Hi friends and family.  Oh and hi aunty Robyn.  I want to tell you that they call soccer football in the UAE.  My dad signed me up to play football.  There are 2 ginormous soccer fields where we live.  The grass is made of rubber and the dirt is like black plastic seeds.  There is giant lights so you can play at night.

At my first soccer practice we did an obstacle course.  It had these ladders so you had to jump like a frog.  There were poles too that made you jump like a kangaroo.  In the soccer game I fell down a couple times but I got straight back up.  I had fun with a smiling face.  This guy with shin pads fell down and said that his legs were broken.  My dad says that is an advanced soccer move.

Whenever the other team had the ball my teammates would stay behind but I would go and take it from them.  I made a great pass to my teammate.  I got a free kick ball because it went out of bounds.  We almost scored at the last second but the game ended up being a tie.  The referee was counting from 3 to 0 and when he reached 0 the game was over and it was a tie one to one.

I scored the first goal!  Then the other team scored.

Here are some pictures of me playing soccer – oh and a few pool pictures too:

At least once a day I have a moment of… lucidity, realism, awareness… where I focus on the fact that I have moved my family to the other side of the planet.  There is plenty of home transplanted here but this is still the Middle East and a culture quite foreign to me.  The weekends are not even the same.  Sunday is truly the first day of the week here.  My work week begins with Sunday and ends on Thursday.  Friday is the sabbath and Saturday is the last day of a two day weekend.

The church here meets in a rented Villa.  There are plenty of members (about 130-140).  The majority of the church membership are from the Philippines.  There are 3 LDS families living at AUS.  It just so happens that our next door neighbour (we live in K33 and they live in K32) is the Stake President.  On the Thursday night before our first Friday I took the kids to the pool at the faculty leisure centre.  There was another family there and we got to talking.  It wasn’t long before I discovered they were members too.  Jeremy and Bridget Palmer and their two daughters (4 & 6) are from Idaho.  What a blessing it was to run into them on the night before our first attempt to get to church.  I hired a car to drive us to the church but of course the driver had poor command of English (and I no command of Arabic).  Jeremy (who speaks fluent Arabic) rode along with us and directed the driver to the church.  Clearly we are being watched over.  My dad is convinced I carry around a bucket of lucky horseshoes.  I know better.

Let me tell you a little about AUS.  They do nothing small in the United Arab Emirates.  All of the buildings on campus have enormous footprints with high ceilings and sculpted exteriors.  AUS is one of several universities/colleges within University City.  As such, it is a gated community within a gated community.  To get on campus one must pass through guarded gates into University City and after passing by other institutions through another set of guarded gates.  There is security everywhere.  So far they seem to just stand around in the blistering heat a whole lot – though I was nearly tackled when I attempted to bring my lunch into the library.  It took me a couple minutes to convince the guard that I was a librarian and was taking it to my office.  From his expression you could tell he had a hard time believing I was a librarian and not a student.

We live about 500 meters from the library.  I can make the walk to work in less than five minutes which means I can come home for lunch too.  There is a free bus that makes scheduled stops all over campus.  Though one could walk anywhere on campus the heat makes that nearly intolerable and probably dangerous.  I have had heat stroke and never wish to get it again.

The sports centre is free to faculty and staff.  It boasts an Olympic size swimming pool.  I  hope to make good use of it.  To do so one needs to figure out the hours.  Men and women do not share the pool at the same time.  The leisure centre for faculty and staff is also free and includes a small outdoor pool, weight room, TV room, and gym.  I have the kids signed up for swimming lessons.  Jaron and Lilli are signed up for Soccer and Kirsten is going to learn to Hula.  All of these activities are free.  Lisa and I are going to take a spinning (cycling) class together.

Campus seems excellent for family life.  There are playgrounds everywhere.  We are told that within a month the temperature outside will be very tolerable.  Apparently we are in for five months of fabulous weather.  We hope the kids will make good use of all the facilities here and make some excellent friends.

I took a few pictures of campus to post here.  Lisa really needs to be the one to take photos – I’m terrible at it.  I’m sure we’ll soon have thousands of great photos to share.  For now here is a small handful.

It is really hot here in the UAE!  The heat never quits.  It feels like you can cook chicken outside.  So I like to go swimming all the time.  There is a pool just down the road from us.  It has a slide that is really fun.  The slide is really steep and has water going down it so it is really fast.  My dad has to catch me at the bottom of the slide because I can’t quite swim yet.  I can swim a little bit but I’m not quite strong enough yet.

We also have fun adventures here.  We went to the salty ocean the other day.  It was really fun but the salty water stung my throat and mouth and eyes and nose.  I didn’t like that very much.  My dad buried me in the sand.  I did like that.

There is a climbing wall here and I am going to learn to climb it.  Dad signed me up for swimming lessons and for soccer – it is going to be really fun.  The only thing that could make this place better is if all my friends were here too.

I’ve been making lego videos on my PS Vita.  I made this one special just for you:

Our new house is totally awesome. We have 5 bathrooms! My dad hates the staircase because it is super long! Luckily, I have my own bedroom:).  Right after I took the video below the shipping company came with the rest of our stuff.  Now my room has way more stuff in it.  It’s really fun when you have not seen something for a long time and when you start to unpack you get to see it again.

There are these weird hose things in each bathroom but I don’t want to say what they are.  The couches are not very soft but we have 3 of them. Jaron got the maid’s room.  I think that makes him our new maid.  There is no grass in the backyard 😦 but dad says they are going to plant some for us.

We’ve already made some friends here.  Today we went to the beach.  It was really hot outside.  The water was very salty and tasted bad.  The salt got in my eyes and up my nose.  It was really painful.  The water was as warm as the air but we still had fun playing in the sand and swimming in the water.  My friends’ dad caught a sea urchin and showed it to us.  It was black and really poky.

After the beach we went to our friends house and jumped in their pool.  The pool water was nicer than the ocean.  We are having lots of fun in our new place.  Tomorrow I start school.  School will be awesome because mom is our teacher.