Class, UAE, and Driving!

Hola!

So the past couple of days have been busy. I have made more friends, most of them from Malaysia and Indonesia. A couple, though, come from Oman and the United Arab Emirates. Wednesday evening we went to a 5-Star restaurant in downtown Abu Dhabi called The Beach Rotana Hotel. It was huge and gorgeous! Marble columns, real brocade curtains, massive chandeliers, etc-Just glad I was not required to pay for it.  I sat with my new Malaysian friends for dinner, and then afterwards they got picture happy. Really picture happy. I should be in many potential facebook pictures now.


Abu Dhabi (or what I saw of it) is so beautiful! And desert-y. The roads are very nice, thought the lanes are narrow. The max driving speed is 60 km/h which none of the locals adhere to. I heard a story about a guy going 140 km/h in a taxi to the airport and there were still cars passing him so fast it made the taxi seem like it was standing still. Also, don’t worry for my safety, as SLB requires me to wear a 3-point seatbelt at all times. Penalty for not wearing a seatbelt, or not making sure everyone is wearing one and they catch you or a wreck occurs? Termination. Anyway, Abu Dhabi is very full of buildings but they do not look like American houses. U.A.E. houses are huge and very square, made out of concrete sort of material, with flat-topped roofs and terraces on multiple floors. I was told this is the oil field side of town, so thus the people are very very rich. Most buildings in town have writing on them in both English and Arabic, which has the potential to be very helpful if I come back here for Engg 1. I can’t tell if there is legit parking anywhere though. They just seem to park randomly where ever they fit.

Fun fact about alcohol and Abu Dhabi? If you are drunk and in public they will arrest you, put you in jail for however long they deem necessary, and then you can be deported. End of story. And yes, it has happened to an engineer from my company.

Classes are going ok. I have yet to actually learn a whole lot of new information. However I have been through this twice before, so I wasn’t really expecting epiphanies to occur in my life. The different people make it interesting for the most part. However one frustrating aspect is the language barrier. All of us speak English, it is just the degree of competency that varies. An instructor asked one of the students how much he was understanding at one point, and the student’s answer was “30 percent.” Also, though many of the students are very proficient in English, little used or specialized words come up that need to be defined for the class, which does take some time.

Oh, and driving…wow. Our instructor got really upset one time. A girl from a SE Asian country asked if she had to wear a seatbelt when on vacation because people from her country aren’t required to. His response, “You’d have to be stupid not to.” Then, one of the more traditional guys from a Gulf country stated that seatbelts shouldn’t be required for speeds up to 80 km (about 50 mph) because you wouldn’t be hurt in the accident. The teacher replied to the effect that the engineer was very very wrong, and when the engineer argued with him it got worse. He stated the engineer obviously had very bad driving training, and proceeded to tell us gruesome accident stories and that if we didn’t want to wear a seatbelt we could walk away from a the job right now. It was impressive to watch.

On the terms of safety, I really do feel very safe working for this company. They do not lay you out to dry. We are provided with training, resources, and empowerment (which sounds odd, I know) when we join. They have the most stringent safety regulation and most thorough safety training in the industry. This is really nice to know. As employees we also have the responsibility to “stop the job.” If I see anything I find questionable, or potentially dangerous, not only am I allowed, but I am required to say something. If I don’t and something happens I will at least be disciplined, and (if the result was major or catastrophic) I will be fired. Even if I was just watching and not physically involved at all. It’s nice to know I can speak up even if I am a newbie. 

The personal safety presentation was kind of terrifying. Not that anything will probably ever happen to me, but I definitely should never have watched, “Taken.”

Found out that in the U.A.E. if you don’t have a U.A.E. government license to give CPR, it is illegal to do so. They will put you in jail even if you were able to save the person.

Driving training was pretty awesome. The instructors were all from Australia and G.B. and they were hilarious and really nice. Well, they weren’t so hilarious when they were telling depressing and sad accident stories, but they did get their point across. Also, the safe driving information they told us was really helpful. Today I did a commentary drive in Abu Dhabi as part of the training. It was sooo sweet. I passed the entire practical, even though I have a major handicap when it comes to roundabouts. We need more of them for practice in Kansas. Also, if any of you think you know how to drive them correctly, you are potentially doing it wrong. Not because I just know everything about them now, but because they are actually quite tricky. And Abu Dhabi has a very large number of them! So I definitely learned fast.

Anyway, I am officially done with OFS-1 now! I have tomorrow off (I am going to sleep!!) and then tomorrow night at 10 pm I head to the airport. My Malaysian friend, who is also heading to Labuan, and I will wait there until our flight leaves at 2:45 am. That would be 5:45 pm for y’all in Kansas. I plan to sleep for the 7 hour flight. All of it. Then I get in to Kuala Lumpur at 2 pm (remember I just added 4 hours onto my already 9 hour time change), wait for hours for my next flight, and head out to Labuan just in time to get in at 9:10 pm (my time) and 8:10 pm yours. WOOHOO…more jetlag. It will be great!

This is definitely long enough (sorry!) so I am heading out now for some food and relaxation.

I love and miss you guys already.

Becca