Standing in front of the machine was a group of about ten laborers, all wearing the bright blue jumpsuits of the street-cleaning crews.  They didn’t notice me as they laughed and chatted and took turns inserting their bank cards into the machine.

I figured it would take at least fifteen minutes for them all to finish their transactions, so I turned back around to ask the desk attendant in our lobby if he knew where I would find the next closest ATM.  He came out to the street–his uniform, of white shirt, black trousers, a jazzy tie, and some sort of epaulet type thing on his shoulders, looked much spiffier than the other men’s grimy blue coveralls.  Instead of pointing me towards the next ATM, he said something in a language I didn’t understand (Urdu? Tagalog? Arabic? Hindi?), jerked his chin at the men, and then waved his hand at me.

The laborers melted away from the ATM like ghosts and stood quietly to one side.

What to do?  I didn’t want to cause the desk attendant to lose face, so I didn’t want to not use the ATM. That would make him look bad in front of men he clearly considered to be his inferiors.  And yet the workers were there first, obviously, which means they should’ve been able to finish their business before I got my turn.

They all stared at me, waiting.  I felt Caleb’s head swiveling, looking at the desk attendant, looking at the laborers, looking at me.

I smiled, muttered my best “shukran” (Arabic for “thank you” — although I have no idea if anyone involved in this situation was a native Arabic speaker), got my money, muttered another thank-you, and darted to the curb with Caleb to hail a cab to his friend’s house.

In the back of the cab, Caleb said “mommy, why’d that man make the other guys let us go first?”

How to answer?  “Well,” I said, “those men were workers, and so the man in our building thought–”

Caleb interrupted: “I know. It’s because that machine is on our building. So it’s like it’s ours. So we get to use it first.”

I stopped. “Yep,” I said. “That’s right. It’s our machine.”

Sometimes it’s easy to forget here, in this city of expats (only about 19% of the population is native Emirati), that we’re living in a culture very different from our own.  You can trot around reveling in the weather and the deep blue sky and imagine you live outside LA, maybe, or Houston.  And then sometimes, whammo, my whiteness and my outsiderness sinks right down into my bones until I spin around in my head like a dervish. I have privilege because I’m a white expat; I have no privilege because I’m a woman; I am deferred to because I am a woman; I am suspect because I am white.

So yes, you’re right. I did bail on the teachable moment. I have a feeling that, unfortunately, there will be plenty more where that one came from.

As if.

But even if people were going to write letters to us, or send us packages of things I can’t find here (what I’ve learned is that what you can’t get in a certain place tells you more about that place than what you can get)…you couldn’t send it to my apartment.

I don’t really have an address. No one does.  There isn’t any home mail delivery in Abu Dhabi and there aren’t what you’d call street addresses, either.

I’m used to hopping in a cab and barking out the address of my destination New York style: 14th between 2nd and 3rd; Houston and Avenue D, south side.

Not here. Here everyone navigates by landmarks because instead of the streets having no name, ala U2, the streets have 2 or 3 names. Our building is on Electra Street. Also Sheikh Zayed the First Street. Also 7th street.  The nearest big cross street is Sheik Rashid Al Bin Maktoum Road. Also Old Airport Road. Also 2nd street.

To add another layer of fun to this larky layout is the fact that behind these multiply named streets, behind the tall buildings that line the wide avenues are honeycombs of shopping districts: tiny shops jammed along crisscrossing little alleys that have no names or numbers at all.

It’s a constant set of triangulations: to find one thing, you need to have one or two other things to orient against: the tailor who hemmed my pants said his shop was “behind Wear Mart and down from Swiss Arabian perfume store.”  The dry cleaner puts this address on the dry cleaning bags:

Not having street addresses creates a disconcerting sense of living in a small town—just turn left at old Mike’s café, drive on past Aunt Tilly’s shop—even though we’re surrounded by skyscrapers and multi-lane highways.

If you want mail, actual mail? You need one of these:

Instead of a post-box, though, many people get their mail delivered to their offices. To get a post-box, you need to fill out an application, turn in copies of your residence visa or passport, two passport photos (I have no idea why), and then of course you need to stand in a bureaucratic line (or two or three). Getting mail at the office means I get my beloved New Yorkers in print, as god intended them to be, but about two weeks after the fact.  You want to know what’s happening in the city in late August? I’m your gal.

What surprises me is how strange it seems not to get mail delivered here, to our apartment. Who knew that “getting the mail” was a ritual important enough that it would be missed?

We’re slowly putting together our routines—boys off to school in the mornings, Husband and I off to work—but I still don’t feel “at home” here.  And as I was roaming around taking pictures of post office boxes, I found a (slightly overstated) metaphor for these early days of expat life: I am an unknown letter…or, rather, a letter that hasn’t yet been addressed.

The flight attendants come through for the “paid food service.”

Passenger in front of me: I’ll have the turkey club please.

Flight attendant rummages in cart: We don’t have any more.

Passenger consults “menu”: Could I have one of these slider sandwiches, then?

Flight attendant rummages in cart: We don’t have any more.

Passenger consults menu: Um…PB&J?

Flight attendant doesn’t even bother to rummage: We’re out of sandwiches.

Passenger, defeated, tentative: Peanuts, please?

Flight attendant, smug: Nope.

Passenger sinks down in seat: Nothing, then.

Flight attendant moves on down the aisle, smiling.

Reverb 10 prompt #12: This year, when did you feel the most integrated with your body? Did you have a moment where there wasn’t mind and body, but simply a cohesive YOU, alive and present?

I remember waaay back in the day–high school and early college–when I was a bun-headed dancer. In high school, daily life was pretty miserable but when I walked into the ballet studio, all that misery got swept away by the precision of plié, tendu, plié, relévé. The girl I saw in the mirror controlled her body in a way that she couldn’t control the world outside the studio–and while I was never going to be a prima ballerina, I think having the separate world of the ballet studio helped me survive adolescence.

I’m pushing fifty at this point, so that ballet body ain’t coming back any time soon (okay, ever) and I’ve (sort of) made my peace with that. What I keep searching for, in my exercise life as an adult, is that endorphine-fueled focus, the sweat that puts everything in perspective.  For a while in grad school I ran on a semi-regular basis but ultimately? I run too slowly and it hurts. Knees, back, ankles. Just one big slow ouch.

And now, in this late-mid-forties place where I find myself and my extra five (eight, maybe ten) pounds? I find myself  at the risk of sounding like someone who totally drank the lotus-spiked kool-aid because what I love these days is yoga.  When I’m sweating in the yoga studio (which has no mirrors, a key intervention in the struggle between mind and body), all the crap that I think about all day–  whattocookfordinnerwhoispickingupwhomwhatamIteachingtomorrowdidIcallthedoctordidIcallthebabysitterwhattimeissoccerpracticeareweoutofmilkisthelaundrydone –all that stuff disappears.It’s not the “om-ing” that I like, although I’m getting less cynical about that, it’s the focus on where I’m putting my body, listening to my creaky joints, feeling them de-creak as I stretch, and the distinct pleasure I take in being able to do things now that I couldn’t do two months ago.

So the short answer to this question is, “today, at about 12:40, when for the first time I managed to lift myself for a split second into something that almost resembles crow pose.” Of course, I tipped forward immediately and about cracked my nose on the floor, but I guess that’s all part of it, right?

just for the record – that person in the picture? not me – it’s from dailygoods.wordpress.com