Return

After about 8 weeks away, I've returned to Abu Dhabi. Getting on a plane from the green midwest United States was a bit depressing when I thought about all the the beautiful weather I'd had in Milwaukee and what I was facing with coming to Abu Dhabi in the middle of August. In addition, while I know it's hard to have sympathy for someone after a two-month holiday, the thought of going back to work after all the fun I'd had with family and friends in both the U.S. and Japan was depressing me even more.

In the end the flight was pretty uneventful, it wasn't as shockingly hot as I was expecting, we were able to catch a taxi easily, and arrived at our apartment after dark. We got home, unloaded our full limit of baggage we were allowed to bring on the plane and set to getting back into our lives in Abu Dhabi.

The first matter was to mop up all the water from the overflowed bucket that was collecting water from the ceiling. Then, I had to go down to the maintenance guy to tell him to send someone to look at our air conditioner the next day to do something about the dripping. After that, I went to where we parked our cars to make sure that they were running after not being moved for two months. Luckily, the covers we put on them to protect them from the sun and sand hadn't blown away and were still intact. I moved my filthy Jeep to the front of our building to where I could get to it easily the next day to go to work where the guy who washes would clean it up.

Meanwhile, my wife worked to get the internet running again and to figure out what we needed to do to get our mobile phones working again. We had a year subscription that expired while we were away. It's easy enough to renew them, but it was just a matter of finding out the process.

Because we were all jet lagged, my son woke me up at 3:00 in the morning and it was then that I realized that I should have bought food for lunch the night we got in. We had cleaned out our refrigerator and freezer before we left in the event that there was a power outage (something that happened to friends of ours who came home to a huge mess to clean up after food sat in their refrigerator for a couple of months). With Ramadan having started a week ago, the cafeteria was closed during the daylight hours. In the end I took a packed lunch of breakfast bars and orange juice drink boxes.

While there was a lot to do to get settled in, it's still nice to be back. Hopefully, I'll feel better after I recover from the jet lag.