Eid Mubarak!

That is, Happy Eid!

For those of you playing at home, Eid al Fitr (or Eidul fittr, depending on who's transliterating)--pronounced alternately "eed" and "eyed"--is the roughly week-long celebration of the end of Ramadan. I get three days off work, and the kids get the whole week off school, but from the sounds of it most westerners either flee the country or hunker down in their homes waiting for the smoke to clear, because after 3+ weeks of fasting during the daylight hours, dem Arabs settle in to par-tay! It's like Italy at new years, from the sounds of it. Or the red mile after a Flames win during playoffs. Or Auschwitz after the Russians showed up. Well, maybe not like Auschwitz. Maybe more like Red Square after Stalin had finished a speech and the security forces prompted applause, only they're not commies and they don't need prompting.

Or maybe not like any of these things: we'll fill you in next week. But we can imagine that it will involve stupid human tricks in high-powered, fast-moving suvs, consumption of gobs of dates and date by-products, shopping, nose-touching, the occasional high-five, and gridlocked traffic from dawn to dusk.

Anyway, Eid Mubarak!



Here at Roundabout, we keep our promises. We promised to talk about misrules of the road and Arabian soaps.



Road's easy:



1) Roundabouts aplenty, driven at 2x20.
2) Don't ever leave the roundabout in the same lane in which you entered it: drivers who enter in the left lane, which is intended for those meaning to turn "left" (180 degrees), should exit in the middle lane, preferrably one turn early, and without signalling; drivers who enter in the middle lane, which is meant for those going "through" the roundabout, should exit in the right-hand lane (see additional rules for left-hand turners, and apply accordingly); drivers who enter in the right-hand lane, intended for those planning to turn right as soon as possible, should go like stink or die a horrible death crushed under the belly of a leviathan Nissan Patrol or Armada, or they should cut across to the middle or left-hand lane and gesture wildly when greeted by the klaxoning hordes careening wildly behind them.
3) Park wherever you can, even if this involves enabling the four-wheel drive.
4) Never wait in line to make a u-turn when you can cut in front of 40 other vehicles.
5) Always yield to Emiratis, especially when they come barrelling up behind you at 3 times the legal limit and flash their headlights several times in succession.
6) Speed limits are minimums, not maximums.
7) Taxis should stop without warning at least once on every block.
8) Headlights are optional.

Arabian soaps are just too darn precious to really capture. Let's just say they explode all stereotypes. The makeup is awful, the acting melodramatic, the plotlines convoluted to the point of indecipherability--Fatima gives a picture of herself to her brother Salid, who, weak and addled from fasting, gives it to a friend, which now makes here a vassal to the friend and a blight on her family's honour, but the friend is recruited by a radical imam for martyrdom, which enrages the conservative but loving patriarch, who shouts passionately and at length and ends up holding his daughter tenderly while she weeps in gratitude for her father's forgiveness, etc.--but they have that same earnest, dewy-eyed vacuity of the American brand. That's entertainment.



Actually, we have no idea what the soaps are about. They're in Arabic.

Next time: Eid update, and a few observations about intercultural relations in the workplace.