Paherale!!! and all the rest

I finally can write an entry on the blog, after three weeks. There are plenty of things to tell as it always happens when you are in a new country with such a different culture. Also things like my birthday and the anecdote I lived yesterday. I can't help getting into troubles with the police wherever I go... Nothing too bad, hehe. I will be dropping bits on this and other entries about Ras Al-Khaimah and the Emirates. By the way, I am going to save some words by using only RAK, the initials for which it is known here. Much easier.

Well, so far, so good! RAK is different to Bahrain and definitely not the type of emirate Dubai is. This is much poorer and dirtier, bit rural too. We have goats and chickens walking peacefully on the site, but it has its charm. A huge percentage of the population are foreigners and there are not many luxurious cars or tall towers. The house where I live is good and I like it. It is very roomy and the rest of the team I am living with are nice people. The site is quite a good one too and we expect to get interesting information about the settlements of 15th and 16th centuries. It is very nice because it is right on the coast, few metres away from the sea shore: beautiful. Besides, the weather is warm during the day and the breeze helps a lot to cool down the air. At the moment, we have 4 workers from Pakistan, really really friendly guys and hard workers. We have become friends with them very easily. They have some archaeology training with some knowledge about how to dig as they have been working for the museum for a year already. I am already learning some Pushtun: paherale, the most usual greeting. That's the language they speak in their region and also wide parts of Afghanistan. However, Urdu is more widely spoken in Pakistan, India, Afghanistan and other countries so I want to learn some from them to be able to communicate with more people.

Apart from the very brief introduction to the house, people, country, etc. there is 'all the rest'. There is the thing of my birthday, that was last Tuesday. As usual, I did nothing special and nobody here knew it except for the project officer, who kept the secret very well. If I don't usually do anything special to celebrate it, I didn't feel to do it people who, nice or not, I hardly know to be honest. I am already 29, getting dangerously closer to the big 3!!

And there is the thing of the anecdote I lived yesterday. I wanted to tell you more about the house, site, country, etc. on this entry but it was going to be long enough (will do it later) as I wanted to tell you this today: I ended up in a police station! Nothing bad though, the policeman were nice all the time and the problem was not with us but with the hiring company. The thing is that I was in a traffic jam with a colleague and I accidentally touched the car in front of me. Nothing happened and the cars suffered no damage (we were almost stopped), there is not even an accident report. The problem came when the policeman asked us for the papers of the cars. We told him that the car was hired as we thought it was. However, the policeman said those papers belonged to a person and not to a company: it was a private car! We went to the police station and everything was sorted when the people from the museum and the owner of the car came. The owner is actually the owner of the hiring company who has lent us his private car because he had no cars available when they went to hire one. The only thing now is that the paperwork and the ticket has been already issued so the car remained in the police station and I got a ticket!! Hahaha!! So we have to go back in the next few days to explain it to the police and get the car back. Otherwise, we will have to wait 7 days until they give it back.

So that's it. I hope to be more regular from now on and post more things about the daily life, the people I am with, the things I see and the good sensations I am having after 3 weeks. I hope they last.

UPDATE Feb 14th
We have been today to the traffic office in RAK and apparently the problem is that a foreigner with an international driving license can only drive hired cars, not private cars, no matter they are of a friend or an institution. Therefore, we are not allowed to drive the cars from the museum either. To drive private cars, we'd need a special national license which none of us has, so we have to actually hire cars and stop using those we were using so far...