The Delights of Economic Tourism. Part 1.

We have been in Colombo, capital of Sri Lanka for three days now, and are moving on to Kandy tomorrow afternoon. So far, I must say, so very, very good. I’m not sure that Colombo itself has a great deal to recommend it. Indeed, we received a text message from a colleague who had arrived in the city a day ahead of us telling us it was, in her words ‘shite’. I don’t think I’d go that far. It feels like a third world city: very poor and clearly battered by 37 years of war. There is a huge army presence still, with every bridge, every building of note and most major junctions having heavily armed checkpoints – a minimum of six Kalashnikov-toting soldiers at each, and often a tripod mounted heavy machine gun or, in a few cases, a rocket launcher. It has a different feel from other cities with a heavy armed presence, Cairo for instance, in that the Sri Lankan soldiers don’t seem to view their guns as macho accoutrements, more uncomfortable but necessary tools. The armed soldiers are a lot more cheerful for a start – more than happy to wave and smile and call out greetings. This was a bit unnerving at first. But we got used to it.

Given that Colombo has little to recommend it, why then so far so very, very good? That is because of the hotel. I would go as far as to venture that Colombo would probably be worth giving a miss entirely were we not staying at the Galle Face Hotel. As it is, we will indubitably be back. The Galle Face Hotel is the oldest hotel in Asia. The oldest hotel, in fact, east of Suez. It was founded in 1864, 46 years before Singapore’s Raffles, 64 years before Hong Kong’s Peninsula and 23 years before Conrad Hilton was even born.

The Galle Face Hotel seen from it's swimming pool.

These days it is split into two sections – the Galle Face in the northern wing and the Regency (not sure why you would choose to call a Victorian Hotel the Regency, but there you go) in the southern wing. The Galle Face is the original part, slightly tired by all accounts, but charming. The Regency, where we are, has been renovated in line with what modern customers would expect from a hotel of this standing. The building is all one, though. And the building, along with the location, is what makes to hotel what it is. Our hotel bedroom looks out over the courtyard which faces straight out westwards across the Indian Ocean.

The view from our hotel window.

This evening, we took high tea on the verandah and watched the sun set behind the palm trees.

Rachel and I taking tea on the verandah. Note the colonial moustache.

The view from the verandah.

The verandah.

 On our first night we ate at the Sea Spray – the hotel’s fish restaurant, our table right beside the balustrade, three feet from the breaking waves. The hotel is impossibly, unutterably, astoundingly wonderful. I am currently reading a memoir by the journalist Paul Harris who stayed at the hotel for a year in the mid 90s. I am very jealous.

The rest of Colombo is…well to be honest, we have rarely left the hotel. We went up to the station to book our train to Kandy (£1.80 each for the best seats in the first class observation carriage – I’ll let you know what it’s like anon). We also made a sortie out towards the National Museum this morning, but Rachel came down with food poisoning (not the fish restaurant! We suspect the water) so we returned. I went out alone to the mother of all factory surplus shops, intending just to have a look round. I came back with 4 suits (Dunhill, Armani, Boss and Valentino) and 7 shirts (Paul Smith, Ermenegildo Zegna and others) which I assumed were knock offs. But, apparently, the shop is world famous and 99% of its stock is real factory surplus/seconds.

My new suits.

The one thing that has kept me constantly amused is the scam artists, of which there are many. Try to walk anywhere from the hotel and within twenty yards a local will fall into step and engage you in conversation which will eventually work round to his recommendations of where to go. Most often this can be deflected with a smile and a firm ‘no thanks’ but the persistent ones are often worth listening to for their invention. The heart of all the scams is that they will try and charge you to go to a special, one-day only elephant festival at a nearby temple. The thing is that there is an elephant there every day and it is free. One particularly persistent chap earned full marks for inventiveness with his replies:

Him: it is a special one day festival!

Me: I’ve been.

Him: No! This is a Hindu festival. The one you went to was a Buddhist festival.

Me: I’m short of time (I had reached the cash point that I was heading for, 100 yards from the hotel)

Him: Don’t go to that cash point. I will show you a better one.

Me: Better how?

Him: That one gives you Indian money. No good, you can’t spend it. I will show you a Sri Lankan cashpoint.

Needless to say, the money was fine. Another favourite is them telling you that you can’t go a certain way because of security checkpoints. All lies! The only one that worked was a Bajaj driver (three wheeled moped taxis, like TucTucs in Thailand) who told me I should visit a shop on the way to where I wanted to go. I asked him why and he told me that if I did the shop owner would give him a litre of petrol and he was very poor. More examples of honest Sri Lankan advertising:

In case you can't read the strap line, it says "because it is really good"

And some not so honest naming of a hotel:

I think that 'bus stop' might have been more succinct:

The thing that I suspect will most evoke our visit to Colombo will be the sound of crows. Previously their raucous cawing reminded me of the beginning of Worzel Gummidge, but it seems that the whole of the city of Colombo is given over to them. The hotel employs a man to stand on the terrace with a canvas strap to make cracking noises to scre them off. It is also the first time I have ever seen urban scarecrows:

The final footnote to all this is the cost. Rachel and I are very much economic tourists and the strength of the Western and Dubaian economy (don’t believe everything in the news!) means we can afford holidays like this, and feel OK about spreading some of our relative wealth around poorer countries. The hotel is £50 a night. The fish restaurant (one of the most expensive in the city) was £9 each. High tea on the verandah, £4. My designer suits cost £40 each and the shirts were £5 apiece.

Cheers!

Well that's half a term closer to retirement

We have just finished our longest half-term ever: nine weeks without a break. For those non-teachers reading this and sneering into your cornflakes, nine weeks without a break is about a decade in non-teacher years. We are off to Sri Lanka in a couple of days where we intend to spend a week doing nothing whatsoever.

Today we celebrated National Day at school. National Day itself is sometime next week, but this was the nearest schoolday to it, so there you go. National Day is the anniversary of the formation of the UAE (38 years ago, so the UAE would have been in the same year as me at school). National Day was celebrated by the kids and some of the staff (myself and Rachel excluded) wearing national dress and by there being a camel in the playground. Getting a bit blase about camels now. Seen one camel, seen 'em all.

Now it is Eid which means 10 days off school. It also means everything is shut from 10 o'clock this evening for 24 hours, so no celebrating the start of the holidays in the usual pub-bound manner; it will be a few quiet boozydrinks at home.

I must say that I am quite enjoying being in such a fiercely competitive country. The country itself, that is, not the people or the culture. The UAE is desperate to prove its world-class status so is going all out to get everything it can (Manchester City FC included - the recent friendly between the UAE National team and Man City was billed as 'Our Country v. Our City'). In the three months we have been here we have had an international golf tournament, a Grand Prix, the Fifa World Beach Soccer Cup and, starting next week, the Rugby Sevens. There is also the Fifa World Club Cup next month to which we will be going: four tickets for the final AND the 3rd/4th playoff came to 20 quid. We also had an international airshow last week.
I am often accused by the kids of spending ages staring out of the window. This is because the view from my classroom window is pretty good.

That's the Burj Dubai on the left there. Another instance of the UAE being competitive. It is the tallest building in the world. Usually, when a country decides to build the tallest building in the world, they settle for a small margin. Before the Burj, the tallest building in the world was Taipei 101 at 509m. Before that, it was the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur at 452m, a difference of 61m. Prior to that it was the Willis (formerly Sears) Tower in Chicago at 442m - a difference of 10m. The Burj, when completed, will stand at 818m. That's 309m taller than the next tallest. To put that into perpective, if you took Tapei 101 and stacked Canary Wharf ontop of it, you'd still be 74m short. That's a pile of 17 London Buses. Incidentally, 'Burj' means tower in Arabic, so don't confuse the Burj Dubai with the Burj al Arab, which is the tallest purpose built hotel in the world (the sail shaped one that you always see in adverts for Dubai).

Anyway, last week I had a day when it was all the kids that were looking out of the window. I asked them to concentrate on their exciting and fun English lesson, but to little avail. The problem was, the classroom window also faces the airport which is about a mile away and the airshow was on. So this was what they could see out of the window:

OK, so that's not entirely true. That's a picture I took of the following day's paper:

But they were really as impressive as the first picture and my real picture didn't quite do them justice:

I know that's sideways on, but I can't work out how to rotate it. Anyway, that's the Patrouille de France Aerobatic Display Team, the French version of the Red Arrows, and they were very good. So the airshow was three days of watching them, and F-22 Raptors and Eurofighter Typhoons and Airbus A380s circling the school. I think I was more excited about it than the kids.

Right, I've just had a phone call from the missus telling me she's ready to leave, so I'm off to start the holidays pretty sharpish.

Eid Mubarak everyone!

A Quick Trip to the Off Licence

This weekend was largely given over to a quick trip to the off licence. It takes about 3 hours, if the Great God of Traffic wills it so. Which means it has to be carefully planned to slot in between weekend hangovers. So it was Friday at about 1pm that we set out for Ras al Khaimah. The journey is fairly straightforward: you get onto the Emirates Road at the bottom of our road, then keep going straight until you get to the end, where you turn left. The last trip was made in the early evening after school with the entire process enlivened by the sight of some wild camels. I say wild, they aren’t really – they are owned by Bedouin tribesmen. But they are allowed to wander free rather than being kept on farms. Our trip on Friday was made during the day, so we first sighted camels about 10 miles out of Dubai, occasioning a volley of photographs from Rachel.

We next sighted some 12 minutes out of Dubai.

And then 14 minutes. And so on. We reached the off licence in a state of Camel fatigue.

Twelve hundred Dirhams (about 200 quid) later, we set off home with a boot full of booty.

The 7km between the off licence and the Emirates Road is made along Ras al Khaimah’s main road connecting its two largest towns. Once we had managed to negotiate a U-turn* traffic seemed unnaturally slow. The reason?

Camels in the road. We enjoyed that. The only regret was that they hadn't wandered onto the road a few hundred yards further along where there was a 'Humps Ahead' warnng sign. That would have made a pretty good photograph.

After the camels, the journey, again, was largely uneventful.

They don’t call it ‘the Empty Quarter’ for nothing. That is until we reached Sharjah. Sharjah is the Emirate right next to Dubai, just beyond the school we both teach in. Dubai has no money – its economy is propped up by oil money from Abu Dhabi. Sharjah has no money. Its economy is propped up by oil money from Saudi Arabia. Consequently, Sharjah is somewhat more conservative than Dubai. Not least in its tolerance to alcohol. A few years back, there was a well known and well loved Booze Souq in Sharjah. No more. Booze is now very, very illegal (except, for some reason, in the bar at Sharjah Wanderers Football Club). It is illegal to be in Sharjah with alcohol in your bloodstream. There is an off licence closer to us than the one we choose to use. Whereas our choice is mostly made on the basis of the greater range of booze stocked in Ras al Khaimah, there are stories of locals waiting outside the off licence in Ajman (right by the Sharjah border) then manufacturing accidents involving expats with a carload of illegal booze in Sharjah and blackmailing them so the police don’t get summoned. Apparently such instances are rare, but the shop in Ras al Khaimah has the added buffer of 20km extra before you reach the border with the dry Emirate. Nevertheless, I got to play Smokey and the Bandit with my bootfull of contraband for the last 15km of the journey home. Which was 14.5km further than it took Rachel to tire of me yelling ‘Breaker 1-9, breaker 1-9, I’ve got the pedal to the metal and a Smokey Bear on my tail’ in a faux American accent.

Anyway, we got home without any interference from Jackie Gleason or any other type of law enforcement professional. And we filled our drinks cabinet.

Isn't that a beautiful sight?
And then we feasted.

On camel.
All in all, a good weekend. Cheers!



*For some reason, the road planners in the UAE are loath to let drivers turn across the flow of traffic. And nearly all roads are dual carriageways, at the very least. Consequently, journeys have to be carefully planned taking into account which direction each road feeds onto. For example, we live on the same side of the same road as our school, but our drive to school is nearly a kilometer further than our drive home as we have to travel away from school until the nearest U-turn place at our end, then past the school to the next set of traffic lights and back at the other end. If you miss your turning it can sometimes take hours and many, many kilometers to get back to where you wanted to be. This isn’t helped by the nationwide policy on road signage which is to remove every third sign for most of the journey, then all signs when you are less than half a kilometer from where you are supposed to be.

An A-Z of Life in Dubai

OK, so we’ve been here a little over 2 months now and still have yet to get the internet at home. I intend to update this more often once that is sorted, but for now, here is my first missive from Dubai.

We have settled in well. Very, very well. Happy at school, happy at home. The flat given to us rent-free by school is nigh-on palatial with two large bedrooms, a huge living room, a big kitchen and 2 bathrooms (though no baths, much to Rachel’s dismay). The area we live and work in is ‘developing’, though having visited the more desirable areas (see ‘Jumeirah’ below) I’m more than happy to be here. My mood has lifted with the weather and finally, we both feel that we are living the sort of life that we deserve (read into that what you will...)

With no further ado, then, here is my A-Z of Dubaian life and its little differences:

A
Addresses: There aren’t any. Seriously. There are no road names, no house numbers. The postal service collects but doesn’t deliver except to PO Boxes. This can be a bit of a pain when you are signing up for cable TV or the internet as you can’t fill in the address box on the form. Also a bit of a pain when it comes to deliveries and taxis. You have to navigate via local landmarks. Consequently, our address is: the Abdul Rasul building, behind the Emirates Driving Institute, left a bit, left a bit, just there...no, not that one, that one there next to where that red car is parked, Al Qusais, Dubai. And then we have a completely different postal address. What fun.
Arabs: Everyone seems to think I am one. People talk to me in Arabic in the street and supermarket. Even after I shaved off my beard.

B
Bookshops: Thank heaven for the eReader! Despite there being many bookshops, books are pricey and the stock of the shops in question is somewhat whimsical. Witness the sparsely stocked travel section of one Borders which consisted of a handful of Lonely Planet guides to various Asian countries, a smattering of Time Out guides to large, bright-lit cities and an A-Z of Southend-on-Sea.
Buffets: Along with two-for-one vouchers, buffets are the mainstay of the Dubai going-out experience. Every Thursday (our equivalent of Friday) we, along with numerous colleagues, toddle off to one of Dubai’s many luxury hotels where we pay an upfront fee (usually in the £30-£40 range) and proceed to eat and drink as much as we can. Despite sounding somewhat seedy (and expensive), it is very much the done thing. When normal bars (as normal as bars get in Dubai anyway) charge an average of £5 a pint, the cost doesn’t seem so high. The problem tends to be when you try to eat AND drink as much as you can – far wiser to concentrate on one of the two with the other playing a support role.
Bureaucracy: Having spent a day trying to bring a box of personal items through the port, I can safely say that Terry Gilliam might have thought his film Brazil to be a little underexaggerated had he seen Dubai first. It should have taken an hour. It took a day. All because each rubber stamp was housed at least a mile from every other. And nobody knew where they were. Thankfully, the school sorted out much of the truly heinous bureaucracy - that of immigration. We were met at the airport, given a visitor’s visa and have been shepherded gently through each subsequent stage. We have our residents’ visas now, so we can get the internet, open bank accounts and so on. I’m extremely glad that we sent all our documents over in advance so the process could be begun early as many of the teachers at school who started at the same time as us have run into various bureaucratic problems and are currently having to travel to Oman once a month to cross the border and then cross back again in order to renew their visitor’s visas.

C
Cold water: If you leave the water heater off, the cold water is hotter than the hot water as it is stored in tanks on the roof. Hot enough to shower in!

D
Deliveries: We have yet to find anything that can’t be delivered. All the fast food chains deliver, all the local shops, all the local services. Our waistlines have been thusfar saved, however, due to the fact we can’t tell any of them where we live (see Addresses above). Many potential deliveries are unsolicited, which leads us to...
Door to door: As the only cockroaches we have seen seem to arrive exactly one day before a door to door exterminator pushes his card beneath the door, we are fairly sure that he comes round first and pushes the cockroaches under the door.
Deoderant: is widely available, but there really needs to be a major governmental push to get people to wear it. Really. The first thing I bought for my classroom was an air freshener. I’m thinking of starting to rub Vicks under my nostrils before we go out in the manner of TV Cops attending to a rotting corpse. But that might be going a bit far.
Dragon Mart: is a shopping mall just outside of Dubai which has the honour of being the largest dragon-shaped shopping mall in the world. It is, as you might imagine, a very strange place.

E
Environmentalism: not a big thing over here. There are signs in supermarkets encouraging you to buy reusable carrier bags, but then the packer will use 5 or 6 bags when one would do. Petrol costs about 20p a litre so most of the cars have massive engines which are always running, even in car parks to facilitate air conditioning. Car manufacturers also seem to persist in attaching yellow lights to each corner of each car which, apparently, can be made to flash to inform other road users of intended changes of direction. I’ve yet to see one used though. What a waste.

F
Friends: I have some! Yay!

G
Gas: All cookers run on gas, but there is no gas main, so every house has a big gas bottle. There are orange vans that constantly criss-cross the city, each full of gas bottles so that there can always be one nearby whenever someone runs out and needs a refill. Given the standard of driving, this seems unnecessarily dangerous. Oh, and our local supplier is called Al Boom. Seriously.

H
Hairdressers: In the West, we traditionally blank out the windows of shops that might corrupt any innocent passersby who happen to glance in. So pubs, bookies and porn (as opposed to pawn) shops remain in the realm of mystery for non initiates. Here, it is the passersby that are corrupt and the shops with blanked out windows are bastions of innocence. Namely ladies’ hairdressers. This struck me as a neat illustration of how Western culture is essentially Rousseauian whilst the Middle East is Hobbesian in outlook. Till I realised that there aren’t any pubs, bookies or porn shops here to have blanked out windows.

I
Islam: Its amazing how much our view of Islam in the West is skewed by the fact that due to its minority status it has a higher proportion of fundamentalists. Certainly not the case where it is a majority religion. Actually, I can’t speak for Saudi Arabia, but it’s certainly not the case here.

J:
Jumeirah: The bit of Dubai in which everyone wants to live. It is by the sea, has a massively expat population, and everyone drives freakishly outsized German 4x4s. They would wear fake tan if you could get it here. They do wear gold shoes. Despite its location, it’s a hole. Much like Chelsea, the people make it practically uninhabitable.

K
Kebabs: Oh yes. Yes indeed. The kebabs are fantastic. And cheap. I am really glad that booze is expensive and that our school day starts so early that I can’t drink at all during the week else I’d be putting on so much weight...

L
Language: other than Arabic, everyone here speaks American. Much to my near-disgust, I have already taken to calling shops ‘stores’ and the like.

M
Mosques: There are lots of them and they are very pretty. We are in the crossfire of 4, so we get to hear lots of calls to prayer. It’s very atmospheric. And that’s all I have to say about that.

N
Nouveau Riche: see Jumeirah above. And I mean that in an entirely judgemental and pejorative way.

O
Off-licences: As we don’t have our alcohol licence yet (we are waiting for our labour cards) we have to drive to Ras al Khaimah (the most south-easterly of the Emirates) to buy our booze. It’s about 60 miles, but it’s worth it – spirits (non-premium) are less than two quid a bottle. As Cath pointed out, it seems fairly typical of me that I have driven 60 miles to go to an off licence but am still yet to visit the beach less than 2 miles up the road.

P
Palatial: How our apartment feels after the basement flat in Camden. And we aren’t even paying for it!

Q
Qusais: the area of Dubai in which we live!

R
Rugs: I do like a nice rug. And the Persian Gulf is the place to be! Of course, hand made Persian silk rugs don’t come cheap, so when we came to buy a rug for our living room, we shopped around a bit. We are very much at the crossroads of rug-making – Iran, India, Afghanistan, Turkey (ptchou ptchou ptchou) all nearby. We finally found one we liked in our price range. Got it back to the flat and laid it triumphantly across the floor. Spotted the label on the rear. Made in Belgium.

S
Sunshine: I’ve come to like it. Which is just as well, really.

T
Taxis: Cheap and convenient; before we got a long term hire car (we should be able to buy a car in a couple more months) we took cabs everywhere. The only problem is that at least half of the cabbies (and that is barely an exaggeration) are fresh off the plane from the subcontinent and don’t know Dubai at all. Given that we, too, are relative newcomers, we often found ourselves trying several cabs before we could find one that could take us to where we wanted to go. For further complications on a theme, see Addresses above.

U
Undertaking: A combination of large numbers of very powerful cars, a complete lack of lane discipline, many multi-lane roads and a high proportion of truly awful drivers means that, sadly, one sort of undertaking all too frequently leads to the other.

V
Visas: We have ours! Hooray! We are real people!

W
Wildlife: Mostly cockroaches (though only little ones, and not all that many of them), birds and wild kittens (as scary as they sound). We did see some wild camels on our trip to the off licence (not many people can say that and be telling the truth. On the way back from the off licence, maybe, but not on the way).

X
X-rays: We had to have them before they’d let us stay in the country. OK, that’s a push, but I haven’t seen any xylophones yet.

Y
Youth hostel: Only in Dubai would the Youth Hostel (there is only one and it’s just round the corner from us) have better accomodation than most 3 and 4 star hotels. The newly-opened metro system has a leather-seated first-class section. People here are obssessed by status!

Z
Zest: For life. I have found mine.

Job Offer
The job offer from Dubai arrived yesterday, which we accepted immediately. Far too excited to do much else with the day so we went straight to Foyle's to buy up books on life in Dubai. Payday on Wednesday, so more books shall follow. Ironic (though entirely understandable) really that we are preparing by buying books as the major part of preparation wil involve getting rid of the many thousands of books that already fill our tiny flat to overflowing.It's always hard to sleep on the last night of the holiday; the change from holiday to workday routine is difficult to manage for the naturally nocturnal; but last night was even worse - a combination of excitement, extensive day time napping and a mouse behind the bedside table means I am knackered. Hard to understand the intricacies of the red tape involved in preparing for a move of this sort on two hours sleep, but there you go. We need, i the coming weeks, to get our educational certificates notarised (£60), travel to Milton Keynes (£40), have the certificated legalised by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (£135) then legalised by the United Arab Emirates Embassy (£100). Fun, fun, fun!