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.