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.
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