Sheik Zayed, 1st president of the United Arab Emirates, 1971-2004
View from our front window: Dubai Creek heading out toward the Gulf
The week before Christmas, in 2000, I got a call at my office at CSU Stanislaus in Turlock, CA. It was the executive assistant to the system chancellor, Chuck L. Chuck and I had worked on projects at the chancellor’s office when he was associate vice chancellor for academic affairs. He asked me to close the door: it was a private matter. He was calling to persuade me to apply for a job in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. Zayed University (ZU) was a public university for Emirati women. It had campuses in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, about 2500 students in all. The next year, ZU would graduate its first class of students but they had no rules and protocols in place yet to certify their candidacy, handle graduation, not even an agreed upon format for transcripts. If I was interested, I’d be the sole source candidate for the position of the first ever dean of students.
A week later, I’d been interviewed by an in-States committee in Charlotte, SC, and invited, along with Esther, to an interview in Dubai at the beginning of January. Two weeks later, we’d been to Dubai and back and I’d accepted the job.
I couldn’t start full time until the academic year ended at Stan State but I was able to take two long stays there to jumpstart work on strategic planning and recruit staff. By June, I’d closed up my work at Stan State, gone through all the goodbye celebrations, and packed for Dubai,. We’d sold our place in Turlock and bought a smaller place for Esther in Modesto, where she would stay while I was in Dubai. I would return to be with her in the summers, when I had eight weeks off.
On July 2, I boarded a British Airlines jet in San Francisco and embarked on a twenty-two-hour trip to Dubai International Airport.
I landed at three in the morning on July 3, 2001. The temperature when I stepped outside of the airport was 120 degrees Fahrenheit and the humidity was near total. This is at three in the morning!
During my three years in Dubai, the reported temperature never exceeded 128 degrees Fahrenheit. It wasn’t so much a function of what the temperature was a way to evade international labor safety laws which required that outdoor workers be relieved of work if the temperature passed 128 degrees at any time.As a consequence, the official temperature never exceeded 128 degrees and workers still worked, no matter how hot it was during the day.
My apartment, on the sixteenth floor of the Twin Towers, was in Deira along Dubai Creek. I got there by four, entered, turned the air conditioning up to high, and unpacked as little as possible before trying but failing to get some sleep before I had to report to campus in the morning. (My pay didn’t start until I had signed in.) The shift in time zones overwhelmed my senses: I had crossed twelve time zones in less than a day. It would take a day per each two time zones before my head and body started to see time normally again.
The rest of the summer passed in a daze. I was one of the few expatriates left on campus. Everyone else used vacation time to escape the heat but I was a new employee and I had no vacation time amassed. So there I stayed.
This is the Abu Dhabi campus. It opened two years before I arrived. They were still working on it when I arrived. Fourteen years later, it and the Dubai campus as well have been replaced by grander, much more extravagant buildings.
This is the Twin Towers, where I l(and soon Esther) lived for the next three years. It was in Deira along Dubai Creek. Our apartment was on the left in this photo, on the sixteenth floor.
At the end of the summer, faculty and staff returned. We held convocation (for faculty and staff, not students) and the school year started.
I’d known I’d feel lonely living there without anyone else in the apartment so three days after my arrival in July, I took a taxi to a pet store along Shk. Rayed Road and returned with three birds: two love birds, green blue and orange-peach colored, and a huge yellow parakeet. I named the love birds Herbie and Mary Lou and the parakeet Farlo. Hearing them sing (Herbie and Mary Lou) and screech (Farlo) when I came home each evening raised my spirits, as did caring for them –giving them seed, emptying litter, cleaning the floor littered with seeds. Farlo only lasted until Esther arrived in October. His excited screeching was too much with both of us there. I gave him to a teacher with young children –they loved him.
The love birds stayed. We housed them in our computer room. (The apartment came with being a dean. At 2800 sq. ft, it It was mammoth. It had marble floors and five bathrooms, two with showers and a third with a bidet. The great room –a combined living and dining room– was big enough to play hockey in.)
9/11 came. We didn’t know what to expect in Dubai that day. Would there be riots against our presence in the Emirates? (ZU was the largest employer of Americans in the whole Emirates.) We made contingency plans that ranged all the way from a few days’ closing to total shutdown and the evacuation of all Americans and Europeans. In the worst case scenario, the campuses would be shut down indefinitely and twelve senior administrators, including me, would stay barricaded in the Hotel Intercontinental (one block from my apartment) as a shadow administration until the air cleared.
As it turned out, there was only one street demonstration in Dubai and it was a march in support of the United States. Arab co-workers kept telling me “This isn’t Islam” and Basra, a lovely Emirati who worked in the vice president’s office, visited me at my desk and left me a present of a small painted bowl with six cocktail toothpicks in it, brightly painted to resemble parrots. She wanted me to know that she appreciated that I was there in a stressful time for an American.
Life suddenly seemed too precious to live apart. Esther joined me in October and stayed the rest of our three years in Dubai.
Many wonderful things happened those three years. We took jaunts to Mauritius (as close to Paradise as we’re ever likely to get), Oman (more than once), Egypt, London and Ireland, plus day and weekend trips around the Emirates.
Music wise, we discovered that our love bird Mary Lou had definite tastes in music. (Herbie had died.) She liked to sing along with harmonica player Charlie Musselwhite or anything by Mozart, but turned off cold at Beethoven.
The Emirates Airlines Training College is built in the shape of a jet liner. Only in Dubai would you find something like this!
Here’s Wafi Centre from the outside
and here inside.
This was my favorite hotel, the Jumeira Beach, which is shaped like a stylized tsunami wave.
Concert options in Dubai weren’t as plentiful as they are now, when Dubai is one of the vacation capitals of the world, but there were some concerts of interest to us.
We heard 
Trilok Gurtu, formerly of Oregon, in an open air concert on the beach in Jumeira.
I saw –Esther was away– jazz guitarist John McLaughlin play at Nad Al-Sheba race track with his jazz-Indian fusion group, I Remember Shakti.
Esther and I heard Bollywood diva Asha Bhosle in concert with a full orchestra, stunning costumes and sets and lights. It was a Bollywood production in itself. The place was packed with Indians are, the largest ex-pat group in the Emirates — I think we were the only Americans there.
Before we left, I bought a few Middle Eastern music CDs –all pop:
- two albums by Egyptian diva Angham (loved them both),
- one by a traditional Saudi singer Muhammad Abdu,
- one by Marwan Khoury (liked it too)
- one by Amr Diab (ditto)
- another by a hot faced young Syrian chanteuse, eyes surrounded by kohl, that I liked so little I never u uploaded it not iTunes, and so now can’t find her name
- one by an Iranian semi-rocker named Jamshid that I thought was awful.
On balance, I liked what I heard. I liked even more that I’d heard it because it opened my ears to new alternatives, and on balance I liked more of what I heard than what I didn’t like. I make no pretense that I now understand Middle Eastern pop music, but at least I’ve heard some and acculturated myself to enjoy it.’
I especially enjoy Angham and especially her song “Leih Sebtaha,” which I’ve included on several gift mixes for friends.
Here are dhows docked for loading or unloading along Dubai Creek. This was shot from our window looking down on the Creek sixteen floors below. The second photo is of a single dhow cruising the Creek.
ADDITIONAL LISTENING
Asha Bhosle: “Dilwale Dulhania le Jayenge / Shah Rukh Khan / Kajol”
.
MUSIC & ME 