us on HOLD for 5 minutes. This was just too much, but we really didn't want to leave the house so we waited (and laughed). Finally, someone came on to take our order. We both wanted the crispy chicken sandwhich meal, so we figured it wouldn't be too difficult. Not so much. 2nd hurdle? They have nothing called the "crispy chicken" sandwich. So I ask (Alli did the holding, so I got stuck with the ordering) what chicken they DO have and roughly heard this: "chicken big mac" (huh???), "chicken morey" (I even repeated it that way to the guy and he said "Yes, chicken morey"), a "chicken arabia" and "mcchicken".  McChicken! Yes! Finally! A name I recognize so I order 2 meals and now comes the biggest challenge of all. 3rd hurdle? Giving them directions. This is by far the biggest hoop because there are no addresses in DOHA! It's all P.O. boxes. (Again, don't get me started.) The McD's guy and I haggle back and forth for a minute or two and then Alli and I start busting up laughing. At this point, it's been well over 15 minutes and we could've been there, back, and eating our McD's by now! We hang up and head out the door. After arriving at the drive-thru, we notice a couple things: there really IS a chicken big mac (whoa) and the "chicken morey" was actually "chicken GOURMET" (otherwise known in the U.S. as the Crispy Chicken so I got it after all!). The Chicken Arabia turned out to be a chicken filet, wrapped in pita bread. So much fun! 

But after all this, I still say the best part of our shinanigans that day happened while we were waiting for our food and listening to some VERY old-school Brittany Spears. In the middle of "Oops, I Did It Again" Alli busted out, and I mean BUSTED OUT some classic dance moves from the video. (I had done this earlier while ordering) Her hands are up in the air, waving around like she just didn't care, when the server opens the window to hand us our food. The music was blaring, so Alli didn't hear her so let's just say she yelped and jumped so high I'm surprised her head didn't hit the roof. Her face was BEET red with embarassment, I'm busting a gut laughing, and the server has a big ole smile on her face as well. We just wanted a taste of home...

I know, I know...

It has definitely been a while! I'm sorry for the dealy but honestl, it mostly has to do with the fact that nothing too exciting has been happening. I'd like to shy away from boring posts as much as possible so what can I say? It's about quality, not quantity people :)

I went to Bahrain for our Eid break. Just a couple of days to visit a friend there and we had a great time! I was a little (make that a LOT) jealous of her fabulous housing. Puts mine to shame, but I was also able see a place that was so similar to Doha and yet was different enough to allow me to appreciate Doha more than I did before. I guess it mostly has to do with the fact that Doha is starting to become my home and it was good to come back. :)

One of my favorite things that I did over Eid break (other than sleeping in, of course) was going to the Four Seasons for High Tea. This was really an amazing experience and if you haven't seen the pictures on facebook yet, you should! A few of my friends and I got all dressed up and went to the Four Seasons where they sat us in this lovely windowed corner where you could look out onto the beach and the gulf. There was a couch, with a couple of chairs and an amazing tea selction-from what I could tell. I don't drink tea. :) We ordered our tea (coffee for me-it was SO YUMMY) and it all comes as a full service so we ordered two services which meant that we got two trays of the delicious treats they brought out: some of the best scones that i've ever had, smoked salmon sanwiches, chicken salad, biscuts, cheesecake squares, and my favorite, this lemon cupcake with lemon sorbet on top, covered in meringue! Can't even explain... Not to mention all the fabulous toppings: english butter, lemon curd, jam, clotted cream. We all felt so special :) It really was a fabulous time and just another treat that I get to enjoy by living out here. I'm so grateful for experiences like this one and I can't wait to share it with people when/if they come visit!

Eid ended all too quickly, but it was good to be back with my kiddos. They really are a joy to teach and just talk to. They have all come to love and root for my beloved Hawkeys (the brainwashing was an enormous success and I think the length of time it took should go down in the record books)...well almost all. I still have a girl who likes to sport her Ohio State t-shirt now and then...we've had some serious discussions about it. She's so stinkin' cute though. Just imagine how cute a little girl would have to be so that I wouldn't care that she's wearing an OSU t-shirt...that's pretty cute. But you know it's catching on when this happens: I'm walking around, checking on the kids as they do their math problem of the day and see that one of my students is sketching the Hawkeye symbol in his math notebook instead of working on the problem. Now how mad can I really get? He was sitting right in front of the flag...I understand the pull. My response went something like this, "Faisal, not that I don't appreciate what you're doing, cuz I really do, but it doesn't exactly count as math. (insert cute, Faisal-like, grin here) Get to work please." I then walk back to my desk, trying not to laugh.

We've been getting back into the swing of things at school and one thing I love is that there's always something going on. People have been throwing fun parties and get-togethers, Alli and I decided to start a book club, it's all good! Alli, more than me. But we decided that there'd be no assigned reading. We'd just get together, make some great food, and talk about the latest book that we've read and why we liked it. First meeting is this Thursday! Alli and I have also started a little tradition known as "French Toast Friday". It's a lazy day we have where we watch movies, I make french toast, we order chinese and just enjoy the day. It's a fabulous wa to enjoy the day since it's too hot to go out. We just had a "Facuty Follies" show to raise money for Pakistan. The people of ASD put on a fabulous show. So much so that I didn't even mind being at school on a Thursday night :) Some other things going on just in this month: book club, the "Babes of the Bin" party (us girls getting together here), the 3rd and 5th party, the ASD progressive dinner, Miss Saigon featuring many of the teachers at ASD, the pumkin patch and Halloween Carnival, and---get this---the Canadian Thanksgiving dinner! Yup, I'm goin Canadian for the night and enjoying some much-missed traditional goodies. They may celebrate early but most of the food is the same. Lauren said that the only difference is that many of the dessert will be maple desserts (Ross' maple candy, Krisin & Missy? Yup, I can't not think of that Friends episode either)...so much fun!
 

One MAJOR change since Eid is the driving. People weren't kidding when they said the driving would get worse after Ramadan, but I honestly didn't know how that could be or what it would look like. That is no longer the case. It takes Katie and I (yup she drives cuz that's right, I've now not been able to drive for over a month now...thanks, Sheik-dude) on average, at least ten minutes to go down one block and through a round-about. And that's with someone directing traffic. I long for and miss the days when I could get to work in 7 min, not to mention the fact that I have to wake up and 5:45 to ride with Katie. I'm not sure if it's sad or just freaky that it doesn't faze me anymore...but I'm so gratedul to Kaite and love our morning rides together. I'm also not gonna lie- I've been more productive now too :)



All around, things have been great here. I've even been able to decorate my dining room and living room a little bit. It's slowly becoming home, but I'm still counting down the days, all. I'm so grateful for the wonder freinds and support I have here, but I still miss home terribly. You know it's bad when you see a Target article on yahoo.com and just the arial photo of the inside of a Target store brings tears to your eyes...yup, that happened. You all have no idea how many times I wish I could just go into Target and shop the dollar section! Thankfully, the time is FLYING by. I have so many things to look forward to like my trip to Rome in November which has now become quite the excursion. Word spread quickly and now Alli and Katie are coming too...I finally have people to travel with! I've also planned a stop-over with in Paris on our way home for Christmas. (It feels weird just saying that!) Clicking "purchase" and getting my ticket home was such a fabulous moment. It hasn't all sunk in yet, but everytime I don't want to get up for work, I think of Paris and Rome and remember that work is the reason I get to do all these amazing things! So it's not so bad :)

I hope I've done well catching everyone up...I know it's strange that nothing too funny has happened to me in the last few months, but I promise I'm not leaving anything out. I'll leave you with this little tid-bit: It's still riduculously hot and humid. Cooler, but still hot. I miss my Vegas dry heat, I miss the autumn like I always do this time of year and darn it! It's October...I'm tired of sweating!

Later y'all!

Presentations and Bath Tubs

Our Back To School Night at ASD was this last Monday. It was a great chance to meet with some of the parents and tell them about the school, my class, and the programs we offer. For this, my teaching partner, Chad, and I decided to give our individual presentations in our classrooms, then switch to each other's to talk about our specific subject areas. (He teaches reading for both our classes and I teach math.) When it came time to give my presentation to my homeroom class of parents, I made the lovely discovery that my projector wasn't cooperating and there would be no way to show the lovely Power Point presentation I'd made all cute and informative over the last few days. Bonus: because of this, I had no "notes" to refer to and had to basically wing it and hope that I mentioned all the important pieces of information. Then came questions. My favorite came from a dad who asked, "Little Johnny seems to have a lot of time after school for video games and watching tv. What can we do about that?" This was his way of saying I'm not giving out enough homework.

After questions, I told the parents (as well as wrote it on the schedule on my door, all pretty) to go to Chad's room for the Reading portion. The plan was simple enough, but by the time we'd decided on how to do the whole switching classrooms thing, we had thrown around many scenarios and tonight, I'd executed the wrong plan. I notice that after a few minutes, they're still waiting outside his door and no one has come to mine. As Chad comes out to the hallway, I realize that I'm supposed to be in his room. Oops! I then take off in a frenzy and proceed to sound like what I'm pretty sure was a bumbling idiot in front of the other class. Again, with no Power Point. Oh well, life goes on!

I've come to find that it is never a awesome life moment when I'm thinking to myself, "This has to go into the blog." These moments are never few-and-far-between in my life, so I thought I'd share the most recent one with you.

I thought I'd take a nice, long, hot bath after a day of not feeling well. This can be tricky since there's no way to actually plug the tub, so I got inventive and used a balled up wash cloth. Sweet. I'm laying there enjoying the hot water (for once), when I have to sit up to adjust the wash cloth. I should now interject a little tid bit about the size and shape of the tubs here in Doha. It's longer than most American tuba as well as much more narrow. Not so narrow that my sufficiantly sized rear-end can't fit into it, but narrow enough. I think the laws of physics and displacement came together in this moment to ruin my night because as I leaned to sit back, I didn't really think about the narrow tub and massive amounts of water. Combine those and the velocity with which I sat back and I've now created a virtual tidal wave in my bathroom. One really large whhooooooosh later, and my bathroom floor, all 65 sq feet of it, has been covered with water. Wait, it gets better...

At this point, I'm definitely not happy for many reasons, but mainly because the only two towels I had in the bathroom were either completely soaked or halfway soaked. I now have to figure out how to get to some dry towels, clean up the water, and in order to do both, get out of the bathroom without killing myself. I throw the halfway soaked towel down into the water so that I have at least something semi-stable to walk on. Upon looking around my room and thinking about what I have in the apt, I realize that I have NOTHING other than another towel to help me clean up the water. The only bright side is the fact that there is a drain on the floor of the bathroon. As I realize this, I also notice a pair of regular ole rubber flip-flops (Old Navy) and have an idea. A few seconds later, I'm on my hands and knees on the floor and have turned my two flip flops into a make-shift squeegee. It seems to be working fairly well and I'm pretty darn proud of myself until my knees decided to go surfing and gave out on me. Before I know it they've split and are sliding in opposite directions and I now have to brace myself so as not to fall on my face. This continues to happen randomly/everytime I move until I've "squeegeed" most of the water down into the drain. By now, I'm feeling like quite the winner, let me tell ya..

Sohar and Rachel Ray

There have been a few exciting developments since I last posted. First off, I'm going to Bahrain on Eid break! Our Eid break is a vacation set by a a lot of things, including the moon and Ramadan. Our Eid break will start after today (woo-hoo for a 3-day week!) and will go till the 14th (another woo-hoo for coming back to a 2-day week!). Now this will be the first time I'll be in Doha without either having to go through orientation or needing to work...so needless to say, I'm excited! I didn't want to travel too much over this break; it's on the shorter side and I just wanted to relax. I short trip to Bahrain however? Totally different! I'll leave Friday morning and come back Sunday. I'll be visiting a friend there; more of a friend-of-a-friend that I met just once, 5 years ago. :) But it was just one of those things- Kristina and I just got a long really well that weekend and had a great time. We've kept in touch off and on and she really helped me a lot through the international process...I'm ready for a couple days of R & R!

At the end of the the last post, I mentioned that I was going to a Sahar feast last Thursday. This was indeed a 7-star resort! I couldn't stop taking pictures!  (my friends were making fun of me) Especially the actual buffet...this thing was increadible! But in just the lobby of the hotel were a couple high end stores---I don't even know the name of the designers--- and in the windows of said stores were 2 dressed that, and we were only guessing, had to be at least $20,000 a piece. Check my facebook for pics because these dresses were insane! There were a lot of banquet rooms surrounding the enourmous Sahar buffet and a desk before you even got to that area. I won't even try to describe the banquet rooms, I wouldn't even know where to begin. David Tuterra would be in heaven though :)

Alli and I found out real quick that we were the unfortunates who showed up first to the party. Sure there were other people milling around and going to their banquet halls (we gave some serious thought to crashing), but none of our people had shown up. So we then decided to explore the place and....WOW! Again, you just have to check out the pictures. When our people finally did show up, we went in the hall and noticed that the "band" showed up too! I'm not going to even attempt to tell you what they were playing but there were four of them and one of them had a drum. That's all I've got. And I don't want to sterotypical, but they played the music that you imagine I'd hear while living in a Muslim country, celebrating a Muslim holiday :) It was pretty cool at times, though, cuz the head singer/chanter guy would many times stand up, keep singing and start clapping, trying to get the crowd into it :) It was fun! And the food..

Well, again you're just going to have to look at the pics. And please spend some time looking at them cuz I really did take a lot of crap while simultaneously looking like a total idiot-tourist-American-white-chick in order to take them. It was a MASSIVE buffet but I think my favortie part had to be the, get this, ICE CREAM CHURNER. They were literally making icecream and serving it out of what looked like a 3 foot tall by 3 foot wide butter churner from (get ready Friends fans) the "days of yore". They'd bring up the stick-churner-thing (yes, my mom grew up on a farm, but no she did not churn butter so that's the best I've got without googling), scrape off however much you'd want, then put it back it. It was yummy and creamy and made up for the fact that there were no delectable-looking mini chocolate tarts leftover by the time we executed Alli's brilliant plan to let our food settle and then get dessert (yes, Alli, I'm blaming you!). The Sahar goes late into the night (1am), but we left at midnight. It was a great time!

Another exciting event in my life this week was the arrival of my boxes from home including many items that I've missed (and won't ever take for grated again: ie- dish wand), AND my new Rachel Ray cookware! It's the adonized set with the orange, rubber grip handles? :) Sooooo excited. I've been scouting out cookeware like my dad scouts deer for the last 18 months and I've finally got it! Unfortunately, I was developing a cold so the maiden voyage for my gorgeous new cookeware was cooking up a mean grilled cheese and some chicken noodle soup from a can. Oh well. There will be lots of time to make up for that!

Love and miss you all...have a good one and before I forget--- Today, one of my all-time, favorite, FABULOUS kids turns 11. Happy birthday, Nicholas Dohrn!

Has it really been a MONTH???

When we sat down last week to plan, I couldn't believe that this week would end on the 2nd. I left Iowa and then the U.S. and about 20 hours later, landed in Doha exactly one month ago! I still haven't quite wrapped my head around it. Many things have happened since then: I've met some absolutely incredible people, finally found out who all my little new "friends" would be, wrestled with the insanity of Doha driving (although apparently real craziness hasn't even begun yet), managed to actually find my way around ASD and the city without a) getting lost (except that one time) or b) turned around too many times, and finally have started to feel at home. Life is great!

Thankfully, I haven't had too much excitement or drama, but it sure makes for a more interesting blog! In a frustrating way, it's reassuring that these kids are just like any other kids you would deal with at a school. There are still the smart ones that always finish first, think they know it all, or---my personal favorite---try to correct me (let's face it, sometimes it's necesary). And there will always be the shy ones that fly under the radar but the second you notice them, their sweet eyes and faces light up and you finally discover what makes them who they are. There are the ones that, no matter what, will always move slower than mollases. But let us never forget that there will ALWAYS be the flighty-ditzy-airhead-love 'em but wanna kill 'em butterfly chasers that are distracted by everything and catch NOTHING you say. (My naive self somehow thought this would go away once I got to 5th grade).

A lesson in the manipulated and responding variable: 

As some of you may know, I've had some issues with my car this last week. Apparently, it's decided that it doesn't like me anymore and wants to start having fun by way of not allowing me to remove my keys from it once I've turned it off (and yes- I've tried turning the steering wheel). I've also been teaching a unit in science inquiry focusing on many vocab words, but in particular, these two: manipulated variable (a variable you change to see how it affects the outcome of an experiment) and responding variable (basically the results of manipulating a variable). I found myself thinking about these lesson as the car key drama went on. 

The conditions were always the same. Car turns off, car doesn't give me the keys. The first few times the keys stuck, I didn't mind so much cuz I could tweek it a litle, turn the steering wheel back and forth and even sometimes, stop then restart the car (manipulated variable) and the keys would them come out (responding variable) However, these methods all lost their effectiveness by Sunday evening when I found myself at the grocery store and my keys absolutely would NOT come out. It was at this time, that I realized I broke a cardinal scientific rule: only manipulate one variable at a time. I really did myself in because I tried all my little tricks, but still didn't know which variable allowed my keys to come free! Maybe it wasn't one, but instead maybe a combination of tweeking the keys whilst turning the wheel...I guess I'll never know cuz it's too stinkin hot to stay outside and do the proper scientific experiment. 

My solution? Leaving the keys in the car. And because this is Doha and not Vegas, the car was still there when I came back out. In fact, as I "speak", my keys are sitting in my car outside ASD on a pretty busy main road. Side note: I burned my self on the keys when, after the first day of them being left in the ignition, I finally freed them...turns out they can still get REALLY hot, even while in the ignition. The teacher in me hopes you've all learned a valuable lesson here. 

Tonight, I get to experience a Sohor feast at a 7 star hotel here in Doha known as the Sharq. These feast are held during Ramadan when, after basically scarfing their faces as soon as the sun goes down, Muslim people set up a proper feast/buffet and eat/party all night. Should be a good time :)