The Dubai Letters: 1. Arriving
Dubai & Sharjah, United Arab Emirates -- September/October 2006

or 'Ramadantastic'

Let me get this out of my system:

Dubai is hot.

Really hot.

Really really fucking hot, and it's only September.

Right. I'll try to not bring it up again.

I have moved to Dubai for two years. An opportunity arose and, having spent four years in the Concrete Kingdom of Swindon, I decided it was time for a change. I am moving within the company, so I will be doing the same sort of work as before; it does, however, mean I shall have to learn Arabic if I am to successfully shout at my computer.

Leaving Swindon is harder than I had expected. For months I had looked forward to it, but when the day arrives I am saddened. The people make the place, and it is a mark of my stupidity that it took me four years to fully appreciate this. I have made some good friends, more than I think I deserve. Almost forty people attend my leaving do, and I am humbled and immensely grateful; even if it does feel as though half of them are only there to make sure I leave.

I will admit to experiencing a small moment of doubt.

I have no regrets though. The time for a change had come, and if I did not take the opportunity now I never would. Besides, my friends won't stop being my friends just because I have stopped being their neighbour.

I have decided to write these letters even though I am not technically travelling. I might not be on holiday, but I am still discovering new places and being confused by new customs, so I figured a continuation of my travelogs was appropriate.

If any further argument was needed, it appears that my Travel Luck^TM is still running strong:

• When I arrive, my employment visa is not ready. Immigration hold on to me for half an hour before they will let me in, but not before confiscating my passport.
• No one from the hotel is waiting to collect me. I figure they probably left because of the delay, so I jump in a taxi.
• The hotel has no reservation for me. I am reminded of my trip to France [link], where 'we have no reservation for Jones' seemed almost to be the catchphrase.

Now understandably, I am pretty pissed off. Everything organised in the U.K. has gone swimmingly, everything organised in the U.A.E. . . . has drowned. I decide not to take it personally when conversations the following week reveal to me that this is fairly standard treatment for a new joiner. In fact, I have gotten off fairly lightly, it appears.

Bur Dubai is the old area of the city south of the creek. Its boundaries seem undefined, but it comprises a number of communities centered around Khalid bin al Waleed Road (known to everyone as Bank Street). Between Bank Street and the creek the buildings are older, covered in desert, every ground floor a barber's shop or rug seller or café.

South of Bank Street, Bur Dubai is characterised by endless hotel apartments and blocks of flats, interspersed with the odd open square of desert where someone has not yet got around to building a hotel. These spots of desert are used as car parks and giant litter trays for the city's few domesticated dogs. Often someone will leave their car in a car park overnight, only to discover the following morning that someone has built a hotel around it. Volleyball pitches are marked on the sand; they play a variation on the game where the ball is thrown over the net. I am not sure what the Arabic name for this game is, but in the U.K. we called it catch. The desert dust turns shoes and turn-ups light tan, enforcing a colour scheme on our feet.

The hotel apartments and blocks of flats are uniformly eight stories high. The enthusiasm for building higher in this community seems to have been leached out by the skyscrapers on Sheikh Zayed Road, unmissable to the south west. Taller buildings are typically real hotels; interupting the eight-storey skyline with neon signs and strings of lights, gatherings of satellite dishes

At ground level skinny cats mewl pathetically, sagging whores swagger unprovocatively, and jumpsuited labourers lounge through breaks, waiting for the last stretches of desert to be developed.

The nightlife is centred around Bank Street and its junction with Mankhool Road, an area of town made sweaty and stifling with the queues of traffic, engines idling to keep the a/c running. This is where the bars are, the hotels, the restaurants, the cheap, curiously empty shopping centres. As a pedestrian this is where most of my evenings are spent. Phoneboxes are papered with adverts for bedspaces and shared rooms. Service roads are the province of Indian men on bicycles, helmetless ghosts coasting through the dark, crashing into pedestrians. The hoardings that circle construction sites are visible everywhere. The cars are almost all Toyotas or Nissans; every one with a dented bumper or smashed headlight.

A resident visa in the U.A.E. requires a medical check. Any one of a number of contagious diseases -- hepatitis, AIDS -- will get you thrown from the country faster than you can cough. I need a resident visa, so on my third day I am taken up to Sharjah. The building is a colonial leftover, plain walls dotted in Arabic medical signs. Curiously, the sign above the X-Ray room door is the only thing written in English, almost as if the Emiratis are impervious to X-rays and so don't need the warning.

The medical check consists of a blood test and an X-ray. It takes about four hours because I am being checked at the same time as the entire Indian sub-continent. The Indians have no concept of personal space: they sit two to a seat; they queue as if they are trying to set a world record for the most people in a very small waiting room; they hold hands, touch each other constantly. As a mild claustrophobic I am soon close to climbing the walls. The air is thick. There is a guy queuing behind me; he is close enough that I can feel his nose in the center of my back. I'm seconds away from swinging at him.

I soon begin to feel out of place. It isn't just the fact I am the only white man in the building. It is also the fact I am a clear foot taller than each of the 60 people crammed into this bedroom-sized space with me.

It is a similar feeling when I am out in Dubai. My whiteness does not attract much comment -- there are swarms of westerners around -- but my tallness does. I get stared at. People defer to me. In the U.K. my height is not worthy of (much) comment; here, I am the definition of the tall white guy.

At times I feel as if I am about to embark on a quest for the One Ring; albeit in the Bollywood version of The Lord of the Rings.

Ramadan starts one day before I arrive in Dubai. The Muslim holy month defines my first four weeks. The fasting commonly associated with the holiday, I learn, is but a part. It is however, the part that most affects my life: what time I leave the hotel, what I do in public, what I do at work, and so on . . .

The biggest impact is on traffic. It boils down to this: during Ramadan everyone forgets how to drive, and between 1 and 6pm the roads become jammed as people rush to get home in time for Iftar (the breaking of the fast). During Ramadan the entire population of the U.A.E. seemingly lives in Sharjah, north of the creek. Travelling in that direction becomes impossible. From the sheer volume of traffic heading northeast you half expect Sharjah and Deira (the part of Dubai northeast of the creek) to be saturated with cars each evening.

Ramadan also disrupts the workplace. Non-muslims are expected to be sensitive to their fasting colleagues, which means eating in secret, closing the office door everytime you want so much as a biscuit. You begin to feel like a drug addict, sneaking fixes always afraid of being caught. You actually feel guilty when someone enters unexpectedly and catches you eating. 'What? This isn't a sandwich. This is . . . this is my new mobile.'

Bars do not serve alcohol until 7pm, which is only really a problem for the raging alcoholics. As you can imagine, I find it particularly difficult. More of a problem is the restriction on live music; we cross town to visit one bar to discover the band was the only reason anyone attended. Without the band, the place was empty. And closing early.

My birthday passes at the end of the second week. Having a birthday overseas is okay; I am able have a few beers with my new drinking buddies, but I miss my established friends and my family. People you have only known for a week cannot celebrate as well as those you have known for longer, I find. Beer aside, it never really feels as though my birthday happens, especially as I have to wait until Christmas until I get cards or presents.

I am propositioned by my first prostitute outside my hotel. The prospect is not appealing. My habit of smiling when people smile at me, of answering people when they ask me a question, of being pathologically unable to be rude to a complete stranger, these habits continually cause me difficulties. My standard defense -- to lie, blag, or joke my way out of uncomfortable situations -- is robbed of its efficacy by the fact most of these women have only rudimentary English. My first attempt at being smart is met with a confused look and a reply of, 'You are very tall, yes?' I am reduced to running off down the street, a panicked look on my face.

I have been robbed of my weapons.

The worst experience occurs in a bar I am invited to by a couple of strangers. 'We're heading over now, why don't you join us when you've finished your food?' I cannot be rude, so I follow behind.

No sooner am I through the door than I am swarmed on by an army of Russians and Fillipinos in leopard print and bad make up. Everywhere I look my wallet is being smiled at. My wallet is being told that it has pretty eyes. I stammer and stutter, trying to think of a polite way of saying 'not a chance in hell' that they will actually understand. Eventually I am saved as a group of expats in the corner take pity on me and call me over as if an old friend. Of the original expats there is no sign, and I suspect I have been stitched up.

I resolve never to return to this bar. I resolve to pull the same trick on the next new expat I meet.

The thing with bars in Dubai is, in order to attract the drunks, they need a gimmick. Every bar needs a theme. It is not like in the U.K. where a bar is made on its location and its clientelle and whether or not it is actually a nice place to drink. Here in the U.A.E. bars cannot just be bars; they need a clarifying word in front to snare those who are looking for something specific.

Are you looking for an Austrian bar? We can sort you out. Looking for a Malaysian themed bar? We've got just the thing down here. Looking for a bar based on the novels of Charles Dickens? Walk this way, sir.

Since coming here, I have drunk in English bars, British bars, Irish bars, a German bar, an Australian bar, a 'colonial-style' bar, an 'east-end' bar, sports bars, laid-back bars, popular bars, and so on . . . The thing is, because of Ramadan I have not actually been out that much. As far as I can tell, the only bars that can afford not to have gimmicks are those in the more expensive hotels (the establishments along Sheikh Zayed Road, for example). But then, maybe being in an expensive hotel is the gimmick.

A friend from Swindon moved out to Sharjah a couple of weeks before I came out here. I caught up with him a couple of weeks ago. We were able to share stories of getting settled in the Emirates, joke about friends back in the U.K. I'm not looking to recreate Swindon in the desert -- that's been done in Doha -- but it has been handy having someone out here I knew from before. Even if it is someone to just get drunk and complain about the heat with.

Damn. And to think I almost made it without mentioning the temperature.