Sand Ants Are On My Bread and In My Head

While Sarah is hard at work trying to teach her class something useful, I'll make a blog post here to try and teach the rest of you something entirely useless.

Lesson 01: Sand Ants
Sand ants will crawl all over a bag of bread trying to get to the deliciously soft goods within no matter how futile their effort may be. That's just the way they operate. Also, I think they're on my head but that might just be paranoia.

See how useless that is to know? Good. Now use that information to go forth and conquer.

I suppose you'd like some actual information regarding our stay in Abu Dhabi. Well! Allow me to share some more delightful tales of our experience here.

I think I'll start with the stop signs here. Apparently, they prove to be highly ineffective with drivers. Despite it being written in both English and Arabic (none of this "I couldn't understand what the sign said" business!), the drivers here seem to take a stop sign as an invitation to speed up and blast through an intersection. I've witnessed this happen with about every single car I've seen.

Oh, oh! I also saw a fender bender! It was exciting because I've never seen a fender bender outside of Canada. And it was totally the person in front who should be at fault - he stopped in the middle of the intersection on a green light. Explain that one to me!

Anyway, back to stop signs. So, the stop signs basically don't work here. I've even found that my classic "let-me-cross-or-I'll-pull-you-out-of-your-car-and-beat-you-to-within-an-inch-of-your-life-with-a-baseball-bat" stare down had no effect! Unbelievable! Now I've got to wait for all the cars to blow through a stop sign before I can cross. Bah!

There are also lots of cats over here. And I mean lots. They litter the streets and garbage bins like dry leaves on the forest floor in autumn (poetic, I know). It'd be okay if they were all cute and cuddly but they're quite the opposite! The majority of them are pretty scrawny which shouldn't really surprise me - their diet is, after all, dust and maybe a chicken bone if they're lucky. Just take a look at this fella, he's got no meat on him:

Fig. 1.0.: A disgustingly mangy cat.

Don't be fooled by his "cute" eyes. Not moments later, Sarah was being surrounded by a clowder of cats waiting to ambush her for food. We promptly hissed and scared them away.

Bonus cat factoid: did you know that a male cat's penis has around 120 - 150 backwards pointing barbs so that when it's withdrawn from the female, it scraps the inside of her vagina stimulating ovulation and removing any semen from previous cats? You can never un-know this now!

Cats are a**holes.

Moving on the non-feline related information: look, a picture of the sun at dusk!

Fig. 1.1.: The sun sets in the west and I'm still dripping sweat. Unbelievable.

We also took a joy ride last week down to the city center. The buses here are super cheap and not that bad to ride. They have a "ladies only" section of the bus at the very front where only "ladies" are allowed to sit. It's rather entertaining to see the back of the bus packe to the brim with a bunch of tired, sweaty workers and ten empty seats at the front of the bus staring at them.

Anyway, here's what a part of the city looks like:

Fig. 1.2.: The very metropolitan city center (I think). There's a sculpture of a cannon in the distance.

Last, but not least, I present to you a picture of Prince Pocket. Those of you on Facebook will have already seen it but I figured that for the benefit of our non-Facebook enabled friends I should post it here for you to check out:

Fig. 1.3.: Prince Pocket - he steals cookies from the rich and gives them to the starving poor. My hero!

Yeah, there are a lot of things like that around here. I have a feeling that I'll be endlessly entertained by bizarre food products and descriptions written in broken english.

That's all for now! Until the next blog post!

- Bernard