Unexpected Holidays

Living in the United Arab Emirates was an interesting experience for me.

I was always very grateful for the unexpected holidays we received when members of the royal family died. Such gratitude, however, is easily misplaced, as happened with me during my latter years when before one of my usual weekly exams, I was actively hoping the president would die so I wouldn't have to do the exam the next day.

It was always a joke between those of us that saw the irony in students celebrating a holiday the government officially labelled as a day of mourning. Personally, I still don't see a justification for calling a national holiday on anybody's death, and so I will disregard any "bleak" aspect of this holiday for the rest of this entry.

The beauty of these holidays was how unexpected they were. On some occassions, the government wouldn't get the chance to notify newspapers on time to make the announcement in the morning paper, and so nobody would know about it. One such case happened when I was in Grade 9 or 10, and the local newspapers couldn't get the word out so they informed the schools personally, probably. The administration got their cleaners and other staff to line up at all the entrances to the school to stop cars and give them the good bad news.

It's an extremely refreshing experience, when you're depressed having to wake up in the morning, planning which period you would have to spend doing homework for the following period or revising some God-awful French Auto-Dictee, and then voila. No more school for the day! And you're up early, so more hours of fun!

I remember on that particular day, I saw students dancing on the grass isles of the parking lot. Me, I wasn't dancing. But one thing's for sure: I wasn't mourning either.

When Sheikh Rashid died, the ruler of Dubai, I was still in Falcon's Private School, the school I was in for kindergarten and Grades 1 through 3, and we got four whole days off. Wow! Four days!

We were watching the funeral ceremony on national television where the entire royal family got together, and my brother mentioned dreamily without looking away from the television, "Look at all those Sheikhs. Imagine, if someone dropped a bomb here, we'd get the whole year off..."