We are spending the day today … and Friday … traveling to Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates for, yes, jobs.

Journalism jobs. Print journalism jobs.

We hardly believe it, either, but after the events of the past 10 weeks, this all seems  like one irresistible tide of fate. Just when we were unhappily preparing to accept that we might not work again in daily journalism.

It was a fairly remarkable chain of events, really.

It was July. Early July. Maybe late June. I was sitting in front of the desktop computer, in the apartment, when a thought popped into my head. And I verbalized it to Leah almost immediately.

“We can do nothing in France as well as we can do nothing here.”

The background: Neither of us had jobs, at that moment. I had done some stringing for the New York Times in the spring. Leah worked for a bit in educational compliance.  There was a medical procedure that involved a month of rehab.

We had decided nothing was going to happen, on the job front, during the summer, so we weren’t out there pounding the pavement. Maybe things would be better at the end of the year. Maybe not. We still had some money from my four months last winter as a temporary copy editor for the International Herald Tribune, and it would last till the end of the year. Maybe.

Anyway, I had this thought. And it was based on this concept: That we could arrange some sort of apartment swap with one of Leah’s numerous friends in Paris. Or perhaps we could stay at some of her friends’ homes while they were on vacation. Lots of people, in Paris, take vacations in August.

She began calling around.

Within days, we discovered that a former Paris colleague already was in the States, taking a long trip. Leah tracked her down in the middle of the country, asked her if she would like to extend her vacation by staying in our place in Long Beach, just a few hundred feet from the Pacific Ocean … and a day later her friend said, “Sure!”

Then we were on our way. We spent the money for the plane tickets, which weren’t cheap, but we would spend no money on housing, at all, during a five-week stay and would make sure we didn’t splurge on restaurants …

Anyway, we had been in Paris only a few days when we set up a meeting with a woman who was in an apartment we were going to take over a week later. We began chatting. We had a bottle of wine. Then another. Then we went to dinner.

She told us about her work as a journalism instructor at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi. How much she enjoyed it. How enthusiastic she was about it. And she told us, “You ought to see if you can get hired at The National.”

The National is an English-language daily newspaper based in Abu Dhabi. It was launched just 18 months ago by the ruling family, and tasked with being the fairest and most professional newspaper in the region.

We shrugged.  “What could it hurt to ask?” Everyone involved in the Great American Journalism Implosion of 2008-09 knows it isn’t a good idea to get your hopes up too high.

We sent off a query to one of the editors. He wrote back thanking us for our interest. And we thought it was over.

Then, not five days later, the editor sent another e-mail. Could we send along resumes, and would we be willing to take an editing test?

Well, sure. Heck yeah.

We updated our resumes. We gave the test — rewriting three stories — our best attention. (And we didn’t compare our work until we were done.)

To make this lengthening story shorter … our contact called back within a week of our tests going back to him … and said he had one job available. But he and we were both keen to see if we could turn that into two jobs — one for Leah, one for me.

It seemed too much to hope for. But we agreed that it would be hard for one of us to work, in Abu Dhabi, and the other to be there looking for work … and the editor we were dealing with said he agreed. He said he wanted to hire both of us — if it were possible.

Maybe one week after that … he sent an e-mail asking us to call. I did, from an apartment in the Marais, in Paris. Our contact said someone had moved to another department, and he had two jobs on the Revise Desk (as it is known). Would we be interested?

Well, of course.

Within a few weeks, it was all buttoned up. We were offered real jobs at an attractive salary. And we began handling all the logistics of moving from one country to another — on the other side of the world.

If you are reading this today, Thursday, we are somewhere in transit. We are scheduled to arrive in Abu Dhabi on Friday night. We report to work on Sunday.

We both will be blogging about our experiences there. At the paper and, especially, on the realities of living in an oil-rich, ultra-cosmopolitan society (80-plus percent of the people living in Abu Dhabi are foreigners) that has aspects of traditional Arab culture and government … and many aspects of the 21st century.

Mostly, we are enthusiastic about being back in daily journalism. When we told a friend in Paris about this opportunity, she described it as “the last two journalism jobs in the world,” and sometimes I wonder if that is exactly what this is about … and how fortunate are we to have gotten them?

The down side, to some, is the “halfway around the world” thing. We are willing to take that on in exchange for spending more time doing jobs in the industry we never wanted to leave.

More on this in the days and months (maybe years?) to come.  Inshallah, that is. (If God wills it.)