Tag Archives: expat

A sticky story about having a housemaid (and please don’t go off me!)

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It’s no secret that many of us here in Dubai have housemaids, who double up as nannies and sometimes cooks too. A very small minority even drive, meaning the school run is magically done too.

I’ve heard this wonderful perk described in various ways:

“My wife at home,” is a common one from expat mums, or “I should have married her!”

Another friend who’d just hired the sweetest lady from the Philippines told me, “She’s marvellous! She can stay at home and be me and I can go off and be somebody else!”

Introducing the efficient, gorgeous and all-round wonderful Catherine the Great (with baby LB)- can you tell how much we love her?!

And it’s amazing how you’re suddenly inspired to do baking, three-course meals, or catering for multiple kids when you have a self-cleaning kitchen.

The only draw-back is if you get too used to having a housemaid – dare I say it, dependent – it can be quite a shock when real-life catches up with you, ie, you have to move back to your home country (or go on a two-week holiday without her). In fact, it’s common for local families and a few expats to take their maids on vacation with them.

This summer in England, a friend asked me if our live-in nanny Catherine the Great spends her whole time tidying up after our two very messy boys.

Well, we are, in fact – and have been for some time – on a drive to get the boys to tidy their own toys, as a precaution against one of my worst fears, expat brat syndrome, which I’ve blogged about before.

But, inevitably, the rest of us, and in particular C.the.Grt who’s at home all day, still end up doing plenty of clearing up – and it drives BB bananas.

So he’s taken to using sellotape (American sp. scotch tape) to tape his trains, planes, cars, pieces of track and even lego to the floor – in the hope all his bits and pieces won’t get thrown back in the toy box.

Once he taped up the whole living room, cordoning it off like it was a crime scene that couldn’t be touched.

Double-sided, poster tape, mounting tape, he doesn't discriminate - he'll take what he can get

He also uses sellotape to make roadways on the floor and he gets through miles of the stuff.

I’ve found myself bribing him with it: “If you’re really good today BB, I’ll get you a roll of sellotape at the supermarket tomorrow!”

This morning I had two rolls stashed away, but BB found them and got busy. The end result was this sellotape superstructure, which we’ll be unsticking for days.

So that is the reason, my dear friends, why when your children receive a present from us, it’s always wrapped in Toys R Us gift paper – because our sellotape is all over our floor and is never, ever to be found when I need it.

PS: I really recommend two superbly written blogs by Dubai writers on this facet of expat life (housemaids, not sellotape) – Housewife in Dubai: Maid wanted: Must love cleaning and hate gossip and We have it maid by SandboxMoxie, who has good reasons for resisting the lure of live-in help.

Double deal: On having two homes

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There’s something I should reveal about expats in Dubai: we lead double lives.

Most of the year is spent in our adopted country, the place where we’ve made good friends, the kids go to school and we work, have pets and own a 4by4. And you can feel perfectly happy and settled there, until July – when you realise you could probably fry an egg on your car so off you go on your long summer sojourn to your other home.

During this time in the motherland, I’m always reminded just how much I love seeing family and old friends, how much I enjoy cooler air, greenery, more effective customer service, and people who understand what I’m saying.

There’s an initial period of adjustment, of course. A kind of reverse culture shock, where you have to get used to looking the other way to cross the road, taking a brolly ‘just in case’, knowing only two people in your childhood town and feeling a bit disconnected. But once you’ve settled in, your old life fits like a glove (helped along by the fact you’re there in summer not winter and everyone’s happy to see you after so long).

This means that, however much you enjoy the country you’ve moved to and also call ‘home’, returning to it after an extended holiday always evokes mixed emotions. As the plane takes off, you look forward to getting back to your own space, re-instating old (and easier) routines and no longer living out of a suitcase.

But there’s also sadness at leaving and guilt, too, because you’re taking the kids away from loving grandparents and extended family. You know you’ll miss family get-togethers and that Facebook doesn’t make up for not being there in person when things happen at home.

The exhilaration and impossibleness of cramming a year’s worth of socialising into one or two evenings with your oldest and dearest friends also leaves you wanting more.

Unless you’re a frequent flyer who jet sets regularly from one home to another, transitioning from one country to the other is never as easy as you think it should be.

Dubai International Airport: The first clue that everything's super-sized

Landing in Dubai after a prolonged stay away is also the only time you see the city through a tourist’s eye. The cavernous, marble-floored airport, with its elevators the size of my first flat, wall of water and endless shopping. The heat and humidity that hit you as you step outside. The crazy drivers on the six-lane highways and, outside our compound, the sandy dunes that stretch for as far as the eye can see, punctuated by desert shrubs and the odd tree.

Seeing camels by the roadside is a novelty again – as is coming across a bus shelter that looks like this:

Comfort zone: One of the city's air-conditioned, enclosed bus shelters, although if the air-con doesn't work they tend to turn into roadside ovens

The contrast between the two countries couldn’t be greater and it takes a few days to reacclimatise – to get back in the saddle. But soon it should cool down, and with some precious memories from the summer and the kids back to school today after the epic 11-week holiday, it feels good to be home with DH.