Category Archives: Dubai

The Gulf’s SAD season

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It’s widely known among desert dwellers that summertime, rather than winter, is when we feel down in the dumps due to being trapped indoors and running the air-conditioned car-to-climate-controlled mall gauntlet.

What’s more, as people retreat from the sun, life here becomes less sociable. There are no afternoons spent BBQ-ing with friends in summer, no kids playing on the streets and, unless you’re up and out at dawn, beach trips are abandoned because it’s literally too hot for the seaside.

June saw a whopping 11.5 hours of sun a day – but in summer, we tend to hide from it

Add to this the fact that nearly all your friends vanish overnight on ‘home leave’, just as your kids break up from school for two months, and it’s easy to see why summer in the Gulf can trigger an inverted variety of seasonal affective disorder, or the ‘winter blues’ as it’s known in other parts of the world – complete with a vitamin D deficiency due to sun avoidance.*

Peering at BB’s slightly sunken-looking eyes today, I even wondered if he might be suffering from an overdose of processed air. “I just want to stay home and watch TV, and play with my Lego,” he told me, exhibiting the classic hibernation symptoms that so many of us display at this time of year.

We’re heading off soon, but several of my good friends are staying in the sandpit for at least some of the summer. One, who’s waiting until the schools break up in England before leaving, wrote on Facebook, “This is my fourth summer in Dubai and it’s been sweat and tears all the way.

“This year, I plan to do it with poise. See me anytime in the compound or at the mall and just check out that poise!” she put.

So, with this dear friend in mind, here are my tips for mums who are sticking around (excuse the pun) and want to create the illusion of appearing both cool and sane this summer:

● Make your own ice cubes from fruit juice and gin

● Avoid manmade fibres like nylon or rayon, which simulate being suffocated slowly in a plastic bag

● Keep a spray bottle in the fridge and give yourself a good squirt, like elephants do – starting with your wrists to quickly cool down your bloodstream

● Wear a moisturiser with SPF on your face every day – put it on before you open the curtains

● Tackle humidity hair with a shot of dry shampoo during the day

● Buy a SolarKindle protective case for your Kindle and let the sun charge the battery

● Keep in mind that retail hara-kiri (Carrefour on a Friday afternoon) won’t be so bad over summer with everyone gone

● If it’s your first summer in Dubai and you haven’t experienced an unchilled pool yet, think of it as the equivalent of a Turkish bath

● Next time you spot Modhesh (the yellow, coiled mascot for the annual Dubai Summer Surprises festival), rather than wanting to run him over, tell yourself he’s the result of a love-fest between a banana and a slinky and you might feel more endeared to him

● Forget poise, you need a posse. Go to the salon for a cucumber facial, valet park at the mall, hire a dog walker and enlist help to entertain the sprogs

*Researchers have actually shown that people who live in the UAE may be prone to SAD in the summer – and those who wear sun cream, abayas or khandouras block still further what little vitamin D their bodies can absorb

In need of a vacation

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“How many more days Mommy,” enquired BB this morning. “Is it one day or two?” he asked, his eyes shining with excitement at the prospect of the epic summer holiday ahead.

“Three days BB, three days to go,” I replied, with an equal measure of trepidation.

I don’t usually admit to feeling stressed on the blog, but if ever there’s a time to come clean it’s this week.

It’s the last week of term, the temperatures are in the 40s, we’ve all been ill due to being cooped up indoors, there’s the kindergarten graduation to attend, teachers’ presents to organise, we have a visitor, there are friends to see before they leave, and then there’s the thought of the 10-week summer holiday ahead of us. Yes, I’ll say that again, 10 weeks!

In fact, the mass exodus from the desert to cooler climes has already started. Yesterday, I parked right outside the supermarket and I’m convinced the roads are already quieter. School seems to be sliding into the holiday and every time I meet a friend, the conversation starts, “So when are you off?” and ends with a cheery, “See you in September!”

Crazy, never-to-be-repeated week

Some mums are leaving practically the moment the school gates clang shut, most of us are following within a week or so, and a few brave souls (and women with jobs) are staying in the sauna.

Aside from the good-byes, there’s the emotion of the school-year ending, lost library books, packing, and – of all the weeks we could have chosen to do this – the nightmarish task of potty training a boy who has a deep, deep mistrust of the toilet. Traumatised isn’t an exaggeration, and that’s both me and him – all witnessed by my visiting mother-in-law.

So, while I know I’ll feel like I’m in free fall once the structure of school is gone and DH jets off away from it all to Sydney, I’ll be so glad when this week is over, the farewells are said, the 10 tonnes of artwork filed and LB actually makes it to the toilet in time without screaming blue murder.

There are weeks when my office job feels like a walk in the park in comparison.

Photo from: The Brotherhood of the Stinky Underpants

Not-so-Silent Sunday: Drum roll

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Children’s birthday parties are practically a sport these days and here in Dubai you can host a party on a bus, on a boat, in a limo or at a waterpark. Alternatively, you can have a party at home and hire entertainers, magicians or, I’ll put money on it, even fire eaters or dwarfs.

Sensible parents get sucked in, too, and I did laugh this weekend when I walked out our front door and saw that our neighbours across the road were holding a party that had the potential to cause a right racket. Whether the most unbelievable din was created or not, I’ll never know as it was all over by the time we got home. Brave parents!

I did wonder if they’d given their next-door neighbours a heads-up…

Help! I need somebody

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I’m not sure whether to post this as it makes us sound terribly spoilt, but here goes.

In the Middle East it’s possible to outsource every task you could conceivably think of – from the ironing to banging a nail into a wall, changing a lightbulb and assembling Ikea furniture.

Even things I didn’t think were possible to avoid can be delegated. Had we wanted to, we could have valet parked at a children’s party this week, and already today I’ve politely declined having someone carry my groceries to the car and having the car washed while I shopped.

Expats tend to follow a typical pattern. They hire a cleaner, pay a teenager to babysit, then farm out the ironing. Before too long, they realise it’s cheaper to sponsor a live-in maid

Because the truth is, it’s really, really difficult not to have help in Dubai.

One of my favourite bloggers, Where’s my ruby slippers?, posted a wonderful and honest account about this aspect of Dubai life, and I found myself nodding in somewhat shame-faced agreement when she described how, that morning at the mall, a lady had taken her parking ticket at the exit and put it in the machine that operates the barrier. “Had she been able to shut my car window without cutting her arm off, I have no doubt she would have done that as well,” she wrote.

The drawback, of course, is how lazy it makes us. How it becomes too easy to throw money at a problem – and, the most concerning part, the effect it has on our children. I’m constantly reminding BB and LB that there are many things in Dubai that aren’t normal (“Where’s her nanny?” asked BB once in England, on meeting a little friend in a park filled with mums, not paid staff).

But, here’s the thing: apart from our trips home, this is the only existence my children know, and teaching them that life here can be a little too easy is a challenge.

This week, our doorbell rang and it was DH’s dry cleaner, dropping off his freshly laundered and pressed uniforms. We thought nothing more of it until we realised the impression it had made on BB.

I bought him some new school uniforms a couple of days ago, but one item was out of stock so I placed an order and left my phone number.

“They call when my shirt arrives?” BB asked, looking a little puzzled. “Won’t they deliver it, like Daddy’s work clothes?’

Sigh! Time to revisit real-life for a reality check, me thinks.

I like to be in America

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It’s lunchtime. Everyone’s hungry and we decide to head to a Subway we haven’t been to before.

“A 12-inch roast chicken on Italian, please,” I ask the man behind the counter.

“Yes, Maam,” he says, nodding in agreement and loading the wrong bread with turkey ham.

I ask again: “Sorry … roast chicken not ham, please?”

“No problem, Maam. No problem,” he assures me, throwing some chicken on top of the ham. (Several minutes later, charging me extra for his mistake.)

We negotiate the veggies, then get to the dressings. I pick Caesar. He starts pouring, but it runs out, mid-squirt.

“Maam, no problem. I give you ketchup,” he says, directing the nozzle at the sub.

“No, no, really, that’s fine. No sauce,” I say, raising an eyebrow in protestation at the salad being covered in ketchup.

I try to get the meal deal, the one we always have. “Could we have the crisps and drink, too, please?”

“Meal deal?” he enquires. Blank smile. (Ringing it all up separately on the till.)

A cut above the rest

After the bill has been debated, the boys tuck into their sandwich. I say ‘tuck in’ – BB eats his half quite happily, while LB pushes his around the table.

Our sandwich man looks over, beaming away at me and the boys. I smile back. Then he starts walking over, brandishing a gleaming, 6-inch kitchen knife!

“You want cut,” he grins, pointing at LB’s still uneaten half of the sub.

“NO! Thank you,” I respond, perhaps a little sharply and with two eyebrows raised, but stopping him in his tracks before my three-year-old gets his hands on the knife.

A little later, as we’re leaving, he motions me over with a cheery wave. “Maam,” he asks. “I want to come to your country.”

He means the US, as I’d already told him the boys were American. My heart sinks, because I genuinely feel terrible for migrant workers who’ve left their families behind, but also know there’s nothing I can do to make the ‘American dream’ a reality for him.

“You can help,” he asks, beseechingly. “Your husband help? When you come next, you tell me how you help. Okay.”

I nod. I offer sympathy. I mutter something about visas. Then agree I’ll ask my husband what to do (DH is already meant to be helping the man in the Indian at a foodcourt we visit to get a job with the airline, after all).

He won’t let me go, though, so we talk some more about a transfer within Subway, and although I can’t quite understand what he’s saying and you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s his first day on the job, I think he says, “I have 10 months’ experience here. And a diploma in sandwich-making.”

An amiable chap – but a diploma, really?

Never a dull moment in Dubai, not even ordering lunch.

Silent Sunday: The Tardis

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If you’ve been following this blog, you’ll know that temperatures in the UAE spike in summer, and it gets seriously hot. So imagine my amusement when I saw this egg-shaped walk-in human drying machine on a visit to our neighbouring emirate of Sharjah. For children who get wet playing in the Al Qasba fountain, it lights up with eerie red lights and blasts hot air at you – like the climate doesn’t already do that!

Looks like an alien space capsule, or a sci-fi teleporter, don’t you think?

A man with a van on a hot afternoon

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Sitting indoors after school today, we heard the tinny strains of Greensleeves – just about audible over the noise coming from the TV (yes, it’s summer, we’re stuck inside and the TV is all that stands between me and the kids climbing the walls with boredom).

As the tinkling notes got louder, so did the boys’ excitement. “Mummeee, it’s the ice cream van. QUICK!!”

The boys ran outside to buy brightly coloured lollies and I couldn’t help but smile at the sight of the van, which comes round our neighbourhood bringing a welcome chill to our desert compound. On long, sultry afternoons, it not only brings back childhood memories, but also provides good old-fashioned entertainment as you watch the vehicle being mobbed by kids.

It might be 41 degrees in the shade, with 75 per cent humidity today (yes, you sweat from pores you didn’t even know existed, and don’t get me started about humidity hair), so the ice cream man’s arrival doesn’t exactly mean we all get a breath of fresh air. But as my boys and BB’s girlfriend from next-door sat on the porch step licking the drips from their lollies before they melted into gloopy puddles, I enjoyed a few blissful moments of peace and quiet in the air-conditioning inside.

Results all round! The next time we hear the van’s chimes ringing out across our compound, I’ll have the money ready.

Set up by two British brothers in 2009, the entrepreneurial young pair spotted a gap in the market and filled it with an imaginative small business that left everyone else wondering why it hadn’t been done before – obvious really!

Circles wins the garden contest!

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My 24-year-old self thought that entering neighbourhood garden contests was the preserve of bored, frustrated, curtain-twitching housewives with competitive tendencies.

It never crossed my mind that, 15 years later – in the desert of all places – I’d pick up a leaflet advertising a community garden competition that had been pushed under the door and put it in a safe place. That, a week later, I’d spend 20 minutes looking for the by-now-lost leaflet, and then, late one night, email a photo of our garden, taken when it was in bloom, to the organisers.

I didn’t even tell DH. I might have told my mum, who has such green fingers she could probably grow roses on the moon, and I mentioned it to Catherine the Great, who laughed. But I didn’t think anymore of it.

I blogged about our garden before. Previously just a giant sandpit, it now has real grass, brightly coloured bougainvillea and a selection of exceedingly hardy, heat-resistant desert plants. Like most families in Dubai, we have gardeners who come by twice a week, but compared to the lush oases that more horticulturally minded neighbours have created, our patch of desert is more Jungle Book than Kew Gardens. If I’m honest, I really don’t know one end of the garden shears from the other.

Inspired, I’ll be out there with the shears to do some pruning as soon as it’s cool enough

So I forgot all about it, until the email arrived to say we’d won. I’ve no idea how, but we’d won! My fate as a reluctant housewife with a garden to manicure was sealed.

And they wanted to come round with a prize!

Twenty minutes before their visit, I was rueing the fact I hadn’t high tailed it to the plant souk to do some repair work. I took the picture shortly after my mum had worked her magic on a visit. Since then, the plants in the photo had either grown to Jack-And-The-Beanstalk proportions, or died in the scorching sun.

At 4pm on the dot, three people arrived from Dubai Properties, one of them a photographer with a long-lens camera, the other two from marketing. Oh no, I cringed, they want photos for their brochure and they’re going to be horribly disappointed!

I didn’t let DH leave. I accepted the prize (a solar-powered lamp) apologetically and we all walked around the garden while the photographer took hundreds of pictures, and I made excuses for the fact that a) it didn’t look nearly as clipped and alive as in the photo (but, look, the grass is still green!) and b) I didn’t know the names of any of the plants.

I have to admit, I did rather enjoy feeling like we were on a shoot for House & Garden magazine, but when their marketing brochure is printed, I won’t be holding my breath.

I can’t show you the photo I entered, unfortunately, as it gives away where we live, but I can leave you with a feast for sore eyes – before and after shots of my mum’s English garden in Surrey. As you can see, I’ve got a lot to live up to!

What my mum and dad’s English garden looks like now

And how it looked before my Mum got her green fingers on it

Silent Sunday: Skyline

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Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the tallest tower in the world, is a sight to behold on any day, but nothing beats seeing it standing tall among its architecturally impressive peers. Each building twists and turns in its own unique way, glinting in the golden sunshine and creating a modern skyline that rises from the desert like a mirage.

Taken with an iPhone from behind the window of our seaplane – through the haze!

Surely they don’t keep cows in the desert?

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And other Dubai myths debunked

At the weekend, we visited a hotel we haven’t swum at before and discovered a little Britain. Full of holidaymakers from the UK, there were accents from every part of the motherland and suntans in numerous different shades (ranging from English Rose to mahogany).

DH and the boys jumped into the pool, and I was taking a few extra minutes to get lotioned up (I don’t mess with the sun here), when a sweet lady started talking to me – ostensibly to tell me that there was a bird’s nest in our parasol, but partly because I think she fancied a chat.

She must have been in her late 50s and was on her honeymoon. After I congratulated her and enquired where her new husband was (chatting to a buxom bikinied lady at the swim-up bar!), she asked me when we’d arrived.

“Oh, we live here,” I replied, realising she’d assumed we were also on holiday. “My husband’s job brought us out here,” I said, by way of explanation, as she shifted her bikini straps around so she wouldn’t get tan lines.

“Really? You live here?”

“Well, not here, in this hotel, but in Dubai,” I continued, glancing over to check the boys were settling into the pool OK, as I had a feeling the lady – lovely as she was – didn’t know much about living in the United Arab Emirates and would have some questions.

Before we moved here, we came across a few surprised reactions from people who’d never been to the Middle East and were, most likely, fearful of the region. “Will you have to wear a veil?” “Are you allowed to drive?” “Can you drink alcohol?”, “Is it true they cut your hand off for stealing?” they’d ask.

She didn’t roll out any of these myths, but immediately honed in on the heat.

“But it’s so hot – and the driving!”

“Yes, it takes a bit of getting used to,” I assured her, smiling as her husband swam away from the big-breasted woman and gave us a cheery wave.

“And what about that sandstorm the other day? It was terrible,” she remarked, referring to a Mission Impossible-style blowy day that must have appeared to herald the start of the apocalypse, but which I couldn’t quite remember given that there are so many sandstorms here.

After 20 more minutes of chat, I’d persuaded her that we actually have a really nice life here – the kids are happy; the schools are great; I can and do work out here; I don’t speak Arabic but the kids learn it at school; and yes, I do get homesick and miss family (a lot) but we have plenty of visitors.

There are more than 10,000 cows in the UAE on farms scattered around the country. They’re kept in open, air-conditioned sheds that allow the animals to wander outside and they eat imported alfalfa. Cornflakes are added to their feed, with compost under foot rather than grass.

And, then, she got me. Square on. I was blindsided by a question that came out of left field and for which I had no answer.

“But where are all the cows?”

“There’s no shortage of milk,” she correctly stated, “But where do they keep the cows?”

With the searing temperatures and lack of grass to graze on, there are, of course, no fields of lowing cattle here, but I knew there were dairy cows somewhere (Al Ain?) I just didn’t know where, or how.

(I’ve since asked Google – see right – as the answer is really interesting).

Moving swiftly on, the only thing I was able to tell her, with any certainty, was that milk – and indeed water – is more expensive than petrol in the UAE.

As much as I was enjoying our chat, I was just about to say I should join DH and the boys in the pool when she brought up one more topic – that people probably want to ask about, but don’t dare to.

“You must all be very rich out here, what with not paying taxes and all,” she quipped, audibly tutting as she pondered the amount of money she’d paid into the British government’s coffers.

I think I snorted – for the first couple of years, we were honestly living from pay check to pay check. Politely, I replied, “No, not everyone! The cost of living in Dubai is astonishingly high. Have you been to a supermarket here? It’s about £5 a fish finger, you know!”

How about you? Do you find yourself debunking myths about the country you live in?