Church on Friday?

Here's the run down for those of you that were curious.

The official religion of Dubai and the United Arab Emirates (Dubai is one of 7 Emirates with Abu Dhabi as the capital- although Dubai has the largest population) is Islam.  Friday is the Holy Day for Muslims and I believe most Islamic nations have a Thursday Friday weekend. The weekend here was also Thursday Friday up until a couple of years ago when they changed to Friday Saturday.  I assume the change was to share more business days with Western nations. 

 

When I did the short study abroad in Israel (11 years ago-whoa!), our weekend was also Friday Saturday, but we celebrated the Sabbath day on Saturday (the Jewish Sabbath day).

To me, it's all just about a shift in thinking and not about what the day is named, so it's not that weird to attend church on Friday and go shopping or to work on Sunday.  However it is weird and tricky to have the Sabbath day as the first day of the weekend as opposed to the second.  There's no "Saturday is a special day it's the day we get ready for SunDay!..." and date night is trickier because our choices are either right after work on Thursday or Saturday night which is a work night/ school night.  We'll figure it out.

and possibly trickier, when do we have "Family night"?  Do we still have ours on Monday over here, or Saturday because it's the day after the Sabbath or Sunday because it's the first day of our work week/ school week and traditionally the Sabbath day? or Monday because that's the day the church leaders suggest? Hmmmm?

*the picture is of a Mosque here in Dubai that we drive by on the way to church. I didn't take the picture I borrowed it from the internet. We attend church in a large villa- not a church building in the same neighborhood.  It's been converted inside so it doesn't seem like a villa (house), it has classrooms a large living room/ chapel and even the same padded metal folding chairs that are found in every LDS church building.

**oh and the local government recognizes the LDS church as one of the religions in the country so it's not like we're meeting in secret or anything. However, there are no missionaries here and the "ward mission leader" is called the "ward service teacher leader" or something like that.