A part of our Day That Abu Dhabi Flooded was the depressing discovery that the apartment we were about to move into … was covered by a quarter-inch of water.

Nothing like standing water to dampen your enthusiasm for a new place.

It rained quite a bit more Sunday,  after we looked in on the place, and I had very little hope for today. Even though the sun was out, this morning.

Standing water, soaked furniture, floating debris …

That was what I expected in our new place.

So, at 2 p.m. I got in the cab to take me down to Muroor, our new neighborhood. Leah wasn’t with me. She was over at Ikea (yes, Ikea is everywhere; like Wal-Mart) buying Stuff You Need for a Furnished Apartment. Silverware,  plates, glasses, sheets, trash cans …

The idea was, I would stop at the apartment, sorta on the way to work, and then call her with an update on the situation. If the place looked vaguely habitable, she would bring her Ikea trove down there … and if not, she would take it back to the hotel. And then we would decide about whether we wanted to try to squirm out of the apartment lease … knowing that the housing guys at the newspaper hadn’t actually put through the paperwork.

So, the cabbie pulled up to the place, only 24 hours after I last saw it … and I unlocked the outside door,  crossed the 6-foot “patio” and unlocked the door to the place and braced myself as I opened pulled it open …

And the place was dry. It was almost clean.

The water was gone. To glance around, you would never know there had been a drip in it, let alone a flood.

I was amazed. How did the watchman/super get it so clean so fast? Had he worked all night? Had the landlord called in some extra guys?

Had the Arabian Peninsula housecleaning genie blown through?

The cabbie was waiting and the meter was running. I needed to get to the office. I called Leah and said, “The place is dry. It’s crazy. No way I expected this.”

Turns out, it wasn’t quite as sharp as I thought. But I had given it a once-over. Leah spent more time there and noticed some damage, when she arrived a half-hour later with her Ikea stuff. The stain on the ceiling. A bit of dampness here and there.

And she figured out where the water went. Like our hotel room, the apartment has a fairly big drain … in the floor … right in front of the sink. So the super probably popped the top off the drain, most of the water drained out, and then he (or someone) mopped up the rest and left it looking almost as if it had just been cleaned.

It could have been oh, so much worse, and I expected it. The place could have been uninhabitable two days before we were due to be living there. It wasn’t. We should be able to make this work. I’m pretty sure.

What a relief. And we have the genie … the elves … the cleaning fairies to thank for it.