A blow-out on the highway

Posted on by

Coming home this evening, with the kids in the back of the car, I had a scary experience that’s left me rather shaken – so a bit of a serious post, this one, with some advice for fellow expats who share the UAE’s roads with drivers from around 180 different nations.

It was just after dark, rush-hour and the traffic was heavy. We were on one of Dubai’s eight-lane highways, which you have no choice but to take from where we live – to get to school, to the park, to the mall, pretty much anywhere.

In front to the left was a van, travelling at speed despite being old-looking and probably not road-worthy in other parts of the world. I expect it had one of those misspelt stickers on the back: ‘Am I driving safe? If no please call *insert driver’s mobile number*’

Good luck calling this number

The van blew a tyre – that I know, because I saw a flame shoot out from a back wheel – then I’m guessing the driver hit the brakes, because he lost control and swerved dangerously – careering across the highway, right into our oncoming path.

I narrowly avoided hitting him as he ploughed across several lanes and, thank god, the cars behind us didn’t slam into the back of us, either. The whole episode played out in slow-motion and I shook like a leaf all the way home.

DH, who I phoned straight away, promises me that if we’d crashed, it wouldn’t have been as bad as I’m morbidly imagining as everyone was (hopefully) slowing down, and it probably seemed worse because it was dark, but even so, it felt like a close call, if you ask me, and I held the kids close when we got home.

It made me think: would I know what to do if our car blew a tyre on the highway? Do you know? I just looked it up and here’s what I found:

DO NOT slam on the brakes (like van man instinctively did tonight) as this may throw you into a spin. Keep a firm grip on the steering wheel and do not over steer to correct any swerve or pull. Try to point the car as straight as possible and let the car slow itself down. Put your indicator on and drift towards the shoulder. When all four wheels are off the highway, brake lightly and cautiously until you stop.

Stay safe peeps.

PHOTO CREDIT: Living the Travel Channel

The run on sellotape

Posted on by

Christmas when you’re living overseas can be a funny thing.

On the upside, here in Dubai you’ve got champagne brunches, take-out turkeys from five-star hotels, child-friendly beach clubs with the sunshine to enjoy them and the fact everywhere’s open on Christmas Day.

My in-laws, who are staying with us and looking to buy property, were able to view apartments with a real-estate agent after we’d opened presents – and could even have gone on to Ikea.

Christmas morning at Circles: But there was no pulling the wool over BB's eyes: "That's not Santa, that's Uncle James!'


On the downside, you’re far from family back home, there are no seasonal specials of Doctor Who or Family Fortunes on the TV, some people think it doesn’t feel festive unless it’s cold and miserable outside and, being a Muslim country, there’s not a baby Jesus in sight, plus you might not officially have the day off work.

And this year – just like the previous two years – there was another curveball for unsuspecting Christmas shoppers, summed up by a friend of mine on Facebook as follows:

“No time to finish shopping, no days off to speak of, no Bacardi (don’t worry, I’ve got vodka) and no husband …. But it was the ‘no sellotape’ that pushed me over the edge.”

Yes, the local supermarket had, once again, failed to order extra supplies, which probably meant there was no sellotape left anywhere in Dubai – leaving, I can only imagine, thousands of expats with presents to wrap frantically wondering if they’d have to use Pritt stick instead.

I called my friend straight away, because as I mentioned before, I have a son who uses rolls of the stuff to tape his toys to the floor so they don’t get cleared away, and so I buy industrial quantities and stash it away.

Next year, I bet loads more expats with stockings to stuff will do the same – as I said, it can be a funny ole time Christmas in Dubai, and apologies for blogging about sellotape, again!

Naughty or nice?

Posted on by

You know what it’s like, when the kids are off school and they’re operating on a schedule that looks like this…


So it’s a small miracle that we’re just about ready for Christmas, despite DH being somewhat preoccupied.

DH is usually around loads (you wouldn’t believe how many days off he has the rest of the year), but right now he’s training on the superjumbo – the A380, to use the proper lingo – or the double-decker (with showers) that looks like it should never get off the ground. Exciting, yes, but it means intensive training at ‘airplane school’ all over Christmas. “Timing” doesn’t come close.

Anyway, over the past few days, I’ve discovered that a bit of festive bribery is a wonderful way to nip bad behaviour in the bud.

It’s like having special powers – it’s cut down on time-outs, shouting and outrageous demands – what’s more, I’m hearing parents everywhere uttering the same two words.

Two little words that speak volumes and will be given up tonight in return for a glass of sherry, a mince pie and a carrot:

They are, of course: “Santa’s watching!”

And you can just see their cute little faces drop, their brain synapses firing away as they process this information and its unthinkable consequences. “That means no presents, no presents! Santa will give my brother presents, and not me!”

It’s working a treat! But, with sibling rivalry alive and well in the Circles household, the funny thing is the boys are trying their hardest to grass each other up.

“Mummeeee, he’s being B.A.D,” is practically ringing in my ears and has led the LittleBoy to actually change his name.

“Who are you?,” asked someone of LB yesterday. “The good one,” he replied, quicker than you can say Santa Claus is coming to town.

Christmas short-cuts for housewives

Posted on by

At work, being a weekly news publication, we’re ‘on a deadline’ the whole time. It’s relentless but everyone pulls together and the magazine always gets done – even when the post-recession production team is two people, doing six different jobs, down, like it was last week.

But the Christmas deadline? That’s something else altogether. And it’s not like I’m trying to create a Martha Stewart-esqe holiday like those women I meet with their bright red Christmas manicures and fresh highlights who hung the last bauble on the tree at 2am and had everything wrapped days ago. With bows on.

I’m trying to keep it simple – the less is more approach – but even so I’m feeling the pressure because, having just finished work on Thursday and the kids now off school, I keep counting the days and there just aren’t enough to get everything done.

So this year, I’m discovering that ‘short-cuts’ are the working housewife’s best friend – let’s just call them time-saving devices that allow you to eke out the hours until Christmas.

Our fourth Christmas in Dubai, and still a novelty seeing trees surrounded by palms and blue sky


By now, the kids were meant to have seen Santa, but we failed at the weekend due to the queue at Wafi and when we trooped over to another mall, we were told the part-time, lazy oaf of a Santa there only works evenings.

We could take the traditionalist approach and see Santa in the snow at Ski Dubai, but I’m thinking it might be insanely busy – like the rest of Dubai, which has swelled in size with thousands of relatives and tourists in town, here to have Christmas on the beach.

I’ve also got a sneaking suspicion that if we did come across Santa in Dubai he might be on the skinny side and sporting a sun tan.

So I’ve warned the kids we may have to email their Christmas list – plus friends have told me about a website, www.portablenorthpole.com, which is apparently brilliant – and free.

A more worrying hitch that came to light while attempting to do some baking with the kids is that only half the oven works – it can just about cope with fish fingers, but a turkey big enough to feed 10-plus people on Christmas Eve could take all day to cook.

We're coming over for Christmas. All of us


So I’m looking into take-out turkeys – because this is where Dubai comes into its own. Despite Christmas not being an official holiday here (DH will be at work, training, on the big day), you can pre-order a cooked turkey with trimmings from a number of hotels – some will even deliver, meaning your turkey arrives at your door like a pizza.

A few other short cuts I’ve discovered include the mince pies at Spinneys (delicious), the frozen sausage rolls in the hidden-away ‘forbidden’ pork section, e-mailable gift certificates from Amazon for my family back home and the fact that it’s ok to superglue the gingerbread house we attempted – as it’s too hard to eat anyway and using icing as glue, as the nonsense in the flat-packed kit suggested, resulted in a derelict shack.

The red nails are even a possibility now that I’ve clawed back a few hours. But not the holiday highlights – because my hairdresser makes enough money here giving women beautiful sun-kissed hair-dos that she can afford to leave early for a beach resort in Thailand.

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE – AND WISHING YOU ALL GOOD THINGS IN 2012!

Santa in the desert: The man himself arrived in a red Hummer at an event organised by the Dubai Irish Society

Desert dress sense: A fashion opportunity

Posted on by

Last night I went to a Christmas party wearing my Ugg boots – a purchase I persuaded DH to buy from the knock-off markets of Shanghai.

Worn without socks - talking of which, I'd been here two years before buying a pair of socks


Their first outing since their arrival months ago, they are, of course, about as necessary as ice scrapers and anti-freeze are in the desert.

But my friend who held the party said there would be snow on the ground (and there was, in the form of fake snow sprinkles!) so it seemed too good a fashion opportunity to miss, even if by the end of the night my feet and half my legs had suffocated in their fur-lined encasings.

It goes without saying that fashion in the desert is biased towards the summer season: flips flops, shorts, maxi dresses and summer tops are year-round staples. Women own tops for fat days, tops for thin days. Short-sleeve tops that aren’t too revealing for the mall, T-shirts that hide underarm stubble, ‘look at my curvy body’ spaghetti tops and ‘I can be sensible’ light-weight tops that hide your bra straps for work.

And another essential in the land of eternal summer: bikinis – which have categories all of their own.

Needed in all colours

On the upside, all these items are easy to pack if you’re coming to Dubai on holiday, but when you live here – rather like eating cheese and tomato sarnies with no mayo for lunch every day – it’s easy to get bored of your summer wardrobe and long to wear a sleeve, boots, a winter coat, layers and a scarf for a change.

Hence my joy at wearing the Uggs last night, putting a sweater on to go to a cinema with chilly air-conditioning, and covering up in the cooler evenings. Ironically, the clothes stores here are full of wooly winter stock, which all looks so tempting but is really only of any use if you’re travelling to cooler climes.

This all leads me to a question I’ve been asked several times by people coming to visit us here: what is appropriate clothing in a Muslim country?

Most ‘normal’ clothing is tolerated in Dubai as long as it is not too outrageous – although to be respectful of the UAE culture, some people only wear tops that cover their shoulders to go shopping.

And you wouldn’t want to reveal your midriff or your ‘bits that are best left hidden’ in public as this would cause offence. You might have heard about the British shopper who was reportedly wearing see-through clothing at the mall and received a stern warning from an Arab lady. Angered by the ‘dress down’ – and to everyone’s amazement – the shopper stripped to her bikini. Needless to say, the police were called and she was arrested.

On the beach, bikinis are fine, topless or thongs are not. And while under-dressers (ie, people who jump into the sea in their y-fronts) risk ending up with a caution from the beach police, over-dressers are also being targeted. Over-dressers are fully clothed men who come to the beach not to swim or sunbathe, but for ‘other’ reasons. Labourers who work in Dubai, they’ve gained a reputation for staring at women in bikinis and apparently even photographing them with their mobiles and groping them underwater! (it’s never happened to me, I should add!)

Two veiled Emirati women in traditional Islamic dress cross paths with a Western woman wearing a revealing frock at the horse races in Dubai

Work-to-rule Santa

Posted on by

At the Wafi mall this morning there was a long line of harassed-looking parents, their kids orbiting round a Christmas tree two houses high with baubles the size of small planets.

A festive extravaganza, even if the queue management left much to be desired

Barely concealing the fact they wished they could have spent the morning sleeping in and reading the paper rather than queuing for Santa, the parents were doing their best to keep their overexcited offspring under control as the queue inched forwards.

People must have been waiting at least an hour – if not more – I’m guessing, but were remaining resolute – the promise of seeing Dubai’s most authentic-looking Santa, in that his beard is said to be genuine, followed by a free cup of tea and entrance to the play area proving to be a crowd puller.

Santa’s top-security grotto was heavily guarded by toy soldiers and you couldn’t even peep at the man in red – we tried but just found ourselves face-to-face with animatronics.

Then, at about quarter to one, a Filipino lady appeared and walked over to the queue. She stopped half way up the line and, ignoring the expectant little faces and restlessness among the ranks, announced with no apology:

“Santa’s taking a break at one.”

“For 30 minutes,” she continued, totally deadpan.

I’m not sure that the families in the second-half of the queue were even told of this fact, although I’m sure the news travelled fast.

We didn’t hang around to see the mutiny I presume ensued.

Honestly, you’d think, wouldn’t you, that since he only works for one month a year, Santa might be able to plough on through?

Jet-setting grandparents

Posted on by

As I mentioned earlier this week, BB’s class is nearing the end of a Unit of Enquiry (the lingo in the international curriculum) into how things have changed over time.

We’ve all worked quite hard on this, completing a questionnaire asking things like, ‘Did you have a television back in your day? Or a washing machine?’, working on a poster as homework and going along with the premise that our kids think we’re really quite old.

With a shared love of train sets, BB and his Grandad can hang out for hours

They’ve even had grandparents into the school to meet the class and talk about life in the past.

This led BB to come home asking me why his grandparents don’t live with us.

Imagining one big happy household crammed full to the rafters with his Nanny and Grandad from England and his Jiddo and Tata from Lebanon, he thought this would be a marvellous set up for everyone.

“Well, dear, we do try to see them as much as possible,” I replied “and we’re really very lucky that you have such jet-setting grandparents.”

“Ummm,” he sighed, a little dejectedly, clearly not persuaded that this was enough. And then dropped a clanger, said in a way only cheeky but affectionate little boys can get away with:

“If Grandad lived with us, I could count the hairs on his head.”

A note on competitive parents

Posted on by

Homework for kindergarten kids is a new concept to me, but I hear that it really kicks off from next term and can be a nightly battle.

To prepare BB’s class of five and six year olds for this, they had their first proper assignment this weekend – the kids had to research an object, such as a toy, television or car, and produce a poster at home, showing what the object looked like in the past and what it looks like today.

And the most worrisome bit: ‘Your child will then present the poster to the whole class as part of their summative assessment,’ the teacher told us.

And, believe me, this made me nervous. Not just about the presenting part, or actually making the poster, but because you wouldn’t believe how competitive expat parents in Dubai can be.

“I know, let’s visit the museum this weekend to do some fact-finding,” I imagined the other mums saying. “And work on some mock-ups first. Even better, why don’t we fly to London to browse the British Museum.” “Yes, and once we’ve finished the conceptuals, we can do a historical key in PowerPoint,” their DHs, getting into the swing of it, probably reply. “That’ll really knock the socks off the teacher.”

BB and I finally got down to it on Saturday afternoon, his attention captured momentarily because I stole an idea from the recent National Day celebrations – a classic car parade! It kept him focused for, ooh, all of 30 minutes, before he legged it to the play area.

Two hours later, I’d finished the poster, cleaned up the mess and hidden it so BB’s little brother wouldn’t scribble all over it – just in time to start thinking about dinner.

I think I’m going to be busy next term, when homework really gets going.

Colouring, cutting, sticking - I was in my element!

20 signs you live in the Middle East

Posted on by

I’ve been short on time this week due to work, plus Tom Cruise is in town for the Dubai premiere of his new movie, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, and someone had to show him around (LOL)!

That's actually Tom scaling the Burj Khalifa, half a mile high

Dubai provided a backdrop for the action flick, with Cruise performing a series of heart-stopping stunts clinging to the world’s tallest building.

Since my invite to the red-carpet premiere must have got lost, I’ve been hoping I might bump into him (I had a bit of a crush on Tommo when I was 15, you see – back in the days of Top Gun, when my husband – who stole my heart at Sixth Form College – wanted to fly for the US Air Force and I dreamt I’d be DH-to-be’s wingwoman in a Kelly McGillis-esque fashion).

Anyway, I digress. This post isn’t original – it’s doing the rounds on Facebook and so I apologise if you’ve already seen it. Or wrote it.

It made me chuckle and I hope you enjoy it too.

You know you’ve been living in the Gulf for too long when…

• You’re not surprised to see a goat in the passenger seat

• When phrases like ‘potato peeler’, ‘dish washer’ and ‘fly killer’ are no longer household items but are actually job titles

• You need a sweater when it cools down to 80 degrees Fahrenheit

Dubai: A city of contrasts (not my behind unfortunately)

• You expect everyone (over 4 years old) to own a mobile phone

• Your idea of housework is leaving a list for the maid

• You believe speed limits are only advisory and expect all police to drive BMWs or Mercedes

• You believe the definition of a nanosecond is the time interval between the time the light turns green and the guy behind you blasts his horn

• You can’t buy anything without asking for a discount

A friend, just to the left of Tom, who DID get to meet him - AND he's following her on Twitter!

• You expect all stores to stay open till midnight

• You make left turns from the far right lane

• You send friends a map instead of your address

• You think it’s perfectly normal to have a picnic in the middle of a roundabout at 11pm

• You know exactly how much alcohol allowance you have left for the month

• You never say Saturday instead of Friday or Sunday instead of Saturday

• You accept that there is no point in asking why you are not allowed to do something

• You expect queues to be 1 person deep and 40 people wide

• You realise that the black and white stripes on the road are not a zebra crossing, just bait to get tourists into the firing line

• You carry 12 passport-size photos around with you just in case

• You overtake a police car at 130 km/h. And don’t worry about it

• When a problem with your car’s air-conditioning or horn is more serious to you than a problem with the brakes

The nightly bedtime debacle

Posted on by

There must be someone else who loves that feeling at the end of the day – when you cocoon yourself in the duvet, your toes slide down to the end of the bed and your whole body exhales with relief?

It’s such a lovely sensation, I don’t understand why my kids think I’m committing such a terrible, heinous crime when I put them to bed.

The boys share a room and if – after cajoling them through the whole bath, teeth, book routine – they would just let me turn the light out and go downstairs while they kept each other company (isn’t that why you have two children?), I’d be a nicer person.

But, no, instead they get hyped up, keep themselves awake and compete for my attention like their lives depend on it.

If I leave the room, LB – who’s still of a clingy age – tantrums until there’s so much adrenalin pumping round his little body he might as well be doing a bungee jump.

It’s easily the most frustrating part of my day, especially now I’m back at work for a while. Aside from a bleary-eyed rush in the morning, the bedtime debacle is the only interaction I get with them during the week – and on a bad night leaves me with a 20-minute long evening by the time the circus finally subsides.

It all goes a lot smoother when DH is home, so I’ve started doing something rather underhand when he’s away. If you compare it to drugging them with sleeping pills (which has crossed my mind) or leaving the house when they behave like this (also tempting), it’s really not that bad.

I say to the boys, “Daddy’s on the phone. He’s calling to see if you’re in bed,” then I pretend to talk on my mobile, shaking my head, umming and making conversation at appropriate intervals.

It works so well, I’ve rolled it out now to saying I have a hotline to DH (1-800-DADDY) wherever he is in the world.

It’s only backfired once, when BB wanted to talk to him and so – like a family friend who used to call Father Christmas in Lapland for us when I was little did – I pretended DH had been cut off.

I really don’t mean to make DH the bad cop when he’s not even here, but now when I bring the milk upstairs, I grab my phone – it’s either that or have SuperNanny on speed dial.