Observations-part two

I imagine my ‘observation’ posts will be on going as I see, learn, pick up and observe things I find interesting in the United Arab Emirates.

-Something I find fairly maddening…there are no addresses. Truly. Most things are identified or described by landmark. For example, when embarking on an adventure to Satwa the other day, I asked a friend where I should go to find the best goodies. In the states, I would anticipate getting the name of a store, googling said store and plugging the address into my phone or GPS device. Not so here in the Mid-East. You get an answer like this… “When you get to Satwa Road, go about half way down, you’ll see a gas station and a mosque and the stores will be on your right hand side.” Or in trying to find the café to meet some friends for lunch. “It’s on the street behind the World Trade Center shopping area, right next to this great little German toy store” So…instead of plugging in the name of the restaurant into my GPS (because the odds of the actual café being in there are about 1 in 5 million) I plug in World Trade Center Shopping Center and then circle around until I find the café. The address of our hotel where we are living now is, "Gloria Hotel, Sheikh Zayed Road, Dubai Media City”, so you’d either need to know where the Gloria Hotel is along Sheikh Zayed Road (a huge 6 lane highway that stretches for probably 30 miles) or where Dubai Media City (an area of Dubai…) is and drive around and ask someone until you get there. It’s enough to drive an American straight out of their mind. Particularly one who was raised on Brigham Young’s perfect, square blocks.

-Don’t even think about pumping your own gas. Pull up to the station, tell the little guy what grade you want and how full you want it and stay in your air conditioned car. Then pay them $25 for a full tank. Brrrrillliant! They will actually snap at you if you try to do it yourself. As I sit there in my cool car I worry about them standing out there all day breathing in all those fumes and I also try do the math on how much money these Arabs are making on oil…it’s a wonder why they have the largest piece of plexi-glass ever in the world.

-There is a huge lack of green space. Parks and playgrounds are few and far between. I have been to two great, large parks. But there aren’t little neighborhood parks like there are in CA dotting the city. And the large one’s I’ve been to, they charge you to enter. It’s a small fee, about $2 a person, but it seems unjust to charge people to use their community park. Of course, I don’t know the tax system here…I guess we pay to use the parks in the States too, just in a different form.

-It’s a cash system here. I use my card now and again, but I’ve observed people deal predominately in cash and store clerks and taxi drivers expect you to have small bills. They ALWAYS ask if I have a smaller dirham note.

-School is serious business. People start putting their two year olds in nursery school and by the time they’re 4, they are going full blown, full time. 7:30-2:30, 5 days a week. There are also 7 year waiting lists for some of the large international schools. Which means you have to put your unborn child on a school waiting list before you’re even close to thinking about conceiving. Tessa will go full time once we hit the ground in Saudi. I have worried and commiserated about this, thinking that will be way to much for her, but I am finding that this is the way of life for pretty much everywhere in the developed world EXCEPT for America…The British and Asian friends I have met here don’t seem to bat an eye. Perhaps this is why American kids test so far below their friends across the pond…Granted this relates in large part to people who can afford to put their kids in private and international schools. The public system may be entirely different.

-And I thought Orange County was the mecca of gated communities. I have yet to see A home, A community, A neighborhood WITHOUT a gate. These guys like their privacy. Every home, every villa, has a wall and a gate surrounding it. Often times the gates are very fancy and ornate, very Middle Eastern in design or what I might refer to as ‘bordering on gaudy.’ A gate it appears, is as much a status symbol as the home behind it. I frankly find this a bit if a bummer. How does one get to know their neighbor or feel comfortable borrowing a cup of sugar when you have to cross the iron rod extravaganza.

-It’s dusty. It took me about a month to realize that the cloudy, smoggy mornings were neither smog, nor clouds. It was dust. There is usually a dusty haze every morning and it lingers until well into the afternoon. After a day or two, our car is covered in a fine sheet of dust and you can tell when a car has been parked for a week or so. It looks like it has been four wheeling. I wonder on the daily what is worse to be breathing in all the time, smog or dust. Our deck gets dusty after a day or two as well. But it gets wiped down by our sweet cleaning crew here at the hotel a few times a week, which brings me to my next point…

-Labor is shamefully inexpensive. It’s enough to make you feel like a terrible human being. Or to make you cry, like I did last week at dinner. We were ordering our food, being waited on by a sweet, darling Phillipino lady. (Phillipino’s, Bandgladeshi’s, and Africans make up a huge part of the service force) She was so nice to our children and kept wanting to talk to Tessa. She asked her name, how old she was, what her favorite color was etc. She then said, I have a baby too. When we asked her about her baby, she let us know that her baby was also 4 years old and lived in the Phillipines with her mother. Having no support from the father, she left her tiny baby girl at 9 weeks old and came to Dubai to find work. She’ll go back for the FIRST TIME in February. These stories are a dime a dozen. These people come to Dubai and work SO hard and send every penny home. On Thursday’s we will see lines of guys, rail thin, dirty, because they’ve just come off probably a 12 hour construction, landscaping, or refinery crew, at the bank’s wiring their money home. It makes me tear up every time. It puts my ‘we are sacrificing to live abroad’ thoughts in check pretty quick. I try very hard to go out of my way to be kind to them and to express appreciation, as I rarely observe the local population doing the same. I often see Arab women at the grocery store, with no children, walking 6 steps ahead of her ‘nanny/servant’ throwing items into her cart while her help pushes it. It kind of makes my blood boil. At least push your own freaking cart lady. I also make sure I tip my porters here at the hotel, or the guys that wash my car (costs me $7 to detail my car…). I wish I could tell them to use the tip to go buy a hearty meal.

-There are at least as many mosques here as there are LDS churches in Salt Lake City. They are everywhere and you can the minarets popping up in every neighborhood. Several times a day you’ll hear the call to prayer. I have been reminded why I loved that sound so much in Jerusalem. It is beautiful.

-In public places, malls, large grocery stores etc. You often see signs for “Prayer Rooms”. Devout Muslims will pause their shopping during prayer time and then resume once it’s over.

-My blond children still garner an enormous amount of attention. Just the other day at the bakery they got called Barbie and Ken. Made me laugh right out loud.