Eid Mubarak

Musings from the Eid holiday. Please don't ask me what an Eid holiday is. I really don't know. All I can tell you is that it involves people buying new clothes. How this is different from every other day in the UAE, I can't tell yas. But it's some sort of religious thing. That involves sales and clothes. So yeah.....

For "my" Eid, my mates family and I went to a water park. This was actually FUN!!! I mostly played Sudoku in a lounge chair under the shade. Of the five that I played (of various levels: easy, medium, and hard) I 100% completed four of them - it was one of the easy ones that stumped me! LOL

Coming back, we drove thru an emerates called Sharja. There are no women in Sharja. I kid you not. We started playing, for fun, "spot the female". First one spotted "wins" five dhiram. LOL Pretty crazy. It's almost like a Lord of the Flies for grown ups. Bachelors is what they call them. Just hundreds upon hundreds of men. Nothing else. Even where we stayed in Dubai there was nothing but men outside. Hundreds upon hundreds of men.

Now I know you all have the Weathergirls song "It's Raining Men" running thru your head and believe me it's NOTHING like that. It's pretty surreal to see. Very "alien". Not disconcerting but very strange. What must the psyche be of all those men. The only conversations you have are with other men. You socialize with ... other men. You shop, travel, live with .... other men. I was told that some of these men do have wives and children back in their homelands. But they are here for months at a time; sometimes a good year before they see their families. Can you imagine? Not interacting with a member of the opposite sex for months even years? The guys reading this probably yelled out "YES!!!" and may think this is a groovy idea. But really... THINK about this....

When "we" were growing up, we played with both boys and girls. It was the natural way of things. Boys and girls HAD to learn to play together, work together, fight each other, disagree. All those things we learned on the playground... in school... roaming the neighbourhood.... middle school... high school..... college.... all those interactions we learned as a matter of course. This country as a whole segregates boys and girls after kindergarden. Girls go to a girls school even at the university level and boys go to a boys school. They don't play together. They don't learn together. They end up having to work together only when they are adults. So 18-21 years of learning social graces and interactions and social cues are just gone.... not exists ... These people have no idea how to communicate with the opposite sex. So misunderstandings abound. They have no concrete contexts for how the other thinks and behaves so their belief about the other is ... conjecture.... fantasy..... misinformation .... lies! Then think of this... most of the marriages are arranged, so now you marry someone you don't know and don't know how to "get to know". And you now have to live with this alien creature! LOL No wonder the divorce rate in this country is hella high!

I wonder if anyone has ever done a psych profile of these people. What must their minds and outlook be like having missed out on half a life. I know they don't think they've missed out on anything. It's natural for them - this segregation of the sexes. But from the outside looking in.... how fucked up they must really be. It's kinda like a supermax prison on a country wide scale.