Many of you are curious about how I manage to pass time at home every day, without a job or friends. As you know, Ben works from 9am till midnight or 1am on most days. His weekly roster is usually made up of 1 or 2 early shifts (8am – 5pm), 1 or 2 late shifts (3pm – 1 or 2 am) and mostly split shifts (9am – 3pm, 6pm – 1 or 2am).
They usually work throughout their split shift, although once in a while, Ben uses that 3-hour break to go for driving lessons, and if he’s really tired then he comes home for a short rest. Recently, he’s also used this short break to come home to work out in the gym. Ben gets about 6 days off a month – 1 day off this week, 2 days off the next week, and so forth.
So anyway, here’s what I do on most days while the husband’s at work…
On ‘good’ days, I wake up some time between noon – 1pm. Some lazy or down days, I’m up at noon but continue lazing and daydreaming in bed till 3 - 5pm! I usually sleep at around 3am, and often also stay up till around 6am. And once in a while, I stay up till morning if I have an ‘outdoor-jalan-jalan’ day planned, and just zombie around on "low-batt" till evening.
So I’m up at noon most days, have my first cuppa and later have ‘breakfast’ – usually toast loaded with cold slabs of margarine, sometimes a banana and Herbalife Formula 1 with orange juice, if I’m a really good girl. Sometimes I skip ‘breakfast’ and have a plate of Indomie for lunch. Indomie Pedas is the only edible instant noodles here, and it’s pretty good.
I do the laundry at least 3 times a week. Ya, it’s unbelievable how we have so much laundry to be washed when I’m in my pajamas all day and night most of the time. But Ben wears a clean pair of pants or jeans every day, and there’s his pajamas, shirts, socks, towels, etc too. The floor has to be swept every 2 days because it gets dusty and my hair falls a lot more in this dry weather.
It doesn’t help that if I stay in all day, it means I’m living in an air-conditioned environment 24 hours a day, with no chance of fresh air… Not that the air outside is what one can call “fresh” or clean. Then there’s mopping to be done once a week, and washing the balcony, about twice a month.
I hardly watch TV during the day ‘cos you get a 2-minute portion of Oprah, followed by a 5-minute ad interval, then 2 minutes of Oprah again, then more ads… Other than Oprah, daytime TV is made up of other talk shows like Dr Phil, Rachel Ray, and soaps like Fashion House and The Bold & The Beautiful. Towards evening you get more interesting stuff on TV like The Tyra Banks Show, Pimp My Ride, a very censored screening of Desperate Housewives (1st season)…and they've just started showing Newlyweds! Like Hallo? They broke up dudes!
Later into the night we get some rather decent movies. I’m guessing people in the Middle East sleep at around 2 or 3am ‘cos the local English TV channels show good movies only at around 11pm or midnight. They provided me with 4 hours of Harry Potter fun, but the marathon started at 11pm so I was up till about 3am. Then they showed the Matrix trilogy, one installation a week, at 11pm. But even then, I don’t watch much TV ‘cos there are only three English channels (movies & sitcoms) and BBC World, to choose from the eight hundred plus free-to-air local (regional) channels (all Arabic).
So most of the time, I’m glued to my computer. If I’m online, I’d be reading/sending mail, uploading pics onto my Flickr album, updating my blog, checking out favourite sites like Wild Singapore, the Wildfilms & Reefwalk blogs, and other Singapore sites like Channel News Asia, and food stuff for Ben. Sometimes I get curious about something, it could be anything, like say… molecular gastronomy. So I surf all day gathering info about it. I’m at a loss without the internet for my daily dose of info and my virtual connection with the rest of the world, beyond the walls of this empty apartment in this distant and grey land.
But of course, I still can survive without the internet at home… for about one week till I can’t tahan and fork out lots of money at an internet café! I still do lots of stuff on my laptop without having to surf. True to typical Virgo attributes, I can spend hours making lists, organising stuff, planning, sorting, updating calendars and address books, designing stuff, and being an anal perfectionist when it comes to all the above.
I record our daily/monthly expenditures and amend our monthly/annual budgets accordingly. Come up with new stuff for my blog to entertain the rest of u :) If I have new photos from a recent trip out to the beach or town, etc, I can spend the entire day or days, just sorting and touching up photos, saving them into three different file sizes for archiving, blogging or uploading/emailing.
Then there's the stuff I do for Ben. If I download any info from the Net for him, I've gotta resize and re-layout the whole document, whether it's just one page or a hundred page document ('cos Ben falls asleep if reading stuff with a point size of less than 12). So this is really leceh if it's a PDF file 'cos then I've gotta cut & paste the text into Word, and edit each of the pictures in Photoshop 'cos they can't be exported directly into Word from Acrobat Reader. And I'm really anal about layout and type, so I have to make sure each sentence is double spaced, make sure the leading and kerning is just right, etc.
I've also just started the initial layout, designs and pics for Ben's website (akan datang...), so I've gotta figure out my way around Dreamweaver again and keep abreast with the latest internet tools and gadgets...
Some days I’m reading and completing assignments for my Diploma in Montessori Education which I have yet to complete after 3 years! I can’t sit for my Final Exam in Singapore till I’ve submitted all my assignments two months before the exam date, and they only inform students of the exam date about one month before. So even if I submitted all my assignments and projects now, I wouldn’t know when the final exam is until a month before, giving me just a month to prepare for it and plan a trip back. My Montessori diploma is turning out to be like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow - something I look forward to attaining, but......
My parents are of course worried that I’ll waste it, just like how I got my Higher Diploma in Mass Communications but didn’t pursue a Degree after that or put it to good use. But I really do make full use of what I learnt every single day. I learned a great deal more about the world, society, culture, the media, government, etc and have honed my writing and analytical skills since graduating. This in turn has helped me a lot in my Montessori course ‘cos the readings and assignments are really ‘chim’ man, and it being a self-study course, I wouldn’t have been able to cope if I didn’t have my Mass Comm background.
So don’t worry, I’ll get my Montessori diploma (one day) and even if I don’t end up teaching, I’ll know a heck of a lot about child development & child psychology. So future kids in my family may be able to save on kindergarten fees... Or they’ll just be very afraid of psycho-anal-aunt Bernie.
SFX: DARTH VADER’S ENTRANCE MARCH
Anyway, back to my taitai life. Once in a while, if I pick up a book and it’s good, I’ll be hooked on it for the next 2 or 3 days till it’s done. Sometimes if I’m really bored then I’ll pick up my crossword puzzle book and work on puzzles for a while… till I get bored again. About once a month, I meet Jana for coffee at a nearby mall. Jana lives in Gardens too, with Manfred, Ben’s colleague.
Once a month I usually look for a new place in Dubai to explore on my own too, so this gives me the opportunity to take more photos and come up with more interesting blog entries instead of what I do on a daily basis. Now that we have a gym on the 6th floor, I follow Ben to the gym once in a blue moon (he goes more often of course), but I spend not more than an hour in there.
By evening/night or the time I get hungry, I’ll cook dinner. Sometimes just something instant like noodles or porridge, and if I’m preparing it for Ben too, then something more elaborate like rice with dishes or one-dish meals like pasta, curry, stew or “deconstructed Sheperd’s Pie” (sautéed minced beef, peas, mashed potatoes & gravy, minus the hassle of actually baking the darn thing).
I’m not an expert in the kitchen like Ben or my Mom, so sometimes I take several hours or even half a day to prepare and cook a proper meal! Thanks to ready-made sauces from my Mom and Brahim’s, I don’t have to spend an entire day cooking, unless I’m attempting to make something complicated from scratch. If I’m in the mood, I bake cookies or brownies for Ben.
When drystores and fresh produce are running low, I head out to the mall to buy groceries (Ibn Battuta Mall is a 15-min brisk walk away, and the Geant Hypermarket another 15-min walk away at the far end of this huge mall). So sometimes I have dinner at the foodcourt in the mall, since I no longer cook supper for Ben n myself ‘cos we’re getting a little too chubby.
The hypermarkets in Dubai (Geant & Carrefour) are so huge, and with nowhere to rush to, I can spend up 3 to 4 hours just supermarket shopping.
Now you know how Ben developed such a sweet tooth since coming here. Supermarkets are stocked with chocolates, sweets, snacks and everything else, from all over the world.
Apart from groceries and household stuff, I hardly shop (for clothes, shoes, accessories, the usual ‘girlie’ things). But if I’m feeling particularly down, I conveniently forget it’s Ben’s money I’m spending and go ahead and spoil myself a little. Like recently, I spent 55 Dirhams on a book, The Green Guide to the Emirates, to help keep me sane because we didn’t have internet and TV in our new home yet.
When Ben’s off the next day, I usually call the DVD shop (back at Courtyard near Ewan) or take the shuttle bus to Ewan, and borrow 2 or 3 DVDs. On his days off, we either stay in watching TV and DVDs ‘cos there’s really nowhere to go in Dubai. Movies at the cinema are ridiculously expensive, not to mention outdated. But Ben enjoys window-shopping, so quite often we have to go to Mall of the Emirates or Ibn Battuta Mall for him to stretch his legs and ‘cuci mata’.
I’ve always been quite a hermit, opting to stay at home doing “my own stuff” rather than go out, unless it’s to a nature spot. There’s a Bird & Wildlife Sanctuary at the Dubai Creek/mangrove, but it’s not open to the public and you have to get special permission from authorities to visit. Then there are the beaches that are partially man-made on reclaimed land. So I’m quite starved for forests and bugs and rocky shores and slugs and such. When I go shopping or window-shopping, if ever, I usually like to go alone.
I’m not anti-social but I am a loner. Not narcissistic but enjoy spending time by myself, doing “my own stuff”. I don’t ‘party’, don’t drink, and got used to missing nights out at the mamak with friends when I lived in Singapore. So adapting to a quiet life here isn’t that difficult for someone like me as compared to your regular, city girl.
Then again, a ‘city girl’ might really like it here, what with all the big brands at the malls, the nightlife, and rather happening dating scene (Guys chat you up all the time - on the bus, at the mall, at nightspots, by the beach…). Conversations always begin with a stranger saying “ in a very gatal way and asking, "So you work here?" --- “Oh I don’t work. My husband works at the Burj Al Arab.” --- "Oh…" --- Silence. Most effective ‘lecher repellent’ so far.
So that’s about it lah. By the 3rd month I was here in Dubai, I did get really bored and depressed, what with no buddies, horrible housemates and the inefficient, incompetent service standards here. I even told Ben that if I didn’t get a decent job by early 2007, I’d move back to Singapore for good in May, ‘cos I was really unhappy here. Then we got the internet set up at home in November and I’ve been alright since!
They usually work throughout their split shift, although once in a while, Ben uses that 3-hour break to go for driving lessons, and if he’s really tired then he comes home for a short rest. Recently, he’s also used this short break to come home to work out in the gym. Ben gets about 6 days off a month – 1 day off this week, 2 days off the next week, and so forth.
So anyway, here’s what I do on most days while the husband’s at work…
On ‘good’ days, I wake up some time between noon – 1pm. Some lazy or down days, I’m up at noon but continue lazing and daydreaming in bed till 3 - 5pm! I usually sleep at around 3am, and often also stay up till around 6am. And once in a while, I stay up till morning if I have an ‘outdoor-jalan-jalan’ day planned, and just zombie around on "low-batt" till evening.
So I’m up at noon most days, have my first cuppa and later have ‘breakfast’ – usually toast loaded with cold slabs of margarine, sometimes a banana and Herbalife Formula 1 with orange juice, if I’m a really good girl. Sometimes I skip ‘breakfast’ and have a plate of Indomie for lunch. Indomie Pedas is the only edible instant noodles here, and it’s pretty good.
I do the laundry at least 3 times a week. Ya, it’s unbelievable how we have so much laundry to be washed when I’m in my pajamas all day and night most of the time. But Ben wears a clean pair of pants or jeans every day, and there’s his pajamas, shirts, socks, towels, etc too. The floor has to be swept every 2 days because it gets dusty and my hair falls a lot more in this dry weather.
It doesn’t help that if I stay in all day, it means I’m living in an air-conditioned environment 24 hours a day, with no chance of fresh air… Not that the air outside is what one can call “fresh” or clean. Then there’s mopping to be done once a week, and washing the balcony, about twice a month.
I hardly watch TV during the day ‘cos you get a 2-minute portion of Oprah, followed by a 5-minute ad interval, then 2 minutes of Oprah again, then more ads… Other than Oprah, daytime TV is made up of other talk shows like Dr Phil, Rachel Ray, and soaps like Fashion House and The Bold & The Beautiful. Towards evening you get more interesting stuff on TV like The Tyra Banks Show, Pimp My Ride, a very censored screening of Desperate Housewives (1st season)…and they've just started showing Newlyweds! Like Hallo? They broke up dudes!
Later into the night we get some rather decent movies. I’m guessing people in the Middle East sleep at around 2 or 3am ‘cos the local English TV channels show good movies only at around 11pm or midnight. They provided me with 4 hours of Harry Potter fun, but the marathon started at 11pm so I was up till about 3am. Then they showed the Matrix trilogy, one installation a week, at 11pm. But even then, I don’t watch much TV ‘cos there are only three English channels (movies & sitcoms) and BBC World, to choose from the eight hundred plus free-to-air local (regional) channels (all Arabic).
So most of the time, I’m glued to my computer. If I’m online, I’d be reading/sending mail, uploading pics onto my Flickr album, updating my blog, checking out favourite sites like Wild Singapore, the Wildfilms & Reefwalk blogs, and other Singapore sites like Channel News Asia, and food stuff for Ben. Sometimes I get curious about something, it could be anything, like say… molecular gastronomy. So I surf all day gathering info about it. I’m at a loss without the internet for my daily dose of info and my virtual connection with the rest of the world, beyond the walls of this empty apartment in this distant and grey land.
But of course, I still can survive without the internet at home… for about one week till I can’t tahan and fork out lots of money at an internet café! I still do lots of stuff on my laptop without having to surf. True to typical Virgo attributes, I can spend hours making lists, organising stuff, planning, sorting, updating calendars and address books, designing stuff, and being an anal perfectionist when it comes to all the above.
I record our daily/monthly expenditures and amend our monthly/annual budgets accordingly. Come up with new stuff for my blog to entertain the rest of u :) If I have new photos from a recent trip out to the beach or town, etc, I can spend the entire day or days, just sorting and touching up photos, saving them into three different file sizes for archiving, blogging or uploading/emailing.
Then there's the stuff I do for Ben. If I download any info from the Net for him, I've gotta resize and re-layout the whole document, whether it's just one page or a hundred page document ('cos Ben falls asleep if reading stuff with a point size of less than 12). So this is really leceh if it's a PDF file 'cos then I've gotta cut & paste the text into Word, and edit each of the pictures in Photoshop 'cos they can't be exported directly into Word from Acrobat Reader. And I'm really anal about layout and type, so I have to make sure each sentence is double spaced, make sure the leading and kerning is just right, etc.
I've also just started the initial layout, designs and pics for Ben's website (akan datang...), so I've gotta figure out my way around Dreamweaver again and keep abreast with the latest internet tools and gadgets...
Some days I’m reading and completing assignments for my Diploma in Montessori Education which I have yet to complete after 3 years! I can’t sit for my Final Exam in Singapore till I’ve submitted all my assignments two months before the exam date, and they only inform students of the exam date about one month before. So even if I submitted all my assignments and projects now, I wouldn’t know when the final exam is until a month before, giving me just a month to prepare for it and plan a trip back. My Montessori diploma is turning out to be like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow - something I look forward to attaining, but......
My parents are of course worried that I’ll waste it, just like how I got my Higher Diploma in Mass Communications but didn’t pursue a Degree after that or put it to good use. But I really do make full use of what I learnt every single day. I learned a great deal more about the world, society, culture, the media, government, etc and have honed my writing and analytical skills since graduating. This in turn has helped me a lot in my Montessori course ‘cos the readings and assignments are really ‘chim’ man, and it being a self-study course, I wouldn’t have been able to cope if I didn’t have my Mass Comm background.
So don’t worry, I’ll get my Montessori diploma (one day) and even if I don’t end up teaching, I’ll know a heck of a lot about child development & child psychology. So future kids in my family may be able to save on kindergarten fees... Or they’ll just be very afraid of psycho-anal-aunt Bernie.
BEN OR BERNIE’S RELATIVES OR FRIENDS
Let’s go to Uncle Ben’s & Aunty Bernie’s house for the holidays.
Let’s go to Uncle Ben’s & Aunty Bernie’s house for the holidays.
SFX: DARTH VADER’S ENTRANCE MARCH
KIDS
No-o-o-o-O-O-o-O!!!
No-o-o-o-O-O-o-O!!!
Anyway, back to my taitai life. Once in a while, if I pick up a book and it’s good, I’ll be hooked on it for the next 2 or 3 days till it’s done. Sometimes if I’m really bored then I’ll pick up my crossword puzzle book and work on puzzles for a while… till I get bored again. About once a month, I meet Jana for coffee at a nearby mall. Jana lives in Gardens too, with Manfred, Ben’s colleague.
Once a month I usually look for a new place in Dubai to explore on my own too, so this gives me the opportunity to take more photos and come up with more interesting blog entries instead of what I do on a daily basis. Now that we have a gym on the 6th floor, I follow Ben to the gym once in a blue moon (he goes more often of course), but I spend not more than an hour in there.
By evening/night or the time I get hungry, I’ll cook dinner. Sometimes just something instant like noodles or porridge, and if I’m preparing it for Ben too, then something more elaborate like rice with dishes or one-dish meals like pasta, curry, stew or “deconstructed Sheperd’s Pie” (sautéed minced beef, peas, mashed potatoes & gravy, minus the hassle of actually baking the darn thing).
I’m not an expert in the kitchen like Ben or my Mom, so sometimes I take several hours or even half a day to prepare and cook a proper meal! Thanks to ready-made sauces from my Mom and Brahim’s, I don’t have to spend an entire day cooking, unless I’m attempting to make something complicated from scratch. If I’m in the mood, I bake cookies or brownies for Ben.
When drystores and fresh produce are running low, I head out to the mall to buy groceries (Ibn Battuta Mall is a 15-min brisk walk away, and the Geant Hypermarket another 15-min walk away at the far end of this huge mall). So sometimes I have dinner at the foodcourt in the mall, since I no longer cook supper for Ben n myself ‘cos we’re getting a little too chubby.
The hypermarkets in Dubai (Geant & Carrefour) are so huge, and with nowhere to rush to, I can spend up 3 to 4 hours just supermarket shopping.
Now you know how Ben developed such a sweet tooth since coming here. Supermarkets are stocked with chocolates, sweets, snacks and everything else, from all over the world.Apart from groceries and household stuff, I hardly shop (for clothes, shoes, accessories, the usual ‘girlie’ things). But if I’m feeling particularly down, I conveniently forget it’s Ben’s money I’m spending and go ahead and spoil myself a little. Like recently, I spent 55 Dirhams on a book, The Green Guide to the Emirates, to help keep me sane because we didn’t have internet and TV in our new home yet.
When Ben’s off the next day, I usually call the DVD shop (back at Courtyard near Ewan) or take the shuttle bus to Ewan, and borrow 2 or 3 DVDs. On his days off, we either stay in watching TV and DVDs ‘cos there’s really nowhere to go in Dubai. Movies at the cinema are ridiculously expensive, not to mention outdated. But Ben enjoys window-shopping, so quite often we have to go to Mall of the Emirates or Ibn Battuta Mall for him to stretch his legs and ‘cuci mata’.
I’ve always been quite a hermit, opting to stay at home doing “my own stuff” rather than go out, unless it’s to a nature spot. There’s a Bird & Wildlife Sanctuary at the Dubai Creek/mangrove, but it’s not open to the public and you have to get special permission from authorities to visit. Then there are the beaches that are partially man-made on reclaimed land. So I’m quite starved for forests and bugs and rocky shores and slugs and such. When I go shopping or window-shopping, if ever, I usually like to go alone.
I’m not anti-social but I am a loner. Not narcissistic but enjoy spending time by myself, doing “my own stuff”. I don’t ‘party’, don’t drink, and got used to missing nights out at the mamak with friends when I lived in Singapore. So adapting to a quiet life here isn’t that difficult for someone like me as compared to your regular, city girl.
Then again, a ‘city girl’ might really like it here, what with all the big brands at the malls, the nightlife, and rather happening dating scene (Guys chat you up all the time - on the bus, at the mall, at nightspots, by the beach…). Conversations always begin with a stranger saying “ in a very gatal way and asking, "So you work here?" --- “Oh I don’t work. My husband works at the Burj Al Arab.” --- "Oh…" --- Silence. Most effective ‘lecher repellent’ so far.
So that’s about it lah. By the 3rd month I was here in Dubai, I did get really bored and depressed, what with no buddies, horrible housemates and the inefficient, incompetent service standards here. I even told Ben that if I didn’t get a decent job by early 2007, I’d move back to Singapore for good in May, ‘cos I was really unhappy here. Then we got the internet set up at home in November and I’ve been alright since!
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