Sunday = Monday

 Sunday is the new Monday. 

A fact that needed some getting used to and that caused some confusion because even consciously knowing that Sunday is the first working day in the UAE it was hard to convince the inner clock to accept this new fact. I still can get confused about what weekday it is because somehow one can feel around Wednesday that the weekend is very near while at the same time wondering why the working week (counted the western way from Monday on) was "so incredibly short". 
Many islamic countries start their weekends on Fridays, until some years ago (until 2006 in the UAE and in Saudi Arabia until 2013) Thursdays and Fridays accounted for the weekend. To facilitate the cooperation with non-Islamic countries this has been adjusted and now it is Friday and Saturday that officially make the two-day weekend in the UAE. 

A couple of weeks I tried to adjust by calling Friday "little Saturday" and Saturday "little Sunday" but that did not really work out, also because it is not correct. It took a while longer until it had sunk in that actually Friday is closest to what we know as Sunday in terms of resting day. Saturdays many people are back at work at least half-days, it is Fridays that is seen as the "holy day" of the week. 

This by far does not mean that anything is standing still in Dubai, as it is the case on Sundays in Germany where everything is closed. But practitioners, schools, offices, authorities will be closed on Fridays, the streets seem to be less trafficked and the shopping malls and parks are crowded. For us it still is a slightly confusing feeling to start the week "a day early", especially now when I have to communicate a lot with European instances because of schools and so on. So naturally today we visited a school and tomorrow, when Europe merely is getting started, the working week here will be on in full steam already.  

February, 27th 2021

 Managing to have nearly precisely one month of radio silence on the blogg was not what I imagined when I started this again. They say, time flies when you have fun.
Well, time flew and to be honest, not everything was fun. 

I really have to get better to write even when I feel stressed otherwise this project will never take off. But I have always been awfully bad in sharing my worries especially in a more public manner. And what could be more public than an open blogg on the internet. 

My dearest husband had to leave for his first business trip roughly four weeks ago. This is a long and complicated story but to make it short and simple: the whole trip was already a bit delayed. Then he got to his destination and things took time. A lot of time. And they got stalled. And complicated. And when one part was solved surely enough another part was putting up new hinders again. So he has basically been gone for a much, much longer time than planned and me and the children were left to our own devices. 

During this time we were on trips, which I will report on, we had lazy days at the beach and at home in mass, we painted, we read, we had a short stint in a hospital and we were school hunting. We were also a lot on our own and this was not always fun. 

Things got tense when our oldest son developed a strange stomach pain which led to a nightly visit in the ER with the fear for an appendicitis which led to an ultrasound that showed swollen lymph nodes in the abdominal area which led to discussions with the health insurance until we could get a CT scan which led to sleepless nights because I really, really got worried which led to a long Saturday in the hospital with admission for one night until we finally got to know that it was "only" a bacterial infection that could be treated with antibiotics. This took roughly two weeks from the first symptoms until the clearance and prescription of medication. And as you might have guessed - that is the part that was not so much fun. 

Now he is well again and since we all now gave up the idea that my husband will be able to make a precise prediction on what day he will be home (it could be anytime from today up until another week or two), we all just get along with it, with many, many Zoom calls and continuing to exploring our new home and fixing our lives here. So next up is school but for now I will take you on the trips we made within Dubai.