Long Day

I have such awesome friends and family!  Thank you so much for your support, prayers, and encouragement when I was feeling overwhelmed.  It means a lot to me!  I am doing much better, even though there are still many many uncertainties.

I found out where I will be teaching.  Well at least the name of the school, I still can't find the area on a map.  I will be teaching at Ammoriyah Primary School.  This is a girls cycle 1 (1-5) school.  As of right now there are no other LTs (licensed teachers) going to this school.   There are 3 more LTs that are going to the same area as I am, but they are going to a different school.  Not sure why I got placed at Ammoriyah instead of the other one, but I'm sure I'm there for a reason.

We went to Sheikh Zayed Mosque today.  It is beautiful.  I took a lot of pictures, but they don't really do it justice.  For women to enter the Mosque they have to wear an abbayah and a sheyla.  The abbayah is the long black covering and the sheyla is the hair covering.  This Mosque can hold 22,000 people!  That's amazing.  It has the largest chandelier in the world.  I will say that the chandelier isn't all that pretty, but it is the largest!  There is a men's worship area and a women's worship area.  Both are exactly the same.  The ceiling has huge domes with verses of the Quran inscribed.   The Quran is also read 24 hours a day.  The men have to read for 2 hours at a time.  In addition to wearing the abbayah and sheyla, we had to take our shoes off.  Even though it was hot outside the ground wasn't hot at all.  Not sure how they achieved that, but I was quite glad.  Sheikh Zayed is buried in this Mosque, but we didn't have time to see his burial site.  In one area of the Mosque if you are stepping on a flower on the carpet and look up at the ceiling you will see the exact flower that you are stepping on!  Pretty neat feature.  The wall facing Mecca (the direction they pray) is white while the other walls have more color.  Some of the walls were covered in flowers.  More pictures will be posted on Facebook.   It was very impressive and amazing! 

Sheikh Zayed Mosque

Me and Cassandra in our abbayahs and sheylas

We also went to the Islamic Cultural Center in Al Ain. We were told that we would have an Iftar buffet when we got there. This did not happen. We had light refreshments; finger foods. It was good, but not what we were told was going to happen. The rest of the night wasn't fun at all. We sat through 2 lectures, and I mean boring lectures where the speaker read from a paper, about culture and relegion. I am getting sick of hearing the same things about Muslims and Islam culture. I know it's important to understand their culutre, but they keep telling us the same things over and over. For a 2 hour ride, I thought it was going to be informative and well presented. A lot of us actually thought we were going to go to a museum. That would have been so much better.


Now it's late and time for bed. I still have no idea how much longer I'll be in the hotel. I have heard that they are moving us to a hotel in Al Ain on Saturday, but I haven't gotten any real confirmation about that.