Tag Archives: Dubai

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.

You know you are creating an expat brat when…

I’ve been poorly with the ‘flu over the weekend and so instead of getting some much desired family time I’ve spent most of the past few days curled up in a ball shivering. Whilst flaked out on the sofa I stumbled across this blog post about ‘Things you never said until you lived in Dubai’. It got me thinking about writing something myself but I couldn’t face the computer. Then my husband and son got home from Dubai Mall and – hey presto! The work was done for me.

Me: Where did Daddy take you for lunch?

My son (aged not-quite-three): We went to the Armani cafe

Me: Did you?! And what did you have to eat?

My son: I had a wagyu beefburger and fries and dip dip, but the dip dip was too spicy so I asked the man and he gave me some nice dip dip.

Me: A wagyu beefburger hey? Wow, aren’t you lucky?

Having picked myself up off the floor and raised an eyebrow to my other half, who claimed that ‘all the other restaurants were out of kids food’ I realised with a cackle of amusement and horror (I told you I was feeling ill) that we were indeed raising our own little expat brat. So here for your pleasure are the top 10 signs you might be headed that way too:

English: Dubai Mall

Mummy is this our new car? (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

1. They automatically turn left when they get on the plane

2. ‘Lamborghini’ is one of their first 50 words

3. Princess manicures are a Thursday afternoon ritual

4. Their 3rd birthday party cost more that your first car

5. They refuse to wear any polo shirt that doesn’t have a horse sewn on it

6. They think all beaches come with free ice pops and a man that sprays you when it gets too hot

7. They are on first name terms with the staff at the Polo/Golf/Beach club (or indeed, all three)

8. You buy them the cute little housework set from ELC and they leave it outside the maid’s door

9. They can operate Skype before they are out of nappies

10. They think gold and silver are part of the colour spectrum

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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Bat Cat

My son has been ill and off school for nearly a week now and while he’s definitely on the mend things are moving quickly from mere boredom to full-on hysteria. This morning, in between breakfast and being forced to take a toy dog for a walk around the living room, I finally managed to get 10 minutes of uninterrupted time on my computer and stumbled across this story  tweeted by the breakfast DJ on Dubai 92 FM. I opened up the link to be greeted by a rather sick/amusing (delete as the mood takes you) tale of a man who converted his dead cat into a helicopter. My son happened to pass by as I was reading the story and saw the picture. Instantly renaming the poor pussy ‘BatCat’ he insisted on looking at the photos and laughing hysterically whilst shrieking ‘BatCat’ at the top of his voice. Upon tweeting Catboy the DJ (there are a lot of cats in this story, sorry) to tell him, he then related the story of BatCat on air and dedicated their ‘Topical Tune of the Day’ to my delighted son, who is still amused and excited in equal doses about the stuffed dead cat that flew on the radio.

I am so proud.

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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Small town/big city

In a city that is all about bigger and better, it’s sometimes nice to remember that Dubai is not exactly a sprawling metropolis. We’re always bumping into people we know – at dinner, on weekends away, in the mall – and quite often the circles that people move in are still small enough to induce that feeling of ‘where everybody knows your name’. Sometimes this is not so great – I should imagine complete reinvention is a little difficult – but often it produces a feeling of camaraderie that gives out a warm and welcome glow in such a transient place as here. This is no more obvious than when listening to the radio. Yesterday, a generous amount of airtime was being given to the installation of the new and rather controversial speed camera on Al Hessa Street. You can’t get more local than that, and there was something rather nice about the sense of belonging it gave me, to know exactly what they were talking about and why.

More amazing is that I’m feeling this generous about Dubai in 45 degree heat late on a Thursday afternoon with another eight weeks to go before I escape for the summer. Times, they are a-changin’….

Back to Black

Several things have recently alerted me to the fact that Dubai may be on the ‘up’ again:

1. I cannot, for love nor money, get a taxi to pick me up from my house after 7pm on the weekend

2. No-one has my dress size or my shoe size in anything expensive

3. I am getting endless phone calls and sms messages from estate agents wishing to buy or rent my house, BUT

4. I don’t seem to be getting as much spam about 75% off sales in Harvey Nicks

5. The DIFC (Dubai’s financial district) is packed full of busy looking suits again

6. The hotels are all fully booked

7. The restaurants are fully booked

8. Everyone is getting just a little bit more rude

9. Everything is getting just a little more expensive

10. Plans for an underwater hotel have just been announced

Yes, you read right. An underwater hotel. It’s true, despite the best link I could find being from the Daily Mail. Ambition clearly is not something this city is short of, even if the pennies have been a little lacking in recent years. And in any case it would seem the announcement of this latest crackpot scheme may well be indicative of Dubai’s apparent recovery. The Dubai Shopping Festival had a record number of visitors this year who collectively spent over AED 10 billion, and according to the latest census there are now also over 2 million residents in Dubai – an all time high. Restaurants and hotels are opening apace, and property prices are on the rise again. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great that Dubai is showing signs of recovery. After a few years of very difficult times, it is nice to see our house is now worth comfortably over 50% of what we paid for it for the first time since we moved in.

(No, it’s no good – it still hurst to talk about it. Moving on…)

Burj Al Arab and 360 degree club

The Burj al Arab: it all started here (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Tourism is most definitely on the rise, with reports of visitor numbers climbing by 9% in the first quarter of 2012. Of course we have Arab Spring to thank for much of that. Whilst many other middle eastern countries are now off the table, Dubai and the UAE in general appear to be politically stable and the city has attracted many regional visitors that may traditionally have gone elsewhere. I should imagine the rotten weather Europe has had to endure so far this spring has also encouraged a larger number of tourists from the west, particularly now the ‘Dubai-bashers’ who took such great delight in reporting nothing but negative and exaggerated stories in the British press in the height of the crash have put a sock in it. Dubai has seemingly regained it’s position as the no.1 destination for shopping, eating, sunbathing and, well – just being rather glamourous, and the punters are flocking in.

And seriously, the city is really flourishing, in new ways as well as old. There are farmer’s markets selling organic locally grown produce, the industrial zone is home to a growing number of galleries, displaying both traditional and contemporary works – and (drumroll) there are large parts of the city that actually look like they are finished. The arts scene, neglected for so long, still has a long way to go – but the sheer number of artists, film makers, actors, musicians, photographers and writers that proliferate my Facebook, and the volume of projects that are being worked on, would suggest the city is getting ready to embrace culture in a new and very different way to anything that has gone before.

When it comes to dining, I can’t count the number of incredible restaurants and bars that have opened this past year or so, and certainly haven’t had time to eat in all of them – but it would also seem every chef and his celebrity dog now wants to get their slice of Dubai. The one exceptional departure has been that of Gordon Ramsey, who paved the way for Michelin-starred food in Dubai with his restaurant ‘Verre’, opening way back in 2001. Ramsey may have gone but he leaves behind a most important legacy: his chefs. In a bold move they’ve taken Ramsay’s old space and claimed it as their own. This is pretty unique in Dubai – ‘home grown’ talent running an independent fine dining restaurant. Most celeb chefs open up, stick their name on the door, and visit once a year. Table 9 is as sure sign as any that the Dubai dining scene is not only back on its feet, but finally starting to mature into something really exciting rather than just a money making machine.

So the city begins to grow a new soul. A very different one from that which was lost during the boom years. It’s true, Dubai’s old heart beats to a different drum and is, I fear, gone, along with so many of the residents that helped build it. The interim years of property booms and money madness were ugly ones. The place was charged with arrogance and selfishness and everything glittered, for sure, but it was not gold. Recent times have been quieter, people have tended to just get on with things, and during the recession it seems the city has reshaped itself and has really grown in some ways – emotionally if not literally. It’s only now things are starting to be on the ‘up’ that I have noticed the mood shift once more. There are signs that of that old personality that I did not like – tempers are a fraction shorter and good manners a littler harder to come by as the city fills up and gets busier, and the ‘Do you have any idea who I ams’ are more prevalent than before. I hope this time, though, that Dubai will try and keep it real. To say no to the shysters and refuse to accept rude and shallow behaviour as the norm. To be generous and accepting and to give back as well as take. Dubai is an amazing city that can continue to grow in all senses of the word. And this time around, as the good times roll, we need to enrich as well as get rich. Now, where’s that taxi?