One of the good things about working here is there is tons of down time. Don’t get me wrong when we are working we are working, but there a good long breaks at the end of the trimesters that are much longer than I am used to. For example, last trimester we worked for 11 weeks straight and that was rough. However, after that I didn’t teach a class for six weeks. There is the week before exams, in which the students have the option of studying at school or at home. All teachers do at school is give exercises to help them study for the test. The students pretty much respond as you might expect when a student at the end of a grading period is given the option to go to school. So that week there are usually only a handful of students in class while the rest decided to stay home and…uh….“study”. The following two weeks are exams. The LT’s are assigned to proctor the exams along with an Arabic teacher. We never get our own class and in most cases we don’t even get our own grade levels. Students come to school at the assigned time, take their test, and go home. We usually get out pretty early those days and I am home with plenty of time to do something else for the day. It sometimes doesn’t even feel like I went to work. During that whole time I literally felt like I was already on vacation. It was such a great time, such a contrast to the previous 11 weeks where I am getting familiar and trying to keep my head above water. Then after that the actual vacation does come, 3 weeks worth. I felt like I would forget how to teach. All the while, got a chance to just hang out at the house with Natova and enjoy being here. Our initial plans to go to Thailand are being postponed until the spring or summer. We figure it’s better to erase the little debt we have before we start globetrotting.
So there you have it. I got a chance to enjoy a month and a half of non-teaching bliss. The good thing is that I can expect more of the same later on. My work schedule seems to shape up to be 7 or 8 weeks on (teaching), 5 weeks off (not teaching, end of 2nd trimester), 8 weeks on, 10 weeks off (end of trimester, summer break). It’s hard to complain about that, even when the job is tough.
Unfortunately towards the end of the break my health was bombarded. The first thing I started to noticed was my right arm had that going to sleep feeling and I couldn’t wake it up for a couple of days. Then I ended up catching a cold at the same time. Thus began my tour of the Emirate medical practice. Interestingly enough, when I got to the hospital the focus shifted from the reason I came in the first place to my blood pressure, which I had always known to be on the high side. I ended up spending almost a whole day in the hospital so that they could run tests and so I could sit around and wait for doctors to become available.
Don’t worry, all of this sounds more serious than it is. Long story short I was in and out of the hospital for a few weeks getting things checked out, searching to see why my arm was going numb periodically (I had to do all this with the aforementioned cold/flu so I wasn’t exactly thrilled about having to move around a lot). The Cardiologist did not think it was related to circulation. After the MRI my neurologist ruled out MS or any neurological diseases and said my nerves seemed fine, at least in the literal sense. His verdict was that it was my body reacting to stress. I kind of chuckled when he asked me do I have a stressful job. I told him I was a teacher, and we both understood. He told me to try to relax. Ironically I can see looking back that I the whole process of finding out what was going on with me was pretty stressful in itself.
One of the other more positive things that happened over the break was that Natova and I checked out the Mabadala Open, an exhibition tennis tournament feature 6 of the top men’s tennis players in the world, including Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Novak Djokavic. These are the 3 best tennis players in the world and I had been looking forward to seeing this tournament all break. I had never actually seen professional tennis played except on TV so this was great. The tricky thing though is scheduling a day to go see it. The match up everyone wants to see is Nadal vs. Federer. Ever since the Wimbledon final a few years ago, a match that tennis professionals, experts, and myself are calling the greatest tennis match ever played, everyone wants to see those two play each other for the possibility of recreating that great tennis match. The thing is both Nadal and Federer did not play the first day, the second they would play but not each other, the third day, there is no telling who will win out to make it to the finals. If they both won out the would make the third day and we could see the epic match up, but its risky because if they don’t win, you may not see them at all. So we bought tickets for Day 3, only because Day 2 was all taken up. But as fortune would have it Nadal and Federer both lost Day 2, and would play the 3rd place match against each other. Now for the bad news. As misfortune would have it, all of this went down the day I was stuck in the hospital for the entire day. The worst part about it was that the hospital is directly across the street from the stadium. I could literally see the stadium from my hospital room, and maybe if I listened hard enough I could hear the crowd (actually the crowd noise, that’s an exaggeration, but you get the idea). I was released with enough time to make it over and catch the last game in the last set between the Federer and Nadal. I did catch all of the championship match with Djokovic and Ferrer, in which Djokovic dominated. Overall it was great and I’m glad I got to see something. 
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