Women's rights Dubai style

I've been saving this topic since I saw a story in Wednesday's Khaleej Times about new money borrowing rights for female Emirati citizens and polygamous men. 

http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticleNew.asp?section=theuae&xfile=data/theuae/2011/april/theuae_april770.xml

Women Emiratis who are married to foreign nationals can now get access to housing loans meaning they are able to buy their own homes, rather than take their chances in the rental sector like the Sand Warlock and I with the world's most moronic landlord (of which more another day, if I'm feeling a bit ranty).
There are certain parts of Dubai in which only Emirati citizens are permitted to buy homes.  And, as I'm sure you're aware, becoming a citizen is impossible.  Marrying a citizen doesn't entitle you to citizenship and as an Emirati woman who marries a foreign national, your children, yes, you read that your right, your children are not entitled to citizenship.  Residency the children are entitled to, but the many financial and social benefits given to citizens are denied. 

The fact that woman are now allowed to obtain home loans even if they are married to a foreign national is a bit of a step forward. 

However, it's a bit of a case of two steps foward and three steps back in terms of the advancement of women here as at the same time, a decree was announced that men who have more than one wife are entitled to more than one home loan in order to provide equal standard of living for their two, three or four wives.

Whatever your views on polygamy, and I'm assured by guide material here that although it's legal, it is rare, on the surface this seems like a good idea because it allows for the several wives not to all be forced into living in the same house.  They can each have their own home and to an extent, their dignity.

However, the law states that a man who has more than one wife is legally obliged to keep each wife to the same standard.  Ie, there's no question of one wife having a nice house with a big four by four to drive while the other gets left in a dingy flat with a moped.  Polygamy has therefore effectively discouraged, in my relatively ill-informed view, as I would imagine even for the well off Emiratis, it's still relatively hard to buy more than one house, more than one car etc.

This new law has therefore made polygamy easier which in my personal view is not a good thing.  I'm not knocking it for those who are content to practise it and believe in it.  My view of it just happens to be that allowing men to marry more than wife at once and making the ability to do so dependent on a) wealth and b) ability to obtain credit, turns women into a commodity. 

Polygamy is a very tricky subject here.  It must go on as the new decree would have been fairly pointless otherwise but I have yet to see it mentioned in the press.  The National, an Abu Dhabi based paper, published a story on polygamy in Oman highlighting the fact that women there, particularly those with careers and independent means of their own, saw it as a midlife crisis when their husbands took second wives and therefore divorced them.  I can't see anyone describing it in such strong terms here but I can't help but think that there must be women in polygamous marriages here who feel that way.

Everyone else is pontificating, so why can't I?

Here is a bit of fluff I wrote for my chums at the Khaleej Times regarding some do or other that's going on at home:

http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticleNew.asp?section=diversions&xfile=data/diversions/2011/april/diversions_april52.xml

With thanks to my brilliant ex-boss Sally Stevens, editor-in-chief at the Reading Chronicle for the idea.  If you are in the Berkshire area, you may have seen a rather similar story in the Midweek, possibly with a picture of me grinning inanely from a sand dune.

I am sitting in my favourite local cafe watching the whole shooting match on two wide screen TVs tuned to different news channels so there is a rather alarming stereo effect.  I had to forgo the Sherlock Holmes pub unfortunately as I need to count my beans a bit more carefully than that at the moment.

Anyway.  Happy Royal Wedding day everyone.  I hope even those of you who are staunch republicans and think it's one massive huge waste of time and money are enjoying the day off.  Life continues as normal here.  Friday is a non-working day for many anyway so you wouldn't really know it was going on apart from the occasional blast of trumpet voluntaries from people's giant flatscreen TVs through open windows.

I can see that the weather at home is just as miserable as it was for Charles and Camilla's wedding but let's face it, they have had a long and lasting union, have they not? Perhaps it's a good omen.

Toodle pip for now.

1001 blog hits

Well, 1,060 at the time of writing, to be precise.

We have no internet at home for various reasons that I won't bore you with so I am logging in from Dubai Mall.  Hopefully, the technician will be around on Sunday to retrain the hamsters and fill the tank up with camel dung to power up the strange goings on that seem to pass for a broadband internet system here.  After that, we will go and pay our bill into a large white egg using used 100dirham notes and it will all be fine again.

Only parts of that previous paragraph are a joke.

Anyway.

Just to say thanks for reading in the past couple of months and please continue to do so and tell your friends to do so if you like what you've read so far.  1,000 hits is a big milestone for me, even if it's not quite the 22,000 hits in the first hour that Facebook got, as I was repeatedly reminded in an infuriatingly oft-repeated clip of The Social Network that they just kept showing on the TV here, but still, it suggests to me that at least a couple of you are interested in my honking chat.  That's my brother's phrase.  I can't really explain precisely what it means, possibly a combination of pretentious, self-regarding and dim.  The sort of chat that stinks due its wankiness, hence "honking".  You get the general idea.

In other news, I have some work on a quarterly magazine which means I might be a bit less prolific on the blog but perhaps also less annoying to you lot toiling away in the UK than me beefing on about my life of leisure in which I have time to take a worryingly keen interest in matters relating to camels. 

The Sand Witch's global news agency

Here is a story I supplied to the Guardian yesterday:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/apr/26/afghan-christians-deported-despite-death-fears?INTCMP=SRCH

They put someone else's byline on it but that's kind of fine by me for various reasons I won't go into.  It was more for philanthropic purposes than cash and other rewards that I did the story anyway. 

I am told that they were indeed on the flight back to their homeland in the early hours of this morning (UK time) but I haven't had that confirmed. Who knows what fate truly awaits them when they land?  I don't doubt there are some who would take the "people will say anything to avoid being deported" line on this but although I've been well and truly turned over in the past on stories, I don't think I was on this occasion.

As a friend of mine who I told about the story said:  "The world is a terrible place."

The Easter Camel

I completely forgot it was Easter Sunday yesterday morning until the husband came home from the night shift with a chocolate camel.  I'm pretty sure there isn't a sneaky camel of children's folklore who hides eggs for the little scamps to find behind desert roses, palm trees and cacti, but nevertheless, it seems appropriately festive.

The fact that I had forgotten it's Easter isn't exactly surprising in a Muslim country.  Easter eggs are on sale in the shops here but you're not bombarded with advertising for them the way you are in the UK.  The newspapers mentioned Easter a bit but as we don't have a TV at the moment, I can't tell you whether the same goes for TV.  Crucially, people don't automatically get the days off here.  Sunday is a working day because the weekend is Friday and Saturday.  I think non-Muslim companies will often give their workers a long weekend so they get Sunday off but I think most people are back to work today unless they've booked it as holiday.  I imagine when Eid comes around, it'll probably be a different story and we won't be able to get away from it.  They also do Christmas in quite a big way I'm led to believe.  The Sand Warlock tells me that in the run up to Christmas, the shops are full of Arabs in traditional dress buying large amounts of gifts with a look on their faces that seems to say: "What?  I just felt like doing a lot of shopping on December 20th.  Christmas? Christwhat?"

You'll be pleased to know this particular camel is made with camel's milk chocolate.  I have tried camel's milk chocolate.  It doesn't taste all that different from cow's milk chocolate, perhaps slightly sweeter.  The real difference seems to be that it's several times more expensive than cow's milk chocolate which can be said for a lot of things in Dubai.    

If God wills it

I probably don't need to tell those of you who have been on holiday to Egypt or any other Arabic speaking country how frequently you will hear the phrase In sa Allah (pronounced Inshallah) which means, God willing or If God Wills it.

It's pretty catching.  I found myself saying it to a Pakistani taxi driver who was more than usually distracted when I got into a cab on the way to an interview one day.  I got in the back and he was yacking away on his mobile phone and drove the first 100metres at five miles per hour.  When he got off the phone, it turned out that his brother, an engineer, had just been sent to Iran for work and he was worried about him. 

"Don't worry, he will be fine," I said, "In sa Allah". 

"Yes, In sa Allah," he agreed. 

Everyone uses the phrase, not just Muslims.  A Government official used it on the phone to me this morning as I was trying to set up an interview.  "I will speak to my boss and In sa Allah, you will be able to come in and speak to them," he said.

In officialdom, here, things tend to happen very, very slowly so I am sometimes tempted to point out, when someone In sa Allah's me that whether my paperwork is processed is not, in fact, down to the will of God, but whether a progressively long procession of bureaucrats do something at a particular time.  I suppose if you're of a religious persuasion you would counter by pointing out that everything is in fact down to the will of God so I may as well chill out and wait for him to do his glorious work in his own time because it's all part of the wonderful mystery.

Unfortunately, being a hack, I'm not really used to waiting for Him to will it. 

We're alright, Abdul

During my daily trawl through the fug, smut and detritus down the back of the newspapers and internet for scurrilous gossip to flog to newspapers back home, I found this article:

http://www.thenational.ae/news/uae-news/tourism/holidaymakers-switching-to-the-safety-of-the-uae

If you can't be bothered to read it, which would be fair enough, it's about the unrest in the rest of the Middle East being beneficial to the UAE because all the tourists who would be going to Sharm El Sheikh, Tunisia, Libya (that well known tourist destination) and Syria are coming here instead.  Lovely safe, clean, quiet and calm UAE where you're not going to get shot in the head by rebel fighters.  Put in prison for being drunk in public or having sex outside marriage, yes, but not caught up in the cross fire of Government vs people.

The newspapers here aren't against printing the odd good news story directly fed to them from the Government-backed WAM News Agency as after all, it's illegal to criticise the powers that be here.  I just thought this one was a little bit "yes, people are dying on a daily basis while our region implodes around us, but we're ok because we're a happy little island making a bit more cash from the tourist industy thanks to it.  All the senseless killing after years of repression was well worth it because our hotels are full again."

It makes me wonder if the authorities here are a little nervier about similar events occurring here than they would like to let on.  I'm not going to utter my famous last words again on how an uprising will never happen. I suppose in the eyes of the rulers, it's just worth reminding people here of how good they have it compared with elsewhere in the region.   

You can see how they would be keen to promote anything good that happens, even if it as at the expense of those elsewhere, as after all, for a while there wasn't a day that went by when someone in the world's press wasn't expounding on the collapse of the Dubai dream.  That's got to be bad for a morale of an Emirate even if the pages have been ripped out of the magazines and newspapers by self-censoring distributors before the maid picks them up with the rest of the shopping.

It's a mirage

Maybe I'm a bit dim but I didn't realise mirages in the desert were real, well, not real, but not tricks the mind plays but tricks the eye plays when light rays are bent by heat.

We were on a very sandy, dusty, heaty desert road the other day during our Fujairah and Friday Market expedition when we saw what looked like water in the road in the distance.

No, we weren't crawling on our hands and knees through sand dunes after all our camels had gone on strike and the locals had abandoned our foolish journey.  No, that wasn't what was occurring, although if I did have such an adventure to tell you about that would of course have been awesome and cool.

I've looked this up on Wikipaedia so it must be true.  What happens is that when light rays pass through extreme heat (ie the last few metres before they reach a hot tarmac road on an extremely hot day in a hot desert)  they bend and cause the eye to see the light in a different way and what it manifests itself as is that it looks like the light is bouncing off water, rather than a road, so your brain tells you there is water up ahead.

Obviously the closer you get it disappears and it looks just like the road.  And here was me thinking that people just hallucinated water when they were travelling through a desert because it's what they want to see.  Perhaps the hallucinations caused by extreme thirst a la 1,001 epic movies exist as well but it was rather intriguing to experience it as an optical illusion.  Well, it's intriguing for me because I've always been rubbish at seeing those pictures that are all fuzzy patterns but if you look at them in a certain way you see bunnies or a message from God or some such.  I'm far too impatient and always end up chucking them at the wall and proclaiming them to be bollocks and who wants to see them anyway, etc.  So seeing an actual real life but not real life mirage tickled me pink, so it did.

Anyone for polo?

I went to a really marvellous place called the Desert Palm resort, which is, unsuprisingly, out in the desert.  I went there to meet a very interesting lady who may have a writing contract for me, of which more later if I get the job.  She is an ex-foreign correspondent but got a bit less keen on visiting the old trouble spots when she began to have visions of herself on YouTube in an orange boiler suit having her head lopped off by some nutcase from some pro-Al-Qaeda group or other, so she now publishes glossy magazines instead.  She's quite a lady.

But I digress.  This Desert Palm place was reet nice.  We're not exactly short of luxury hotels here but it's a bit different as it's outside the city and is home to four polo fields.  Beautiful terraces looking down on to the field with very posh looking avante-garde furniture and sculpture.  I can just imagine the Sand Warlock and I sitting there sipping a gin and lime wearing crisp white linen and trying to be so ironic that time collapsed in on itself.  There are professional players based there and the focus seems to be on chilling out, watching the polo, maybe learning a bit of horse riding.  The polo has all gone quiet for now as a lot of the players and ponies will be off to the UK for the season.  It is still a lovely place though.  There seems to be a particular skill for lush, green lawns here despite the incredibly dry conditions.  Horribly environmentally unsustainable but very nice to look at which is what matters in the UAE.  I can't see that we'll be staying there any time soon as rooms start at 1,000Dhs a night even in low season but I'm planning to pop back there and sample the restaurant once I actually manage to earn some cash.

There is a theme of surprising places here.  Places that look like nothing from the road can often turn out to be oases of calm green.  Then there are places, like International City, which look crazy from the road and are indeed crazy when you get to them.  I mention this particular place as it's on the way to the Desert Palm and we passed it again today.  It's a huge housing development with complexes named after countries.  I think it was someone's great idea for promoting international harmony, not that you really need to do that here as although the Indian and Pakistani taxi drivers complain about each other, everyone seems to rub along quite nicely together.

The advantage of living there is that the rents are pretty damned cheap compared to what you would pay living in the centre of town like we do.  However, it's a good 20-minute drive into town and that can quadruple during rush hour, and it has a distinct unfinished and may never be finished feel about it that characterises a lot of the newer parts of Dubai where the money from the bad debts didn't quite stretch to landscaping.  We did genuinely think about living there but apparently the traffic getting out to get into Dubai for work in the morning can be a nightmare.  We do know people who live there but they own a huge 4X4 and they simply drive over the sand to avoid the traffic.  That sound like bonkers driving but it's actually pretty conservative compared to some of the sheer lunacy that you see on the roads on an hourly basis. 

There are also some rather troubling rumours that the smell from the nearby sewage farm can be overpowering.  I have to say we've never noticed such a thing in the times that we've been there, but I think it's still enough to put many potential residents off.  The Dubai skyline of huge skyscrapers appearing out of the desert is pretty bonkers but in a way, seeing this enormous housing development by the side of the highway with mock period finishes on many of the buildings seems even crazier.  

Thank God it's the Friday Market

Weirdly, although I'm reading reports of petrol shortages in Dubai, because of fuel prices, one of the cheapest things you can do for fun here is get in your car and drive around a bit so we got in Kevin the Toyota yesterday and headed east.

The Friday Market, near the mineral water producing town of Masafi on the way to the Emirate of Fujairah, has a rather confusing name as it is in fact open seven days a week and some stalls are open 24 hours. 

It's a collection of stalls along the side of the main road that passes through the weird deserty Hajar Mountains.  It's as if they have dumped all the rubble from digging up and concreting Dubai in the desert to form a mountain range.  That isn't what's happened, obviously, it's millions of years of geology but that's what it looks like to someone from a land of grass covered hills rather than sand dunes and peaks.

Stuff on stuff on sale there ranges from plants (we bought jasmine and desert rose), cheap knockoffs of the pure silk Afghan rugs which are very popular here along with other carpets, inflatable beach toys and exotic fruits.  It's a great place to go because it feels a million miles from Dubai and you get a chance to go traditional Arab and barter.  Being British, we probably failed miserably with our embarrassed attempts at haggling but the stuff we bought still seemed super cheap to us.  Apparently if the heat is too much for you, you can park your air conditioned car and imperiously beckon the traders over to serve you through your car window but we're not quite at that stage yet. 

We also stopped for a mutton biryani at a roadside restaurant there which cost us a mere 10Dhs each, ie, less than £4 for both of us.  That was more than 24 hours ago and we're still alive to tell the tale so it must have been ok. 

We carried on through Fujairah town and headed to the Mangrove swamp and coast.  There's still a community of fishermen operating there driving up and down in very battered trucks to find the best places to cast their nets.

There's none of that health and safety business here so if we wanted we could have driven for miles along the beach, however, we didn't fancy sinking in and getting stuck in the sand.  "I suppose if we rang the breakdown people to tell them what we'd done and where we were, they probably would have said 'fine, we'll be there tomorrow' rather than in an hour,"  I said.  "Yes, by which time the fishermen will have sold the car," replied the wise Sand Warlock. I'm so lucky to have him to think of these things.  He is very nice natured and optimistic most of the time and it's usually me that is the doom merchant.  But just sometimes, he is so much better at the forseeing of potential disasters. 

Paris to Dubai by private jet

The good people at 365 things to do in Dubai tell me that Paris Hilton's BFF Dubai is at last to be shown here.  It was filmed in 2008 but legal problems prevented it being aired before now, they tell the breathless public.

One reason why I'm glad we're too poor to afford a telly at the moment.

More on the Brit who came a cropper

Because I still consider myself a journalist, even though my activities of the past three months have in fact been more akin to that of a poor version of what they call a Jumeirah Jane here, that is, a lady what lunches, hangs around her house, shouts at the servants and not much else, the responsible thing to do is to update you on the investigation into the death of the unfortunate Mr Brown.  The authorities here have, perhaps not surprisingly, denied claims that he was beaten and tortured to death by Dubai police officers.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/dubai/8457062/Second-post-mortem-into-Dubai-death-of-British-tourist-in-custody.html

You know me, I hate to be cynical, but one can't help but think the hasty denials might have something to do with the fact that if Brits think they may be beaten to death if they get involved in any kind of trouble, it might put them off coming here for those high spending, high boozing hotel holidays that are so good for the Dubai economy.

Anyway, this story will, as they say, run and run, definitely in the Dubai English language press even if the Brit newspapers get bored of it.

getting your darks darker than dark

I was going to call this post "getting your blacks blacker than black" but I was worried you might think I had taken on some of those post-colonial attitudes I have talked about in earlier posts.

It's another amusing cultural difference post I'm afraid but here is a placard advertising laundry liquid I found in the Al Maya supermarket:

Yes, it's an Abaya-clad lady advertising how to keep your Abayas a really nice, deep, jet black, lest they should fade to charcoal grey with repeated washings.  Not that I bother buying different laundry liquids for different types of laundry, but I seem to remember you can buy stuff especially for black clothes in the UK that features a glamourous strappy, velvety-looking dress on the bottle. 

I fluctuate in how I feel about women wearing this all encompassing garment on a regular basis.  In some ways it doesn't feel as restrictive as it would if I saw it in the UK because the men wear a nearly as all-encompassing garment in the form of white Dishdashas (basically an ankle length shirt that looks like a night shirt) with a scarf on their head known as a Smagh.  I've already talked about how the young Emirati women particularly go out of their way to look glamourous with designer heels, immaculate makeup and fiercely styled hair, which in some ways makes it feel both more and less repressive. 

However, I  have noticed a lot more what we in the West call Burkhas when they're actually Niqabs recently.  I can't decide whether I'm noticing them more since they were banned in France on April 11, which was obviously big news over here, and this is because more women are showing solidarity with women in France by wearing them more, or whether I am just looking out for them for this reason. 

We were at an Indian restaurant down near Mall of the Emirates recently and a young married couple rocked up and sat behind us.  I noticed he was in jeans and a checked shirt while she was wearing trousers with an abaya and head scarf over the top of her outfit.  I spotted that she had the words FIRST LADY picked out on diamante around the hem, which amused me a little, but I also spotted when her robes fell away to reveal her trousers, her husband picked them up and wrapped them around her legs again. 

I think with my Western attitudes, I'd probably say: "Screw you, if you're wearing Western dress, so am I" and dump the pesky garment in the bin.  But the sense I get from reading interviews with Emirati women here is that many couldn't fathom being seen in public without it, while rumours abound that at the same time some feel free to go out without it so they can pass as a non-Muslim, drink in the hotels and do all the western-style stuff they could ever want. 

It is indeed a strange society.  We were discussing this morning what would make us leave the Emirates in terms of our rights.  I certainly wouldn't be happy living in a society in which it is compulsory for women to wear headscarves and abayas, and definitely not niqabs or burkhas.  Abayas aren't compulsory here, it's just the done thing.  I just about cope with covering my knees and shoulders in the shopping malls (that applies to men too, but there are plenty of people who disobey it without problems).  If there was any nonsense about women getting permission from their husbands to leave the country, as with Saudi Arabia, I'd definitely want out.    

Gift ideas for the man in your life

The Sand Warlock's birthday is coming up soon and I have already been on the look out for potential gift ideas for him.  He can be a bit of a bugger to buy for.  I remember one particularly trying year when I kept asking him for ideas and he kept saying "speaker cable". 

Although there are all kinds of weird and wonderful things to buy in Dubai, the shopping capital of the world, I think it's safe to say I won't be getting him either of these:

The natural viagra was advertised at the Spice Souk in Deira.  I have to say despite its "natural" status, I wouldn't be tempted to get the Sand Warlock to try it.  I think I'd rather take my chances with pharmaceuticals should it ever come to that than try whatever ground up camel hoof concoction was contained therein.  The Sex Appeal aftershave was on sale in Waitrose, no less.  My beloved tells me that it is not a funny foreign quirk and he may have seen it on sale in the UK.  Maybe he's been secretly wearing it and that's how he convinced me to marry him, damnit! Theie secret special blend of herbs and spices worked after all.  I must write to them and tell them.

Seriously, though, it's a bold claim to make for an aftershave, though, isn't it?  I mean, I know that's basically what they're all meant to to do, give you sex appeal, but to go and ahead and claim on the label that "this stuff will make you sexy even if you weren't born that way" seems a little like the aftershave equivalent of donning a shirt unbuttoned to the waist and a gold medallion.  It also claims "men can never have enough" which implies that the poor darlings should douse themselves from head to foot in it while simultaneously somewhat sleazily implying that men can never have enough women.  I think I need to violently disagree with the makers on the first meaning as there certainly is such a thing as enough and indeed too much aftershave, as 14-year-old boys across the world soon learn.  I'm not even going to begin to get into analogies about me being more than enough woman for the Sand Warlock... 

Brit comes a cropper in Dubai

It's been an interesting news week here in Dubai.  This blog is really meant to be a light hearted account of our lives here with the occasional rant about the every day frustrations but I felt I couldn't really post quirky pictures of mundane Emirati happenings when this is going on:

http://www.7days.ae/storydetails.php?id=104389&page=localnews&title=Mystery over tourist death in jail

It's been covered in a little more detail in the British press and a colleague UK side has been implying that there is probably a lot more to come on it. 

I think it's fair to say, without wishing to dance on this unfortunate man's grave in the manner of some hideous right wing columnist, that this is an extreme example of why it's a very bad idea get on the wrong side of the Dubai Police. 

Also in the news this week has been a Bangladeshi maid who took revenge on her employer, who she has accused of sexual assault, by cutting off his manhood.  The police's quoted response to it has been somewhat extraordinary.  They are both anonymous so we already know that she has accused him of raping her twice prior to the final incident when she allegedly played along with his demands before attacking him with a razor on Monday.

He has already been charged in connection with her allegations and she has been charged with "causing a disability", but what's been extraordinary are the police's immediate allegations that this man had made another woman (not his wife) pregnant prior to the incident and referring to their campaign last year in which they told people with maids that they are "human beings and should be treated that way".   They've come down squarely on the side of the maid it would appear, just days after the incident happened.   This comes from not having to worry about prejudicing the outcomes of criminal trials because there are no juries here.  Everyone is tried by judges and even judges in the UK say they are capable of ignoring speculation in the press in favour of the evidence before them.   It will be interesting to see what happens to both of them. 

mad dogs and Englishwomen

My mission to purchase camel milk yesterday resulted in a somewhat toasty warm hour and a half round trip walk to an Arabian supermarket.  The Sand Warlock had the car for work so I set off on foot to the shop which is near the Rotana Hotel, where we had our dry Valentine's dinner.

Part of it involved walking sandily under a flyover which could not be more different from the M4 flyover in my beloved home London Boroughs of Hounslow/Ealing if it tried:

This picture is taken from underneath it so you can't see the Arabian decorations they've put on the side of it.  It's a pretty yellow colour though with ornate pillars rather than sludge grey with a tramp living under it.  Ah, the M4 tramp.  I wonder how he's doing.  Hopefully he's still shouting at the birds and putting up notices about people who've tried to beat him up.

Unfortunately, the flyover has been built right next to the Rotana Hotel which I can't imagine thrilled the owners as some of the guests must have cars whizzing past a few feet from their luxury hotel room windows.  It's that lack of accountability thing again.  If the Government wants to build a flyover metres from a luxury hotel, they damn well do it, whether or not it's going to decimate whatever business the hotel may have had.  On the other hand, people seem to care a lot less about such things here.

In this pic you can also see a huge building that looks like a massive, elongated, toaster.  That's the Index building where we looked at an apartment but decided against it because, among other reasons, it was really very, very high and the facilities are not and may never be finished.  To the right of it, you may also be able to pick out what looks like not one but two buildings similar to London's gherkin but with what appear to be some form of contraceptive devices attached.   That's the Dubai way, if someone else has done it, we have to do it better - ie twice.  Not sure what the contraceptive devices are about though.

It can be an odd experience going for a walk here because while there are some wide sweeping pedestrian friendly boulevards with palm trees, there are really quite a lot of 12-lane highways with tiny little pavements that you would be mad to walk along unless you're suicidal.  Hence my decision to retreat under the flyover.  It was hot yesterday despite the fact that we have had some rain and I'll be honest and admit that I did feel a bit of an idiot striding under a flyover sweating profusely and occasionally stopping to shake the sand out of my sandals as people drove past in their air conditioned cars wondering what on earth this lunatic was doing.  The only other people I met on foot were some construction workers who had stopped for a break in the shade of the flyover.  I kept my head high and walked past swiftly so they knew I was a very serious person who was on an important camel milk related mission and on no account were they to call mental health services.  

It's times like that that, as if the soaring temperatures are not enough, you're really reminded that you're in the desert.  A lot of it is concreted or turfed over but you don't have to go far to be back on the sand. 

milky milky

It's virtually impossible to read any guide material relating to the UAE without being told that this;

was once one of the two staples that the locals once survived on.  This was prior to oil and skyscrapers of course.  The other staple was dates.

I have wanted to try it ever since I came here. It's not for sale at European supermarkets that I've seen but sure enough, it is at the Al Maya supermarket.  The Sand Witch taste test is not yet complete but I will enthrall you with my views before long.

moonlit flit

We're in our new flat now which is lovely and peaceful in a nice Arabian-style (built three years ago) development which is on the first floor, low enough to hear bird song and everything.  I'm
glad to be here as it's our very own place and we can cook when we want, wash clothes when we want, watch what we want on the (non-existent) TV and so on.  I have nothing against high rise developments but I'm one of those people who when standing on a high-rise balcony, always gets that uncomfortable urge to see what would happen should I throw myself off.  I realise that from 13 floors up, the simple answer is death, but the urge remains nontheless.  It didn't really bother me in our flat in London which was five floors up, but here, where super high-rise is everywhere, the urge was worryingly strong. 

During our flat hunt we looked at flats on the 43rd floor of a block.  They were beautiful, all white and what I imagine Steve Jobs from Apple's home would look like.  We rejected them for several reasons, one of which was the lack of outside space (but then, would, if you have vertigo like me, really want to be outside on the 43rd floor?) and the fact that I worried that I would go steadily crazy in a pure white decor. 

Anyhoo, moving house was demonstrative of facets of UAE/Dubai culture which I shall now bore you with.  A friend of mine who I knew from the UK also moved home a couple of weeks ago and told us that she was in the lobby of her block with all her possessions waiting for the movers when her building's security informed her they wouldn't let her leave unless she provided a letter from her landlord confirming she was moving out.  I can only assume that this is because of a combination of two factors.  First, the Dubai passionate love affair with officialdom.  Stamping forms and copies of documents that they don't actually bother reading the contents of and stapling copies of your passport, photos and visa to them is an obsession here.  It is like catnip to them.  They love it and go into some form of trance while they do it and they seem to have to do it for everything, getting a mobile phone, getting your electricity and water connected, getting a liquor licence, driving licence, and so on.  Second, perhaps it's a relic of the time of the financial crash when a lot of previously prosperous ex-pats lost their jobs and found they could not afford their hugely over-inflated mortgages, rent and car payments and quickly got on planes home leaving their debts behind them on a gold encrusted, brunch munching cloud.

I snorted with laughter at the idea that the security at our old block would do anything other than vaguely look up from whatever international call home they were making when we trotted past with our luggage.  But oh, how wrong I was.  There is an overlap between the tenancies on this place and our own place, so we casually moved our stuff out over a period of days going back and forth with the two big two suitcases we bought to transport our stuff with the UK.

Not once did they bat an eyelid until the Sand Warlock appeared in the hallway with two moving men and furniture, including a bed frame, mattress, dining table and chairs, coffee table and desk (the sum total of furniture we own at the moment). 

The receptionist that we have fondly referred to as monobrow asked the Warlock if we were moving out.  "Why yes," he replied, "either that or I am going on some form of holiday which requires the customer to take along their own furniture which doesn't sound like much of a holiday to me." 

Not, one, not two, not three but four security guards did she summon to make sure the Warlock didn't pick up his double bed and struggle off speedily into the glaring sun with it before she could involve him in some officialdom.  Without actually bothering to ask which of the 130 flats in the building he had been living in, she demanded his mobile number and a copy of his new tenancy agreement.

I got a bit pissy about this, as many of you know I can do on occasion, saying:  "What's the point in that?  It's none of their business where we're moving to and we've paid the rent and all she has to do is ring the landord to confirm this but she doesn't even know which flat we are in and does she really think if we were planning to leg it without paying the rent we would do it by the front door in full view of security carrying all our luggage and furniture?" 

The Sand Warlock summoned the oft-repeated phrase: "It's just Dubai" to soothe my shattered nerves which had been somewhat frayed by moving our possessions in 39 degree heat in a car that had been left out all day in aforesaid 39 degree heat. 

I was tempted, being somewhat bloody minded, to not bother going back with said tenancy agreement just to see if they would actually bother do anything if you failed to provide yet another time wasting piece of paper to be stamped, ticked off and filed in the bin.  But, misunderstandings about intentions can occasionally land you in jail in Dubai so it's not really worth the risk of not handing in your piece of paper.

So here we are, contented in our new home which has a small, windowless spare room for visitors should any of you have the urge to drop by.  We can't afford any more furniture at the moment because paying a 5,000AED deposit and nearly as much in commission to the estate agent (yes, it is the tenant that pays that here, joy of joys) has pretty much cleaned us out.  So you would be wise to wait a few months and then until October when the worst of the summer heat will be over.

cruisin' in my (massively over the top, shiny, 4X4) whip

Cars are a pretty big deal here.  The rule seems to be the bigger the better.  I think during the boom times high-powered sports cars were the order of the day but now it's 4X4s.  They're everywhere. Toyota Landcruisers seem to be one of the most popular but the Mercedes G Class is pretty common too, probably because Sheikh Mohammed drives one, and so although they look like boxy, old fashioned Land Rovers, they're a symbol of money and power.

It's hot enough here now that all but the shortest walks are pretty much out of the question unless you are happy to arrive at your destination dripping with sweat.  Here people are reconciled to it and just get into their air conditioned cars for even the shortest of trips, but what made us giggle a week or so ago was this brilliantly teenage use of vehicles.

We were at Jumeirah Open Beach, one of the few that you don't have to pay to get to, where there is a large expanse of concrete covered in gravel and sand for parking before you reach the sea shore.  We had just returned to our car, probably about six o'clock, when we noticed a parade of four wheel drive vehicles seemed to be queuing up to drive slowly up and down the car park in a diagonal line from the road.  We got closer and realised that a lot of the cars had teenage boys or men in their early 20s leaning out of the windows chatting to someone in the car opposite them in this slow, car park parade.

This, we realised, must be what the young, cool dudes of Dubai do of an evening.  Obviously going to the local park and necking a bottle of cider and simultaneously ignoring and staring at teenage girls is out of the question as they're not meant to drink or have pre-marital sex, so that's the twin obsessions of the average teenage boy out of the window.  So they get into their cars and drive around and lean out of the window chatting to whomsoever they meet.  You don't go and hang around somewhere on foot of course, even though it wasn't too yet too hot to do so at that point.  Such is the love affair with the car here that it's not just something for getting you from A to B, it's a part of you.

And they do it because they can.  Petrol is cheap enough here (it cost us £14 to fill up our car recently) and huge cars are affordable to young people.  While that remains the case, I can't see them taking the Metro or the bus to hang around on park benches any time soon. 

I've got the hump

This is my favourite picture from my visit to Dubai Camel Hospital on Wednesday.  Hopefully the story will be going into the Khaleej Times later this month but if not, I'll be fascinating you with the info at some point on this blog no doubt.  But for now, here's a poorly but friendly camel.

Maid in Dubai

I briefly mentioned the debate surrounding the treatment of live in maids in Dubai which has been popping up in the English language press here in my last post.

http://www.7days.ae/storydetails.php?id=103559&page=localnews&title=Maids driven to seek home help

This story reveals that maids are in the unique position, along with other domestic staff, that their rights are not protected by the Ministry of Labour.  I've already mentioned the low salaries that these women are paid but the fact that they undertake the work knowing they effectively have no rights speaks volumes about the lack of prospects they have left behind in their home countries.

It's difficult for a bedwetting pinko leftie such as myself to reconcile myself to the fact that we are effectively in a rigid class system here which a lot of ex-pats willingly buy into and in some cases, seem to rather enjoy.  It started off with my inability to call these migrant workers maids at first as it made me feel like I was in some kind of costume drama.

At this flat, where there are three fully grown adults with no kids, one of whom (me) has a lot of time on her hands, we have a maid who comes in for three hours a week to clean and do the ironing.  The flatmate did (jokingly, I think) suggest that we sack the maid when I arrived as I would have plenty of time to do the housework being unemployed, but that went down like a lead balloon.

I have concluded that the longer you are here, the more you buy into the concept of having "servants" who are there to do your bidding, and do it they must to a high standard because for them what they're being paid is a lot of money even if it is peanuts to you.

There was a particularly embarrassing story of maid mistreatment here last month when a maid ran away and called a newspaper saying she had worked from 5am til 1am every day with no time off and was not allowed to leave the house.  Instead of wearing her own clothes she was made to wear a pink pyjama-style uniform. 

Her Emirati employer had the rather extraordinary attitude that letting maids out of the house only caused problems as they would "get themselves pregnant" and then "make trouble by saying it was the man of the house".
"Anyway, where would she go? She has no friends here, she said.

I say it was embarrassing due to the lack of remorse or compassion towards her employee.  There was simply no comprehension that this woman, like any other human being, would need the occasional day off or social interaction to make her life bearable.  Because she was perceived to be of lower social standing, her wellbeing and happiness simply did not factor in her employer's assessment of the situation.

Press reports here are a rather different thing to what we're used to in the UK, as there is not much clarity on defamation laws, so people who have been caught behaving badly are often given anonymity so the newspaper can avoid being sued.  This may make them more willing to say what they're really thinking, hence this woman's brazen admission of the way she treats her maid.     

Letter writers to national newspapers can also hide behind pseudonyms such as "Fat Abdul" or "Annoyed of Dubai" which they would never be permitted to use in the UK, so they often express extremely unpalatable views.  Responding to a story about a maid who was beaten by her employers, one person said: "Feel sorry for the sponsors too, we paid for our maid's visa and agency fee and she ran away" as if losing a few thousand dirhams was as bad as being subjected to regular beatings.

The maid question is an interesting one for the newly arrived ex-pat.  We won't be able to afford someone a few hours a week when we move flats let alone even think about having a live in maid.  I am not sure, were I in a position to do, so I would be that keen on having a live in maid anyway.  The idea of having a person there being paid to do my every bidding is something alien to me and I am kind of hoping that it will stay that way, however long we stay here.

don't be such a racist

If like me, you have a lot of time on your hands, you start to notice that Dubai's work force tends to run along racial lines.

Government jobs tend to be given to Emiratis.  Government jobs can mean anything from working on the Post Office counter, taking the money at the Dubai Museum, to customer services in the bank.  It's one of the few times that you come into contact with an actual Emirati - Dish Dasha clad men and Abaya clad women. 

Apart from that, you see them walking in clans in the shopping malls.  The abaya-clad women walk arm in arm with their husbands. The younger women often wear super expensive designer clothes so you can see their Laboutins poking out from under their robes and they have this elegant and proud way of walking with their shoulders back and with one foot placed dead in front of the other.  I think perhaps they have to take deportment classes so they can move freely in such a lot of material.   They are often beautifully made up with amazingly sharply styled hair - maybe slightly bouffant at the front and hairsprayed within an inch of their lives.  They sometimes push the hijab part of their robes far back to allow the maximum amount of coiffure to be on show while still observing the tradition. 

The armies of workers who swarm over the high rise building projects like overall-clad ants tend to be very slightly built Indian men.  Very slightly built, methinks, because of the long hours of manual labour in ferocious heat. 

Anything customer service based such as serving in sandwich shops, bars, supermarket checkouts, tends to go to Filipinos or Filipinas probably because they are super smiley and polite.
"Hi sir!" "Hi Ma'am!" they say.  Or, "Hi sir-ma'am!" if you take him indoors along to the supermarket.  I have yet to meet an uncheery person from the Philippines. 

Maids, who are making the headlines a lot in the English language press here, are also often Filipinas and sometimes Indonesian.  They're making the headlines because of concerns that they're being mistreated, but that's a whole other blog post.  Suffice to say, families who hire live-in maids will often pay more than 2,000 AED per month to an agency of which the maid herself receives 700 AED, which is not much more than £110.  Per month.  OK, she gets a place to live and food provided, but that's not a lot of spending money.  No wonder they need the politest friendliest race on earth to do the job.  No one else would put up with it.

Taxi drivers are predominantly from Pakistan, although I have also met an awesome Sudanese taxi driver and a few from Bangladesh.  The working conditions of taxi drivers suck some serious arse.  They work seven days per week, 12 hours per day, for a year, then they get given a month off.  Quite often you will be in a cab and they will not stop talking.  Presumably because they are trying to keep themselves awake.  Their driving is pretty damned terrifying, but when you take into account the fact that their saloon cars are competing with the death wish Emiratis in their ginormous 4 X 4s, you can't really blame them. 

Anything a bit middle class tends to go to whites or Europeans, or perhaps the Japanese or sometimes the burgeoning Chinese and Indian middle classes.  Banking is very European and American heavy.  Food buyers, according to the Sand Warlock, tend to be french.   That's why in the western-orientated supermarkets, you see a lot of french cheeses and meats at the deli departments but not a lot else.  Us Brits know that the french believe their food and their food alone is the food worth eating.

As for newspapers, there's a bit of a racial divide there too.  Each newspaper tends to have at least one Arabic speaking reporter, if not an Emirati, because all court proceedings here take place in Arabic with no translators and that's obviously a big part of the news agenda here - foreigners getting themselves in the cacky poo poo in the criminal courts.

At 7Days, a very Brit-orientated newspaper, a large proportion of the staff are British and there's a British editor.  Khaleej Times is a very Indian-focused paper and it therefore follows that there is an Indian editor and a large proportion of the staff are Indian. 

I am not sure whether recruiters here go out of their way to hire specific nationalities to fill specific posts, although it would certainly appear that way.  Without wishing to state the bleedin' obvious, there is no European Court of Human rights here so employers are perfectly free to discriminate on racial grounds if they want.  If they want to hire someone from the Philippines because they think they are good at customer service, they are perfectly free to do so.  Likewise, if they want to hire solely Pakistanis to staff their taxi firm, they can do so. 

That nasty A A Gill claimed that Emirati youths had taken to beating up foreigners here:

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/04/dubai-201104

If that is the case, there's certainly been no reports of it in the press, although, as several papers have affiliations with the Government, if it is true, it may not be surprising that they have kept it on the down low.