The Dubai Letters: 5. Socialising
Dubai, United Arab Emirates -- February 2007

I'll turn the air conditioning on, and someone else will turn it off. Goes on all day. It's like Tom and Jerry.

Work colleague

As we grow older, making friends becomes more difficult. Wherever you move, whatever situation you put yourself in, you enter established systems, and the people you meet may not have the same needs as you. Certainly, as you get older your own need decreases. You have your wife or husband, your children, your established friends, and the need to add new people to these groups is less pressing.

Moving overseas struck me very much like moving to university for the first time. There was that sense that everyone was away from home, having left behind those established systems. Most people are in a similar situation to yourself, alone and looking for someone to catch a beer with.

I imagine for the people that moved over here with a partner it is different, but for the single person you suddenly find yourself having to make a group of entirely new friends, in a way that you have not had to do since you first left your parents' home.

My circle here at work -- what one of the Sharjah girls calls my posse -- is reasonably well established now that I approach half a year in the desert. I was lucky enough to know a couple of people here from my time in the Concrete Kingdom of Swindon, so when I arrive I am able to base this circle around them. My friends are mostly people from the Dubai office, although there are now a few outsiders.

In a short time I find myself in a similar role that I occupied back home. I become the guy making the plans and phoning people; I often find myself leading the charge into unknown quarters of Dubai. Years ago I would have resented this role, as I worry that I am have no aptitude for social organisation, but recently I have come to accept it. I will carry on until someone comes to take over the role. We do what we do.

Once I move into my flat, I start looking for a Local; a pub that I could frequent regularly, that met as many of my criteria as possible^[1]. I briefly consider choosing my housemate's local -- a branch of the American chain Henry J Beans -- but it was a taxi journey away, and one of my criteria was that it would be walkable.

I search Bur Dubai, selflessly drinking countless pints of lager in my quest.

I reject sports bar Goodfellas because even though it has dozens of screens on which to watch sport, it hates rugby.

I reject the Irish bar Waxy O' Connors because it turns into a meat market on weekends, and I need somewhere to enjoy a quiet pint.

I reject The Old Vic, physically closest to my flat, because it feels like a working men's club. I drink with some of the regulars, who are welcoming but older than me by ten years and more. Whilst the food is generally good, I never really feel at home there.

In the end my selection of Local is practically subconcious. I suggest on one night that my posse meet up in The Viceroy, a colonial-style bar on Bank Street, more for the convenience of being able to get food before we started drinking than for anything else. It becomes the standard meeting place for those of us living in Bur Dubai, and before I realise it we patronise the bar two or three times a week. My suggestion that we gather elsewhere is met with scorn, or offence, and I soon come to accept that Dubai has chosen a Local for me.

The bar is in a square room on the mezzinine floor of the Four Points Sheraton hotel. Dark and crowded with tables and comfortable leather sofas, with tevelision screens showing foreign football in every corner. The beer is cheap. The food is good, with a separate Sin Menu containing pork dishes. The waitresses recognise me.

My ginger work colleague invites me to dinner with him and his wife. We go to an Indian restaurant called Gazebo. It is not somewhere I would normally have chosen to dine. It is unlicensed, for one thing. For another, it is away from my usual lurking grounds, on the wrong side of Mankhool Road.

That said, the food is fantastic, and my colleague assures me that everything they have tried from the comprehensive menu is of equal quality. Despite its outward appearances, the interior is smart and polished, the staff friendly. The food is cheap, with main courses floating around the 30 dirhams mark.

Mid-month, I am invited to the South African Weekender, a small music festival featuring some of South Africa's biggest names: Watershed, Johnny Clegg, and Just Jinjer.

(Do not worry if you did not recognise any of those names. Even some of the Saffers I spoke to could not tell me who these acts were.)

The day is a music festival with the usual Dubai sheen; wrist-bands, clean toilet facilities, and a couple of bars selling small yet expensive cans of beer^[2]. The bands are good. Johnny Clegg talks about God and educates us about the four types of women^[3]. We spend the day shouting 'Ja!' at the stage, much to the annoyance of the genuine Saffers in the audience.

The only disappointment of the day is culinary in nature. What is served is not, we suspect, traditional South African food. Chips and an unidentifiable meat on kebab sticks. Cold chips, greasy meat. Shortly after we eat they run out. We despair that they could so badly mess up the catering. If they had just organised a braai -- A South African barbecue -- and grilled some meat, everyone, except maybe the vegetarians, would have gone home happy. In comparison, the cold chips disappoint.

Amazingly, the following week a letter appears in Time Out Dubai praising the food. We scratch our heads, hoping that the letter was written sarcastically.

My social circle consists mainly of people from the Dubai office, but there is an equivalent circle in the Sharjah office. Due to the proximity of Sharjah, and the fact that a lot of the western staff live in Dubai, the circles occassionally overlap. They like to come across as social and outgoing, but I like to think that they are as disfunctional and boring as us in Dubai.

The friend that visited in December introduced us to a former university friend of his, who we subsequently adopt into the group. Despite being an accountant, he is okay. He is thankful to us for finally getting him past the racist doormen at some of Dubai's less salubrious venues.

I meet random strangers in the bars and clubs, and after almost half a year I have a motley collection of names in my phone. Surprisingly, a large proportion of them are women, which goes to say something about the availability and reliability of alcohol in Dubai. I bump into some of them regularly, others I never see again.

The circus is in town. The Cirque du Soleil, to be precise. I want to go, but I fail to convince any of the posse to go with me. I meet a girl at Rock Bottom's who also wants to see it. I weigh up my options: go with this complete stranger, or do not go at all. A week later we run away to see the circus.

The circus itself is pretty impressive. There is a cynical little part of me that thinks I should lose man points for going -- no one sticks their head inside a lion's mouth, after all -- but the rest of me was eager to go. The strength and agility of some of these performers is simply mind boggling.

The girl I am with keeps mentioning dates. When it dawns on me that she is not talking about fruit, I realise she may think we are on one. But I just wanted to see the circus, I think. I'm not interested. Towards the end of the evening I ask how much the tickets were. She tells me the price, adding 'but I'd settle for dinner.'

At the end of the evening, I give her the money and run. I feel a bit of a bastard, but the fact that she still speaks to me goes to say something for the availability and reliability of alcohol in Dubai.

Back in November, I had not yet found anyone to watch rugby with, so when the autumn internationals arrive I venture to Goodfellas on my own to catch the games.

Remember earlier when I said that Goodfellas hated rugby? Allow me to elaborate.

The matches are being shown on Saturday evenings, directly in conflict with Premiership matches (it being afternoon back in the U.K.). In the first week I discover that they have commentary for the football in the bar, and commentary for the rugby in the restaurant. In the bar they will not turn the football sound off, even when they are only showing half-time adverts for hotels in Doha, or pre-match speculation and post-match analysis. In order to listen to the rugby, you have to book a table in the restaurant.

On the second week I decide to get a table. The manager is initially reluctant to let me in -- I am on my own after all -- but I win him round by promising I will order food, and insinuating that I will only be stopping for the first game.

Midway into the second match, the waitresses start hovering, asking me if I would mind moving. I have not ordered food yet, but a group of old expats at the next table take pity on me and invite me to join them. They turn out to be engineers in the maritime sector. We eat thick steaks.

The evening ends with my new associates deciding that they want to play pool. We go upstairs to the hooker bar, Rockafellas, where rumour places a pool table or two. Two U.S. squaddies become convinced that my companions are pimps because of the familiar way they are acting around the working girls. I point out that they are in fact two engineers rapidly approaching retirement.

Sometime later the 'pimps' are thrown out of the bar for fighting with a couple of the regulars over who was next on the pool table. I keep my head down and finish my beer. The squaddies go to talk with the working girls.

Four months later, I run late for one of the Sunday matches in the six nations. It takes half an hour to find a taxi that will take me to Rydges Plaza Hotel, an unfamiliar hotel which I am told houses an Australian theme-bar called Aussie Legends. I am assured that they will be showing the rugby in preference to the football.

The match has been running for about 15 minutes when I finally crash into the bar. I have not walked two paces when there is a loud crackle and a bang, and every tevelision in the bar goes dark. The bar is half-full, and every head inside turns to me.

'What did you do that for?' says an old expat at a nearby table.

The glares on every other face make me wonder if the other patrons realise that he is joking, realise that I did not do anything.

Just in case, I duck back outside and re-enter. The screens are still dark. They stay dark -- on the rugby channel only -- for another half an hour, and we end up watching the football anyway.

Two of my friends and colleagues from the U.K. move to the Emirates. The first is a South African girl I have known since joining the company four and a half years ago. She moves to the country for 6 months to help our department with our workload and complain about people thinking she is Indian.

The second is a young graduate from the Swindon Office who managed to make his escape a lot quicker than I did, having only been there for about a year. He soon joins the posse and settles into the working-drinking routine.

The ginger work colleague recommends a Sri Lankan restaurant to me. I have never had Sri Lankan food before but, always willing to be puzzled by new cuisines and laugh at new Engrish^[4], we head into Karama. We find it, a small restaurant off Karama shopping centre. There is a menu -- filled with a lot of dishes that I do not recognise, and some generic curries that I assume would be reasonably safe. There is also a buffet for the amazingly small price of 20 dirhams, and this is what we eventually plump for.

The restaurant is empty except for us and four bored-looking staff. We are seated by the doors, as if to entice other customers in, seated at tables where a poorly photocopied menu lies underneath the glass table top. The buffet is housed under a leaf canopy designed for short sri lankans, and not six-foot-three westerners. I have to duck and dive in order to see dishes that I can only identify by the labels on the front.

My dining partner is the South African girl and she identifies most of those foods that I cannot. The curry is as you would expect, chunky lumps of meat and too much salt. Sri Lankan food is spicier than I typically like, but it is all reasonably good stuff (if sometimes cold).

Shortly after our arrival one of the members of staff puts a DVD on the tevelision. A selection of Sri Lankan pop music issues from the speakers, and I forget my food in my amazement. The videos are surprisingly cheesy, sub-titled with a circular script that looks like repeated variations on the 'at' symbol (@). The title, the only thing in English, proclaims it to be Karaoke Compilation 21. In one memorable, a middle-aged Sri Lankan carpenter does a passable Benny Hill impression, chased around by a multitude of characters (including some attractive young women). It only lacks some speeded up motion, and it would be the finest tribute to the creator of Ernie that I have ever witnessed.

Towards the end of February two friends and I head to Media City to see Roger Waters, the creative genius behind Pink Floyd. The gig is organised with the same ruthless dedication to amateurism that seems to be prevalent amongst Dubai's events organisers: the approach to the gig is badly lit; directions and instructions are non-existent; and the food is poor. Radio adverts advised us in the previous days to take taxis because parking in the vicinity of the venue is limited; however, not enough taxis are laid on at the end of the night, and several thousand people walk the road out of the concert. We walk for 45 minutes before we manage to flag a taxi down.

Luckily, the gig is amazing. He plays approximately two hours of his own songs, interspersed with Floyd classics. The set ends with a near-complete performance of Dark Side of the Moon, complete with fireworks, video, and lightshow. Highlights include: Shine On, You Crazy Diamond^[5]; a new song lambasting George Bush and praising the Lebanese which was very well received by the Arab crowd, but which probably does not go down so well in the States; and the cartoon accompanying the song, which managed to be unintentionally hilarious and incredibly cheesy and pretty damn patronising.

I come to a realisation about social circles, and the nature of my friendships out here. Thinking back to October, I realise that the people I was going out with then are mostly absent from my activities now. A lot of people, even in this short a time, have moved on.

I see that circles here are very dynamic things, always changing, much more so than they had been in the U.K. I feel like I am in a soap opera, full of the unrealistically frequent cast changes and the almost fickle nature of any group's composition. The only way I can tell that I'm not in a soap is that I have been here almost six months and have not yet been to a wedding or a funeral.

As someone who had always desired stability, my acceptance of this situation surprises me. At the end of the day, we do what we do. The group may change^[6], but the aim remains the same. We are all just looking for someone to catch a beer with.

[1] I was aware that none would match all of my criteria; if there was a perfect pub here I would already be drinking in it.
[2] In this case, a Saffer lager called Castle.
[3] Mother, lover, sister, daughter. Hopefully not at the same time.
[4] Misspelled English or English with incorrect grammar found in foreign countries with hilarious cosequences.
[5] During which I send a text message saying 'Shine on, you crazy diamond' to my brother, three and a half thousand miles away. He is a big Roger Waters fan, and he is not as amused with my teasing as I am.
[6] And this is one of the reasons behind my decision to not name anyone in these travelogs. Things change too fast, and it soon gets confusing. The other reason is, of course, the privacy thing. Whilst I am happy for my name to be out in the public domain, I cannot assume that my friends and work colleagues feel the same.