Ultimate Professional Satisfaction

This is a group after my own heart. We were scheduled to have a 2 hour break in the morning after practice, and an hour break in the afternoon. Before the training began, Noura and I decided to shorten the morning break to 1.5 hours. The students said, "Can we shorten the morning break to 1 hour, and do we really need a whole hour off in the afternoon?" Ok, to be fair, many of them are stealing time away from their children and husbands/responsibilities, and so ending early is on their mind. But they are completely and totally engaged in the topic at hand. It's been 3 days. We've spent the better part of 30 hours together, and I couldn't have imagined it going better. I think that, because we have less cumulative time together, they need to crack and pop sooner. Three students have already had realizations or experiences profound enough that they shed some tears. We're already one day ahead of the syllabus, which truthfully was just a guess anyway, since I've never taught my training program in a condensed, intense format. I'm seeing precious little of Dubai, but feel so totally content and satisfied with the professional aspect, it's almost irrelevant where I am.

After 'work' today, one of the students drove me to Dubai Mall. It's the largest mall in the world, next to the largest tower in the world. He drove me around a few areas to see the 'downtown area,' and the skyline view from different vantage points. There is a huge fountain around the mall, almost a lake, which offers a show set to music every half hour after sunset. The first show I didn't get to see, but was choreographed to some throbbing Arabian music. The one I witnessed was set to some operatic aria ... the fountain streams would rise up, shimmy to the side, slowly trickle down. It was truly like a ballet. I took some photos, but I'm not sure they communicate so much.

In my next post I'll start to write about interesting things about this country. In the meantime, it is way past my bed time. Over!