Category Archives: Living away from home

Food glorious food

I  love food. The only reason I endure going to the gym three times a week (OK, mostly I only make it twice. Or once. Or not at all on busy weeks) is that I can justifiably stuff my fact for 8 weeks a year when we leave Dubai and travel back for the summer. (We’ll save discussing what happens in Dubai the other 44 weeks of the year for another time…) Anyway, for me, one of the things that I really look forward to about going home is all the yummy food I’ve missed the rest of the year – stuff I just can’t get in Dubai. And as it’s just under a week until I get on a plane out of here (HOOOOOOOORAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYY!) I am already salivating in anticipation of a Waitrose shopping trip. Here, in no particular order, are the top 10 things I am looking forward to eating when I get home:

Fish and chips, a popular take-away food of th...

Fish and chips and a muddy estuary: you can’t get better than that. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

1. Chicken with skin that actually goes crispy

2. Really, really good pork sausages that go sticky in the pan

3. Mashed potatoes that don’t just consist of lumps of starch amongst a watery gloop

4. Fresh salad

5. Big ripe beef tomatoes that taste of something akin to a tomato. Served sliced with a beautiful red onion and lashings of oil & vinegar, and a french stick for dunking.

6. Fish and chips from the chippie not some posh pub grub wannabe nonsense

7. Lush wholemeal/seedy/brown sliced bread that doesn’t resemble particle board

8. Asparagus that doesn’t take a chainsaw to cut through.

9. A chinese takeout with prawn toast, seaweed, duck pancakes, crispy chilli beef and vegetable spring rolls, all of which arrive actually crispy. (Dunno what you’re all having)

10. A picnic. With booze and friends involved. And pork pies.

Ahhh, England. It’s what maxi dresses were invented for.

Hair today, gone tomorrow

As any woman will know, finding a decent hairdresser is like searching for a needle in a haystack; and when you find the one that can tame your curly/straight/long/short/thin/thick/flyaway hair you will move heaven and earth to keep them. I have short hair that requires a regular 6 week crop and colour to maintain its precision cut and keep away the wavy 80s Princess Diana/Farah Fawcett style it would otherwise morph into if left to its own devices. I am incredibly particular about who cuts my hair and insist that they gaze at old photos of me with longer locks and bad styling before they make the first incision in order to fully understand the horror that awaits if I do not keep it short and in tip top condition.

Princess Diana on a royal visit for the offici...

I am only ever eight weeks and some hair lacquer away from Princess Diana c.1987 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Imagine then, if you will, my dilemma when my hairdressers move away from Dubai nearly as often as my friends do.

In the time I have lived here I have had no less than eight hairdressers. The first time I needed a cut I went to a local salon in the Marina where we lived and he sheared the whole thing with a razor blade and refused to let me look in a mirror until he was finished. And the end result looked…well, like I had sheared my hair with a razor blade and no mirror. After that experience I timed my trips back to the UK often enough to ensure my old stylist could do my cut and colour and when it got too unruly inbetween times I stuck a scarf on my head. Eventually (and it must have been a good year or so later) I decided that commuting back to the UK for a haircut was a little ridiculous and decided to brave the salons of Dubai once more.

I found my next salon from recommendations on the forum of a local website. After a single false start involving a junior stylist and six weeks of sporting a mullet only a Premier League footballer could be proud of, I was booked with a more experienced hairdresser in the same salon who mastered my hair at almost the first cut. She lasted for precisely 8 months until she got pregnant, and as it was unplanned and she was unmarried she had to leave Dubai. Something the manager of the salon failed to inform me of until I arrived one day for my appointment. She offered to do the cut and colour for me instead, so I hesitantly agreed, laid back and thought of England. Literally, because when I looked in the mirror again that’s precisely where I wished I was so that I wouldn’t be staring at my PURPLE hair. Yes, this ‘highly experienced’ manager had managed to use so much toner on my dye job that she’d given me a blue rinse. I spent 2 months using special shampoo and an awful lot of product to try and hide my ultra violet fringe.

Are you keeping score? So far that’s a tally of five. Number six saw a radical rethink. No longer a big fan of trying yet another tinpot outfit in a random high rise on the Sheikh Zayed Road just because a few Jumeirah Janes had had their uniform pencil-straight highlighted long bobs trimmed there, I decided to go with the safe but expensive option and hit Tony and Guy. Amy, my stylist, strolled in looking hip and laid back, kicked off her Loubs before snipping and sculpting the funkiest hair I’d ever had. I finally felt like I’d found my hair mecca.

Of course, this isn’t the end of the story because – guess what – Amy decided that she was going back to London. I was seven months pregnant at the time, extremely hormonal and somewhat devastated. (I may have even cried about it but don’t tell anyone.) I stuck with Tony and Guy, but unfortunately due to circumstance the next hairdresser in line didn’t really stand a chance and she lasted a mere two cuts – one before my son was born and one soon after – before I was swallowed into the world of parenthood where six-weekly trips to the other side of town to sit in a chair and do nothing for two hours were nothing but a dream. I was on the hunt again, and this time my friend came to the rescue and gave me the number for her hairdresser who did home cuts.

Enter Luca. Luca was – is – perfect. Italian, male and straight he is exactly who every woman should want to do her hair. I have always had a theory actually, that the best hairdressers are straight men. Call me hideously politically incorrect, but I think a trip to the salon should be a bit like walking past a building site. I mean, you can pretend to ignore the comments but a bit of attention never hurt anyone, right? Anyway, back to the point. Luca has been my stylist now for three years, and has restyled and resculpted my hair to the point where I am barely recognisable from when he first clapped scissors on me. I absolutely love my hair these days. Love it. So when he announced last month he was leaving Dubai and I threatened to hunt him down, bunny boiler stylie, there is a good chance I meant it.

I feel like I’m being dumped, or worse still let down gently to spare my feelings. He has promised he is keeping on his clients in Dubai and will be back every four to eight weeks, but is this code speak for that throwaway classic ‘let’s stay friends’? Am I keeping a torch burning for him when really I should just find someone new? What if I make a date and he stands me up? Then I will be left desperate and alone, starting all over again with my caveman hair.

I really thought I would make it through to the end of my time here without having to search for yet another hairdresser but now I fear the worst. I am under no illusion that commuting back and forth to Dubai from the UK will be easy to do every month and I suspect the novelty will wear off sometime within the second six months he is gone. But, like all bad breakups, I can’t quite face the thought of moving on and finding someone new just yet. So like a fool, I will do what women have done for time immemorial: I will wait for my hairdresser’s call and if the inevitable happens and he resigns completely I will start the search for someone new and hope that I can find ‘the one’ all over again.

And if not I will be headed back to London SW13 to see if my stylist remembers me from 2006.

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The sound of summer

It’s occurred to me that the summer is finally here. I had a feeling it was, for a number of reasons:

1. My son appears to be on a permanent sugar high from birthday parties, end of term parties and because ice cream is almost a necessity at this time of year

2. The driving has gone into ‘Special Summer Mode’ where everyone is too busy adjusting the aircon to blow on their armpits and dozing off in the heat to actually concentrate on the tiny issue of driving from A to B without a near miss.

3. I have been out drinking for what feels like a solid two months – having that ‘one last meet before the summer’ with practically everyone I know – a sort of perverse panic to ensure the friends I have managed to collect over the course of the year will remember who I am come September.

4. I have come to the conclusion that the three month detox, diet and exercise masterplan has failed spectacularly and I will be packing tankinis again this summer. The ‘Body of J-Lo’ will have to go on the bucket list for September.

5. I have applied fake tan this week in an effort to emulate the colour that I should be from living somewhere perpetually sunny, whilst in reality I have been gazing at the blue skies from behind my triple glazed tinted windows for weeks because it’s too damn hot by 8am to even think about lying in the garden.

6. Soft play areas have become an indoor destination of choice despite their germ-infested surfaces, deafening noise and the no-fun-for-a-big-person act of climbing through too-small tunnels, crashing my head on too-low ceilings and injuring my back sliding down too-small slides. The trampoline is quite fun though.

7. Everyone I know has been sick from a) a chest/ear/eye/sinus infection, b) a stomach bug or c) both

8. I have been heard to say on more that one occasion in the past few weeks “it’s too hot to go swimming”

9. The spare room looks like a jumble sale but is actually my annual attempt to start packing for two months of holidays without forgetting anything. (I will forget something.)

10. Everyone I know, including me, is exhausted with the business of being in Dubai. Standard conversation the past week with practically everyone has been “Are you travelling? When are you travelling? How long are you travelling for?” and most people are champing at the bit to Get. Out. Of. Here.

"Modhesh", Arabic for amazing, is th...

“Modhesh”, Arabic for amazing, is the mascot of Dubai Summer Surprises and its appearance all over the city heralds the start of true summer in Dubai. This is not me in the picture by the way. That yellow worm freaks me out and I would certainly never let a child of mine show emotional attachment to it (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

And this week, just in case I wasn’t quite in the spirit of things, the searing heat that we have been steadily building up to made its killer summer move: humidity. It’s hard to explain what a massive difference it makes but everyone that has lived through a summer or two in Dubai will agree that it’s not the heat that gets you, it’s the humidity. And it can be extreme; this week saw temperatures of 40 degrees, which is perfectly manageable to us desert-dwellers – but the humidity climbed to 75%, which is borderline intolerable even for the hardcore sun-lovers. This heat/humidity combo is the equivalent of wading through ‘weather soup’ every time you leave the house – your sunglasses steam up and leave you either flailing around in a blind frenzy trying to locate your car/front door/child, or force you to (gasp of horror) remove them and squint whilst your mascara melts down your face, your hair frizzes up where you stand and your t-shirt develops so many damp patches it looks like it’s been tie-dyed.

I have not felt the need to escape Dubai this year quite as badly as other years. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that we have been spectacularly lucky with the weather and enjoyed a long and relatively cool spring/early summer. But suddenly, this week, it’s as if someone has flicked the switch. My son has ‘graduated’ from nursery (a proud moment), my Improv group is on hiatus, my husband is working like a dog and I am officially fed up with the heat, the humidity, with being indoors all the time. And my hair is baaaaaad.

I am ready to go. So forgive me if my prose sounds reminiscent of previous posts because it is about now that I begin to form the images in my mind of how I will spend my real summer. In busy streets with over-excited Olympic-loving Londoners; with precious family and friends and rain – endless, endless rain which I will never complain about (until about three days in when the novelty will wear off). In my husband’s beloved Boston: with grandparents and aunts and uncles and on the beach and in the freezing waters of the Atlantic Ocean. In my beloved New York, to soak up the dappled sunshine of Central Park with my much-missed sister and niece. In the gardens and farms and fields of Essex and at pub lunches drinking pints and enjoying long summer evenings. All of this is within my grasp and worth the pain of long haul flights and jet lag. It is just around the corner and I can’t wait.

I believe the children are our future…

I seem to be quoting Whitney a lot these days. I have no idea why, she was only ever relevant to me during a particularly terrible set of Modern dance lessons I had in the mid-80s, when our teacher choreographed ‘I wanna dance with somebody’ so badly it shall forever be remembered as ‘the step-ball-change dance’. The next time I paid any attention she was dead (Whitney, not my dance teacher, although she might be too for all I know) and it was Glee season 3, and now suddenly I’m full of big ballads and bad disco dancing.

Anyway, I digress: what I really wanted to write about today was on a slightly more serious topic. We have just made some huge decisions on my son’s schooling, and the weight of the responsibility sits heavier on my shoulders than I ever imagined it would. The worry that you will somehow fail your child because you didn’t give them the best start in life they could possibly have is, I suspect, a pretty universal one. However I do think that expats have it particularly hard when it comes to deciding where and when to send their children to school.

When we came to Dubai we were a newly wed couple with absolutely no responsibilities to anyone except ourselves. It didn’t occur to me for a second that I would be here long enough to a)have a child and b) have to send him/her to nursery, never mind school. So I didn’t really pay a lot of attention, even when I got pregnant, and even though I was actually a teacher for crying out loud.

But now, as my son approaches his third birthday, it is crunch time. Schools here generally start accepting students from aged three, a full year before the UK equivalent of Reception class (if you’re from the US, it’s the equivalent of a Pre-KG class). They are fee-paying and predominantly run for profit and there is a severe shortage of places at the popular ones. And so the problem is, if you don’t put them into these schools at aged three, you may well miss the boat.

What is the idea on the blackboard?

Schools can be a little pushy here. Drawing by Olivia from Arabian Ranches, aged 3.  (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

People here seem to enjoy having lots of babies. The city is teeming with toddlers. The population naturally seems to thin out as children get older but many schools in Dubai are ridiculously over-subscribed at Foundation stage level.  To get into the top ones you have to register them at birth or be married to an Emirates pilot. It is horrendously competitive and nerve wracking to say the least, that you may have to take your second, third or even fourth choice of school because you waited until their first birthday to think about it. Schools can get pretty pushy about things too and over the years it has become the norm to assume that you must pack your child off to school as early as possible in order that they succeed in life. One particularly cunning plan recently employed by a very reputable school here has been to open a nursery, and then send an email to all the parents who are on the wait list for future academic years indicating that it doesn’t matter when you applied, priority will be given to the children who attend the nursery. So if you can send your child to school shortly after the umbilical chord is cut, you should probably get a place.

Which is why we have gone against the crowds and instead chosen an American school in the rural backwaters of Sports city.  Despite a plan to accept students from aged three all the way up to 18, the school is relatively new and still undersubscribed, giving it a more local feel than the other giant behemoths that operate here. It is three minutes from our house versus the half hour commute I would have to undertake four times a day to take him anywhere else. It doesn’t come with the usual snobberies nor does it subscribe to the ‘work hard, play hard’ ethos that frankly seems a little harsh to be putting on a child barely out of nappies. Instead it appears to genuinely embrace individuality, and childhood, and the sheer enjoyment of learning. To top it all off, it is the nicest, cleanest, friendliest school I have visited, with some of the best facilities. It might not enjoy the ‘Outstanding’ status of some of the more popular schools but I’m pretty sure my son will benefit in other ways from a cosy class of 15 for the first two years of his academic career – and at the same time absorb an American culture and education that, being of dual nationality, is important to us that he have, and not something that he would get from an English school in Dubai (or one in England, for that matter).

I am pretty confident we have made the right choice and now my attentions turn to the UK, to look at securing him a place somewhere that I am equally sure of. The conundrum for many expats is you never know how long you’re staying or when you’re going to leave. So you have to plan properly for a future in two different places and ensure that your child receives the best potential possible start in life on opposite sides of the world. You need to believe that the chosen expat school provides an educational experience equal in all measures to that of one at home, and you need to ensure the school you choose if or when you return home is going to be the right environment to help your child cope with a huge and often overwhelming change in circumstance. We have chosen to apply to private schools particularly to try and avoid potential issues that relying on screaming into the state school system at the 11th hour may throw up. But private schools in the UK come with the same personality disorders as they do here. I am already put off by a couple of them because they display precisely the same kind of horrid, faintly sit-com-esque middle class snobbery I have seen in Dubai. However, I have high hopes that the others I am visiting will prove to be just right. I really hope so, because if he is happy at his Dubai school, one of the most vital and potentially traumatic decisions we will face making in the future will be transplanting him to a new one in a place he is completely unfamiliar with.

It’s another thing no-one mentioned when we moved to Dubai. And they didn’t mention it when we became parents either for that matter. The responsibility to ‘get it right’ is always huge, but extends further – much further – when your child is an expat. It’s so confusing to know what to do. Our son was born and raised (to date) in the Middle East, and we (his parents) come from opposite sides of the Atlantic. Where will he call home in the future? How will he identify himself? Which education system should he follow? Will it even matter to him or to anyone else? How will it affect him, when we eventually do pull him away from everything familiar to him, from everything that he calls ‘home’, because it is categorically not our ‘home’?  I guess only time will tell. In the meantime, we hope that the decisions we make are the right ones, and do what all parents do: Our very best.

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Get over it

It is no secret in our house that I don’t want to live in Dubai forever. In fact I think the blog name I picked out might have given a clue as to my feelings on the subject. However for some reason I feel the need to push it in everyone’s face once in a while, just to make sure they are still listening. Last night was one of those times, and my husband copped the worst of it.

Well…all of it.

Again.

Homesickness

Everyone gets homesick once in a while (Photo credit: Kalexanderson)

My desire to ‘not be here’ has become deep rooted over the course of the last few years. In truth, I don’t think about it on a daily basis and very rarely get homesick anymore, in fact right now I’m having a rather enjoyable and satisfying time of it – but the bottom line, when you scrape all of the other stuff away and get to the heart of the matter, is that I can’t shake the feeling that being here is a huge compromise. It is so engrained in me that I want to go home that occasionally when the mood takes me and I am feeling particularly vulnerable, or dramatic, or both, I cannot see past this to anything else. And because it is not within my control to change the situation I get really foul about the whole subject of when and if it will ever happen.

Grossly unfair of me when I flip out about it and never my finest hour. I wish I could just be okay with being here, like, really okay with it. Or I wish that I could not be okay with it very quietly and privately, so that other people didn’t have to put up with my childish tantrums and whining, and so that I didn’t use my anger as a weapon of mass destruction. But I can’t seem to do either of those things. I think I have parked it, accepted it, and am coping with it, and then I suddenly flare up again and go nuclear, usually at my husband, about the terrible blow life has dealt me because I can’t go home.

Which of course is rubbish and immature and frankly rather silly. There is absolutely nothing to say my life away from Dubai would be any better than the one we enjoy here. I think it’s just – and I’m going to copyright my new term of diagnosis here – ‘Ultimate homesickness’. It’s like an extended remix, years and years of missing out on life at home all rolled into one big ball of emotion that once in a while appears rather suddenly and lashes out at everything in a two mile radius until it is spent.

I talked before about ‘that permanently temporary’ feeling of being an expat. It is here again, and I think it is exaggerated the closer I get to summer, and returning home. It is a particularly sensitive time for me as I plan my days away from here, and realise once again that it is all too short a time to spend with the people I love and miss dearly.  However, faced with the reality of leaving our life here I’m sure I would have very mixed feelings about going. There are parts of living in Dubai that I have accepted, parts I actually like and some things I absolutely love about being here. There is actually very little I don’t like, and it mainly revolves around the uncertainty of how long we are here for, which of course is a ridiculous thing to spend life worrying about. Plan for the future, but live in the here and now, right? So I consider this post a telling-off, to myself, to get with the program and stop being an idiot. Feeling sorry for myself never got me anywhere and neither did going postal on my loved ones. Fortunately, Ultimate homesickness is rare and although brightly burning, it is very short lived. Now, if someone would just invent a vaccination…

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Coz you’re there for me Part twooooo-oooooo

Well I have to say it’s been absolutely ages since I felt genuinely sorry for myself. That, and not wanting to use up my precious writing ideas on my blog when I have two years of a masters degree to fill up, means I’ve been a little mean about my blog posting topics. And this week, despite my best intentions, it will be no different, because yet again I managed to run headlong into the catchphrase that invades my life on a regular basis, entitled “Why can’t we make friends in Dubai?”

Friends

Coffee-shop-tastic: The stuff expat dreams are made of (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have blogged on this subject extensively (so much so that I haven’t provided a link in case I’m repeating myself) and I’m sure there are those of you heartily sick of hearing about it. I’m sick of hearing about it. And I’m not particularly bothered about it any more, if truth be told. But last week, I met a friend of a friend who has only recently arrived in Dubai, and it threw the whole thing back up in my face. The woman in question has been here less than six months and in that time managed to infiltrate a whole collection of my friend’s friends, plus make a whole set of her own. She knows everyone. And their husbands. She is going to birthday parties and camping and Christmas and all manner of things that I must admit, whilst I wouldn’t expect an invite from the friend in question because our friendship hasn’t shaped itself this way, would be nice to get from somebody.

Don’t get me wrong. I have friends, plenty, particularly now that I am involved again in the Dark Arts (otherwise known as theatre). But I seem to have failed dismally on the playdate front, and therefore on the ‘family friends’ side of things too, that means we might actually get invited to camping and boat trips and waterpark outings and other such fun weekend activities.

In the early days, I admit I was fussy. And socially a little awkward. And I didn’t have children which automatically put me at a disadvantage because most other people we met did. But then we did have children. Oops, no we didn’t, we had one child. Singular. Which again puts me in a bit of a situation, because most mummies like their play dates to have a convenient older or younger sibling attached for theirs to play with. And, in all fairness, I like to keep a nice house and refuse to invite my son’s toddler friends over with a hyperactive 5 year old in tow who is going to wreck the furniture and bully the cats because they are bored. But it’s not all my fault, because I have tried to break the ice with mums on several occasions and for some reason it never seems to work. At the soft play area a few weeks back we were sitting having a snack on the table next to a couple of mums from nursery who I see every day and I said hello and introduced myself (just in case they didn’t know who I was after nearly a year of drop offs and pick ups) and you know what? They nodded and then went back to their conversation as if I ceased to exist. The children were all playing together and they just let me sit next to them like a ninny. Why would they do that? It’s two versus one, it’s socially polite for them to ask me to join them, not let me hang there like a nerd at the school disco waiting to be asked to dance.

But this is the story of my life in Dubai. WHAT DID I DO WRONG? Am I such an utter social misfit that I cannot be let loose in public? Do people think I’m a)too weird b)too caustically challenged c)too anally retentive to enjoy breakfast/brunch/beach outings/bbqs/birthday parties/other things beginning with ‘b’? I know my husband charms the pants off most people he ever meets so it can’t be him that’s the problem. Maybe (she dreams) I’m just too attractive or clever or confident for the average person to handle.

Or maybe I just prefer a more organic approach to friendship, and still, after all this time as an expat, can’t be doing with making my life a continuous round of speed-play-dating in order to ‘fit in’. Meeting my friend’s friend (FF?) last week was a little like being on a job interview. She quizzed me about everything, from what I did with my time whilst my son was at nursery (tricky: do I admit to being a gym bunny and indulging in blogging and shopping inbetween house maintenance and supermarket trips or do I try to make myself sound more meaningful?) to what schools I had picked out for him (the wrong one, apparently), to whether I would want my husband to remarry if I died. As I slurped on the second glass of sauv blanc I got the distinct feeling I hadn’t got the job – that I’d been sloppy in my responses, as little too down-to-earth for her liking, and like a teenage boy on their first date, just a bit too eager to be funny.

Thing is, I am funny. And down to earth. And a bit lazy sometimes, when I’m not working my arse off to achieve something for myself or my family. I am a little weird, and caustically challenged, and somewhat anally retentive. But I want people to like me because I’m different, and therefore a little interesting, not because I’m the same. It shouldn’t stop me from going to brunches or meeting for coffee or gathering at the soft play area and yet I don’t seem to have been able to tap into what I have officially dubbed ‘The Coven Concept’ in Dubai at all.

What the hell, I was never a girl’s girl. But in the UK, over the years, I did make friends with a lot of other girls who weren’t girl’s girls either. Sometimes even in groups. On weekends my husband and I did things with other couples and no doubt when we return we will do so again, with all of our children in tow as well. I am not completely incapable of forming friendships and we seem able to have our share of fun with our friends when we see them. But for some reason I never quite nailed it in Dubai, and now I fear it’s too late. The new people coming in are new. They do newbie things and meet other newbie people and their eyebrows shoot to the backs of their heads when you say you’ve been here six years, and they assume you already have people to go camping with and have bbqs with and spend school holidays with hanging out by the pool. To a certain extent they are right to assume we have other things going on. They are in a totally different place to us psychologically and it’s hard to not end up in a weird sort of ‘parenting/public information’ role. For anyone who is not new to Dubai our place in their lives is usually relegated to the occasional dinner rather than a group gathering. On the rare occasions we are invited somewhere we are usually the outsiders in an otherwise well-established group of friends, which isn’t easy to break into either, unless you have balls of steel like my FF of course.

So, I don’t know how she’s done it, but clearly I can’t, or won’t, or don’t need to enough to make it happen. And maybe that’s the point here. We have a nice life, we have a few people we enjoy spending time with, and we have our weekends together to enjoy just the three of us which is precious in its own way. I look forward to a day when we are surrounded by enough friends and family to pick and choose how to spend our time, but if that is not Dubai then so be it. As the great Whitney said, it’s not right, but it’s okay.

Lucky seven

Next week sees us mark the start of our 7th year in Dubai. SEVENTH. When I say to people I arrived in 2006 it really doesn’t seem very long ago. When I think of how I was a newlywed barely into my 30s and now my 40s are hurtling towards me at a rate of knots, I start to wonder where the decade went. When I realise I have entered my fifth cycle of friends in the space of roughly as many years (1. the ones I met when I arrived, 2. the ones I worked with, 3. the ones I met after having a baby, 4. the ones I met when my son started nursery, 5. the ones I met through theatre) I feel a little exhausted by the whole process.

Living abroad can be exciting, it can be depressing, it can be mediocre or even boring at times, and tremendously educational and fun at others. Depending on what you are doing or where life is taking you depends on how you feel about the whole expat experience at any given point. Dubai hasn’t been considered a hardship posting for years. But even for the mere housewife, between the times on the beach or in the mall or drinking coffee (which seems to be the general perception of my life even by the people who live here), it can be pretty hard work. If the summer heat doesn’t get you the incessant packing up and shipping out to escape it every year will. If living in the lap of luxury seems too good to be true it’s because there are hours and hours and hours of household management to keep it that way. If the ‘work hard, play hard’ ethic seemed like fun in your twenties then it’s a lot more like hard work a decade or two later to pull the same stunt whilst holding down a family – and a UK 10 dress size, a permanently perfect mani/pedi, a wardrobe full of up to the minute fashion and quite possibly a job. And then there’s the whole love ’em and leave ’em friend issue – the people you meet and like and fill your life with until they up and leave six months, a year, two years later and you have to work to find new ones all over again.

The gap between the different societies and nationalities that live here looms large. Miscommunication and misunderstanding of cultural differences make up 90% of why things take so long and can get so stressful. Of course, the other 10% is because a lot of people here are total shysters. That doesn’t make life any easier either, although with six years under my belt now it’s certainly getting easier to spot them. Experience has also taught me that everything takes far, far longer than planned – the Spanish ‘mañana’ has nothing on the arabic ‘inshallah‘. This particular trait appears to be cross-cultural, spanning across the entire spectrum of customer care – from trying to buy a bottle of water to wondering which decade your house will be finished in.

Dubai is a brilliant place to live – until it isn’t. After six years I have learned that when things go wrong, however big or small, it will take five times as long, be three times as expensive, and cause twice as much stress to put it right as it would do at home. The best thing to do, I have discovered, is really enjoy the bits inbetween. No doubt it is a great life we have here and when I try to imagine my life in the UK had we not come, I’m not sure where we would have been instead. Our house would have been smaller, for sure, as would my shoe collection – but there’s other things that would have been different too. I would most likely have still been on the corporate treadmill instead of realising a dream to teach, and to write. We would never have experienced living somewhere so different and life would be less rich for that. But most importantly and against all medical odds, I have a child. Yes, Dubai is a hard place to live sometimes, but it gave me my son, and there is no guarantee the stars would have aligned to make that happen anywhere else in the world. When I see the decades of pleasure I will have from this one simple act, six years doesn’t seem all that much to give in return.

In Memoriam

My paternal grandmother passed away yesterday. It did not come as a surprise, she had terminal cancer diagnosed a long while ago, so we all knew it was only a matter of time. But when you are living thousands of miles away a ‘matter of time’ does not have the same meaning. Distance puts an invisible and impenetrable barrier between me and my loved ones. Unless I am ‘lucky’ to be home when death strikes, I cannot help, I cannot support, and I cannot say goodbye when goodbye matters most. Until last year all four of my grandparents were still alive but all over 85, and clearly not going to live forever. With each trip back I have to quietly say my goodbyes to these old people whom I love so much, in case it’s the last time I see them. I strive to make my peace with it but the bottom line is I’m not there.

There is a school of thought that death is easier to cope with if you are far away. You don’t have to deal with any of the nasty, you don’t have to see what’s happening, you don’t have to help, simply because you can’t. There is no way of being with them in an ambulance, or dropping a hot dinner round to their home, brushing their hair, or holding their hand at the bedside. There is no true understanding of what that person is going through, nor the terror, grief and worry of the other people who are there to provide all the support that you can’t. I have no real clue to what my dad has been doing these past months to assist his parents, just as I have no proper understanding of what my mum went through caring for my grandfather before he passed away last year. I am sheltered from all of this. And when a person dies, I am sheltered all over again, from everyone else’s grief, because I am not there to see it.

I toy with the idea of flying back for the funeral but I feel guilty, as if I have just turned up for the easy bit and missed all the hard stuff everyone else has been through. I cannot be part of the process, I can only turn up to the party. But it is not easy sitting here by myself. Grief is a lonely business when you are far away. I might not be able to help or support my family but there is no-one to help me either.  A comment from another post I read on this subject said this: “We  must be self-reliant in a way most grievers do not have to be…Grieving solo is one of the hardest things to do…(and) can also prevent us from the closure that other people receive from going to the funeral, the wake, the reception.”

And I am discovering for the second time now, that the process for grieving is difficult when you are doing it by yourself. I rely on phone calls and emails to keep me up to date with funeral arrangements, but no-one really wants to talk to me about how they are feeling over the phone, it just isn’t the same. No-one will ask me how I’m doing because they will unconsciously (or consciously) assume that I am somehow less attached for being far away. I will watch other people with less attachment, less history, less loss than me become more involved than I can possibly be in the grieving process because I am not there. I wrote an email and sent text messages to tell my grandmother we loved her but it’s unlikely I’ll ever find the right time to ask if they were delivered before she slipped into her last sleep. I cannot comfort my dad, my sisters, my grandfather. I cannot sit and have a cup of tea with them just to have the company of another human being who is going through the same thing. I cannot hug anyone. No-one can hug me back. I hate that I am not there to help, I resent that I am not there to be part of the grieving, I am devastated that I could not say goodbye when it was truly time.

Every expat must face the possibility of someone they love passing away while they are abroad. We face grief all over again when we return for visits because life has changed unalterably, again, and whilst everyone else has gradually come to accept the change, it is thrown at us like a bucket of cold water. My grandmother (she would have loved that I’m calling her grandmother, and that I’m writing about her, by the way) probably had the most understanding of my situation of all my family. Her own siblings emigrated to California decades ago and she has dealt with all the pleasure and pain that this brings. She was a meddlesome old bat sometimes (and she knew it) who I didn’t always agree with, but she managed to keep herself relevant and even with her great-grandson bouncing around the room claiming all the attention, she would always take time to ask how I was doing, how I was feeling. I write this for her, because I know she would understand where so many others might not, how I am feeling right now.  This is my goodbye, Nanna. Rest in Peace.

Nanna & Grandad with my son, summer 2011

…coz you’re there for me tooo-oo-oooo

Friends

I moan alot about my lack of friends in Dubai, but it would be a little churlish of me not to mention that I do actually have the odd one or two. I have just enjoyed a fabulous evening with a girlfriend who I met here six years ago as part of a speed friend-ing program set up by my first, very sociable friend in Dubai (codename O). O was a mum, and therefore unlike me had access to a veritable mass of potential friends. She was also way, way more outgoing and friendly than I could ever aspire to being. With that in mind, she and I used to meet for a drink every Wednesday and she would invite unsuspecting school mums to join us for a road test. The rule of thumb was that if we agreed they were still fun after a few glasses of wine, we’d invite them again. Not many made the cut for both of us: rather she ended up with the most amazing social life and I sat on the edges wondering what I could possibly have in common with so many 30-somethings with children. The answer was not a lot, most of the time – as a newly-wed barely out of my 20s they just all seemed terribly grown up and slightly irrelevant. But meeting my friend was a different case, because she, like O, made me feel like I’d found someone to be ‘me’ with. I remember meeting her for the first time, a tall slim blonde waiting on a bench for myself and O outside the Mina A’Salam hotel, looking incredibly stylish and cool. Of course in reality she wasn’t any cooler than me – what she was was a wicked funny Aussie who reminds me more of Bree from Desperate Housewives than anyone else I’ve ever met. The three of us spent a very amusing evening together – and have had many, many more during the relative lifetime we have spent here.

Long term friends in Dubai are hard to come by and harder still to keep hold of as life propels us ever forward. I have been lucky enough to have kept a few close ones for the entire duration of my time here. I don’t see them too often, but like good friends anywhere in the world, I can just pick up where I left off a few months back. Problem is there is always the prospect of them(and maybe one day, me) leaving hanging over our heads, unlike at home. It’s taken me a long, long time to accept that in the expat world, close friends and longevity don’t necessarily go hand in hand. The conclusion I have come to lately, however, is that being an expat is a bit like being single: the longer you go without a long term relationship the more attractive one-night stands start to become. One of the mums from school (because I am now that irrelevant 30-something with kids) and I have recently ‘hooked up’ and get on really well. She is leaving in six months. The old me would have thought ‘what’s the point?’ and not bothered making plans for playdates with the kids or nights out. The new one thinks ‘what the hell’ and I have resolved to simply enjoy her company until she goes.

Another aspect to making friends in an expat community is that you don’t have to know each other very long in order to consider yourself close. A couple who we have known for just over a year recently left Dubai, and we were devastated because we had really enjoyed our time with them and genuinely considered them to be some of our best friends, despite the fact that actually we really don’t know an awful lot about eachother. The shared experience of simply living here plus a shared sense of humour seems to be what counts, and you make good friends in the strangest of circumstances as a result. I met someone at a soft play area about 18 months ago and whilst our kids never play together (in fact they don’t even know each other!) and we don’t have a single thing in common, we really enjoy going out for the occasional glass (read bottle) of wine and having a laugh to ease the day to day grind.

The pressure of course is to be friends, really good friends, with every person you meet. It is a relatively small pool and because you are thrown into it without any form of raft, the instinct is to find as many people as you can and grab onto them with all your might. But now I realise the best way to make friends here is the same as anywhere really –  to just let it happen, and like buses, the really good ones will come along when you least expect it. Most will stay long enough to get you from A to B and some will stick around for a longer journey, but long or short-lived, really it’s the companionship along the way that matters. And if you can get to the end and have collected a few that will withstand the long distance friendships they will inevitably become, well then all the better.

“No, it’s not my home address…”

I’ve just wasted another hour of my life on the phone to a UK customer services department, wondering not for the first time how the hell the world is still turning. This time, I made the mistake of ordering some winter clothing for my son online, and had them delivered to my mum’s house. Why did I do this? So that I don’t have to contend with the grossly overinflated prices that this particular brand is subject to in my local shopping mall, so I have more choice in what I am buying that’s actually available in his size, and finally so I don’t have to pack any of it. However, I’m beginning to wish I had just bought it all here and put up with the expense and inconvenience.

I stupidly assumed that all online shopping works the same way as that most wonderful of sites, Amazon: You choose what you want, put it in a virtual basket, pay for it and give a billing address, then tell them where you’d like it to be sent to. Well, apparently not. Apparently, if you shop at Next online, it goes a little more like this: You choose what you want, put it in a virtual basket, pay for it and given a billing address, tell them where you’d like it to be sent to, then they send it there, decline your credit card without telling you, set up an account for you without asking and then email you a month and a half later to tell you you owe them money. Then they refuse your card again, then you call customer services, then they tell you that you have to pay for the goods with a card registered to the delivery address and that the only way for you to pay if you don’t have a card registered to that address is to borrow the money from your mum who does, and perform a completely unnecessary bank transfer to pay her back.

When querying this slightly crazy payment system, I was told it was in the T&Cs when I set up the account. That will be the account I didn’t set up, of course. I actually thought it was pretty strange that they just set up an credit account for me without asking. Most websites that don’t like a my heebeejeebee foreign muck credit card tell you by rejecting you outright; they don’t tend to deliver the goods, send you a catalogue and set up a monthly billing plan. But regardless of what the policy is, the thing I found strangest was that the customer services person in question didn’t seem to wonder why it would be useful to be able to take a foreign credit card for a UK delivery. Or indeed any card not registered to the delivery address. And in fact I did try asking what would happen if I wanted to buy a gift for someone and have it delivered to them, but apparently you can’t do that either, unless you have their credit card details or get it sent to you, both of which sort of defeat the object. It suddenly felt all very familiar – we have often found ourselves rejected from buying in US online stores too because they also adopt the policy that unless you have a US address for your credit card, you can’t shop. Given I can walk into any store in the US and purchase items using the same foreign credit card, I’m not sure what their point is. But rarely have I found this to be the case on a UK website and it really took me by surprise. Maybe I’ve just got too used to buying everything from Amazon.

So, back to my phone call, which by now of course was starting to wind me up a little. I asked if I could change the delivery address on my account to my UAE address I could make the payment. But the answer was no. In fact, they suggested I should have set up the account here, not the UK, and then I wouldn’t have caused myself and them such a problem. Aside from the fact that they don’t even have a UAE website, I DIDN’T SET UP AN ACCOUNT, THEY DID. Also they don’t deliver internationally, so even if I managed to set up an account I didn’t want in a country they don’t cover, they would have charged me in Dirhams and delivered it here. Which of course, is completely futile when I could nip down to the mall and actually go in the shop in half the time.

The point of online shopping, surely, is to be able to acquire items for gifting purposes or because you can’t conveniently walk down the road to buy them. Most people don’t get annoyed by technicalities such as I experienced because most people buy for themselves and in their own country. But given the world is supposed to be getting smaller, there seems to be a distinct lack of understanding with regards to the needs of the people that actually travel it. Maybe I am completely ignorant when it comes to international financing laws, but surely I should, in this day and age, be able to go onto any website, buy something for delivery to an address of my choice, and pay for it however I deem appropriate? And I’m sure there is some hugely technically or legally complicated reason, but if some sites can do it, why can’t everyone? It’s time to put the ‘world wide’ back into WWW, people.