It was two years ago today, October 16, 2009, that we got off the plane at Abu Dhabi International Airport and picked up our duffel bags stuffed with clothes meant to last us … indefinitely.

We have spent two years, then, working at The National and living in the UAE. A fair chunk of time.

In broadest terms, what have we learned, since then?

Two years can seem like a very long time, when you are in an exotic locale. And I mean exotic, in part, because we are so far from home.

Also, when many of the daily events of your life change markedly, 730 days can seem like forever. And if you go down a mental checklist of “interesting stuff that has happened since we’ve been here” … well, it seems like we would have needed far more than two years to experience all that.

At the same time, it seems fairly recent. One of our relatives back in California, whom we had not seen for 22 months, told us in August that it did not seem like two years since we had left. For those who remained in the same routine, I’m sure that the past two years zipped past.

But also, when you get into a routine, even in a new place, the days can come off the calendar fairly quickly. That was more the case here in Year 2 than in Year 1.

The UAE is not as strange as we thought it would be. (Or else we have grown used to the oddness of it.)

The calls to prayer, five times per day, now go unremarked. I can’t say they have become background noise; the sound of a guy chanting, relayed by amplifiers throughout the city, gets your attention. But it doesn’t launch you on reveries of “what an interesting concept.” If anything, it has the same connotations for non-believers as believers in the sense that it marks the time of the day. Like church bells. The afternoon prayer, in particular, is a quick way of realizing, “Hey, it’s about 3:30.”

Getting used to another set of holidays is interesting. Especially when the religious holidays are driven by a lunar calendar and move around. The two Eids have varied fairly widely, since we arrived, which is a bit discombobulating. National Day, however, is always December 2. There’s that.

I am impressed by how everyone gets along quite well here. This is a country that is 85 percent non-Emirati. The 8 million people in the UAE include about 2 million Indians, 1.5 million Pakistanis and about 500,000 each of Filipinos, Bangladeshis, Indonesians and non-Emirati Arabs. With significant numbers of Sri Lankans, Nepalese, Iranians, Britons, Canadians, Americans, Australians …

Some of the countries of origin mentioned, above, do not get along well. Such as India and Pakistan, or either of those and Bangladesh. But things here hum along fairly well, day in and day out. Crime is low. Civility is high.

I suppose the takeaway here is … when people are working steadily (and foreigners cannot stay without a job), and sending home money … they are going to be too tired and too preoccupied to cause trouble. Idle hands/devil’s playground, all that. And it’s not as if more than a few of the expats are crazy teens. In fact, I will make up a stat: I’d guess that 5 million of the people in the UAE, right this moment, are adult males between the ages of 25 and 45. Men in their prime who came her to work, not to get in trouble.

Many of the men from the subcontinent, especially, send home money that their extended families live on. Guys like that can’t afford to stray; too many people are counting on them.

So, yes, in theory, we should all be a little nervous about social friction … but practically none of us are. We should in theory be angry at a chunk of people in the UAE … but we almost always are not. I find that interesting, and even hopeful.

It is possible to create an environment with very little crime, and this is it. I can think of almost nowhere in the city of Abu Dhabi were I am afraid to walk at night, and women here will tell you the same thing. Even in the most Pakistani of neighborhoods, populated by thousands of men who (to a Western eye) look indistinguishable from guys who might be in the Taliban … we have practically zero history of violence.

(What little violence we have here tends to be within ethnic groups.)

Our perspective on the United States has changed, from the other side of the world. The UAE is in theory an ally of the U.S., but that doesn’t mean that people here are happy with the U.S.  In fact, nearly everyone here is a critic (including the Brits), and often it’s just plain silly. Half the people here will want the U.S. to stop doing this or that … and the other half will demand the U.S. to do more of this and that.

We have grown used to living half the year in conditions of great heat. Like Palm Springs or Death Valley, but with far more humidity. The trick is easy — we rush from one air-conditioned environment to another. Aside from those of us who fall into the “laborer” category. Those guys work during daylight hours, though laws give them the hottest hours off. The guys building skyscrapers have it rough.

The idea of a monarchy is interesting. The people who grew up with it … are fine with it. Abu Dhabi is floating on oil, and the government has billions in cash, and the government is in the habit of sharing quite a bit of it with the citizens — which makes for a contented population.

No “Arab spring” will blow through here any time soon, and I assume that the overwhelming number of Emiratis would see no need for it. Among expats, the Yanks and Brits and Indians generally will remain convinced of the superiority of representational democracy, but this isn’t our country.

It’s an interesting neighborhood, in terms of the globe, though it’s fairly easy to not quite remember that. Iran, the UAE’s arch-rival, is about a 15-minute ride, by jet, from where we are sitting. Violence-torn Yemen is not much further. Neither is Pakistan, presumably nuclear armed and seemingly on the verge of collapse on any given day.

Being located on the edge of the Indian Ocean puts us within a fairly short commute of India and Sri Lanka, and not all that far from Southeast Asia and Singapore, and it changes your ideas of travel. “Sri Lanka, five hours; Paris, seven hours” is a bit mindboggling … as is “back to California, 16-20 hours.”

We could eat exotic food 365 days a year, but we do not. Boring American/British stuff is available in most grocery stores. I have had about 1,000 turkey sandwiches since I got here. Butterball slices are a bit more expensive here, but it’s good for getting through a shift, and healthier than day after day of fast food — which we also could do, if we liked, and which some of our co-workers, especially in sports, seem to do.

The idea that Burger King or McDonalds will deliver … which is standard here … is something I may never really get used to.

So, summing up my summing up … we get paid fairly well to work in a professional environment, with a lot of other people who care about their work, and a benefits package we would be hard=pressed to find in the U.S. … and we live in a semi-comfortable place in which we eventually get most U.S. television … and we experience little crime .. despite a melting pot environment.

It’s not home in the cosmic sense, but after 24 months here, it has become home in the practical sense of the word.

So, no regrets. I am glad I came. Without question. A good two years.