The incident took place here.

B was spending a couple days in Dubai last week working at her “paid-volunteer” job and staying at the Citymax hotel in Bur Dubai. The company I work for has two offices, one here in Abu Dhabi and the other in Dubai. She’s been working since early January and splits her time between the two cities with a promise of a contract and a salary but continually being put off with various excuses as to why she hasn’t been signed on or even paid. At least they reimburse her expenses.  I will force the rotating blades of the air cooling machine to receive a fermented load of excrement next week if this situation is not resolved.

Anyway, B calls me from the hotel room in a bit of a panic telling me there had been an incident at the hotel.

“A voice came over the loudspeaker in the hall way stating there had been an incident in the hotel and we were to stay in our rooms until further notice,” she stated.  “I’m really freaking out.”

My first thoughts were terrorist attack or a murder in the hotel but not to make B worry even more I decided to play it down.

“Well, look outside the window and see if there is anything unusual looking in front of the entrance,” I replied.  Her answer came back negative.  “I’m sure it’s nothing. Why don’t you call the front desk and ask?”

About twenty minutes later B called back. “It took me forever to get through downstairs. The incident is over, we can leave the room now,” she informed me. “Someone lit a cigarette in a non-smoking room.”

Will smoking in the hotel get you this?

Relieved that no one had died, I wondered if the culprit had been taken away in shackles and jailed for a few months.  How did they know this had happened? Are there security cameras in the rooms? Did everyone stay in their rooms as instructed? Was the culprit’s room locked from a central security station so he couldn’t escape? I have a lot of questions. The safe and secure feeling you have living in the UAE is countered, I’m afraid to admit, by a really Big Brother in the room.

B and I walked to the Khalidiyah Mall this morning rather than take the taxi in an attempt to pretend it was exercise and to take a look at the back streets of Abu Dhabi. We needed to stock up on groceries in order to break the chain of perpetual eating out, which is taking it’s toll on the pocketbok and the waistline. Plus, as I mentioned before, Abu Dhabi’s restaurant scene is quite varied but disappointingly tasteless, relying more on the generally excellent ambiance of their physical plants to attract customers rather than the taste of the food. The lure of home cooking had moved high enough up on our priority list to get us off our behinds and do something about it.

No business for old men.

Just for fun I took my camera along for the twenty minute or so walk and was not disappointed at that decision. It’s Friday morning, the one common day off work shared by both government offices and private businesses, and shops that are open today generally don’t do so until the afternoon. So our walk was quite enjoyable with very few cars on the road, very few people outdoors and weather nice enough to prevent one from breaking a sweat.

The first interesting thing we came across was a computer store that either sold old antique computer systems or was owned and opererated by the elderly, which made me question if they would even know enough about computers to have a viable business. The store was closed so I could not enter the shop to find out.

The Sniper Grocery Store

We then walked by a grocery store that was either owned and operated by ex-military sharpshooters or was warning us of our fate if we were caught shoplifting. Again, this impeccable local business was closed and I couldn’t find out the answer to that question. Probably they were at the local armory stocking up on theft prevention supplies.

Further on down the road we saw an interesting skyscraper under construction. Obviously, the Pisa Construction company from Italy was requisitioned to build this future Abu Dhabi icon. Fortunately, it seems that it won’t be more than the usual 20 stories tall, which used to be the height limit for all construction projects and gave one the impresion that Abu Dhabi had some sense of city planning. Had the Pisa brothers had a local partner tied to the ruling family, who apparently get to build anything, anywhere and any height they desire, despite the city plannning guidelines, and put up a 50 story tower, I’m afraid it would have bumped into its neighboring building.

Leaning Tower of Abu Dhabi

We finally arrived at the mall to discover that the LuLu supermarket was promoting it’s vast supply of organically grown fruits and vegetables. The center of the Khalidiyah Mall currently contains a great display of  colorful, fresh, neatly arranged and displayed fruits and vegetables, which instantly caught our eye. We browsed the several aisles of produce, constantly oohing and aahing at the quality food before our eyes. However, there were no bags with which to purchase our treasures nor were ther any supermarket staff on hand to help us.  A security guard quiclky educated us to the fact that these items were on display only and we had to go into the LuLu supermarket, over to their produce section, to purchase the organically grown items.

The trouble is that the organically grown produce in the supermarket was generally outdated, withered, turning brown and wrinkling. Apparently the fresh recently delivered produce goes out on display for several days, where you aren’t allowed to buy it before it’s brought back into the store to sell, which by then it’s basically unedible. Who thought of that marketing strategy?

The longer I live here, the smarter I become, comparaively. Never a dull moment in this country.

Islamic Disneyland

I’ve been asked several times since moving to the UAE what it is like living here. Up until now, my answers have been long drawn out explanations of the climate, the culture, the social and economic levels and the glitter, bling and gold plating added to every endeavor taken on in this tiny country.

Having moved here from quiet, green and sincere Portugal, my initial impression of this place was of shock and awe, hypnotized by the perpetual dripping of money and surreal order of everything.  Portugal and the UAE are on opposite ends of the spectrum in the comparative list of the world ‘s countries. Agricultural green has been replaced by sandy brown, rural quietness  has been replaced by the deafening sound of 24 hour a day high rise construction (an alleyway’s distance from the terrace of our apartment), and sincere is not a word in the vocabulary of 85% of the population whose motivation to be here is to make a ton of money during their three year work contract and then get back out.

Not that they have a choice, mind you. In the UAE, if you don’t have a job, you have to leave the country. There is no homeless population, no soup kitchens, no welfare or public assistance,and no unemployment. Your right to stay here beyond the 30 day tourist visa that gets stamped in your passport when you enter the country is solely dependent on getting a job. Without a job, you will be deported back to your home country. In the UAE, you can not open a bank account, get a drivers license, rent an apartment or get a residence visa without legitimate employment. Everyone here works.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not complaining.  I am having more fun living here than I ever thought I would, but this place is unique and completely different than any other country in the world. Now that I have settled into the daily grind of living here, and “shock and awe” has been replaced with “day to day”, I have come to realize that I am living in Disneyland.

Cast Members take the Monorail to the Disneyland Hotel.

As is in Disneyland, everything you see here is artificial, clean, intentional, planned, attractive, superficial, polite, expensive, overstaffed, secure, safe, and there is much more hidden and going on behind he scenes that you are allowed to see.

In Disneyland, there is an entire underground (literally) portion of the park that houses the security, computers, kitchens, maintenance facilities, staff entrances, loading docks and pretty much anything that , if visible by the tourists, would take away from the fantasy and idyllic experience created above ground. Underground is where the aesthetically challenged employees work, the ones who applied for the job of portraying Alice and Jasmine above ground but didn’t make it through the sieve of attractiveness. You don’t ever see them but they make up the majority of the employees and are really what make the park tick.

In Dubai and Abu Dhabi, there isn’t the convenience of a separate underground facility to hide what you are not supposed to see, but they certainly try. The construction worker class of residents, whose plight and conditions have been described by some journalists (none living here as saying anything negative about the UAE never makes it to print here) as modern day slaves, are bussed in and out of town. Apparently their living conditions are upsetting to the expat community so out of sight, out of mind is the solution to that problem.

Walking down Main Street in Disneyland you can’t help notice that every building is clean, freshly painted and with flowers in the windows. The architects of Main Street left no detail ignored and created an experience of reality that really isn’t there. What you don’t realize is that these buildings are just  fronts, facades to give you the illusion they are three dimensional structures. Look behind the windows and you will find nothing but scaffolding and some support structures. Any scrap of litter casually tossed on the ground by insensitive tourists is immediately swept up by the nameless, smartly dressed but good looking (enough) trash sweeper uppers. Apparently this is the most sought after job in Disneyland as there is absolutely no interaction whatsoever with the public. The employees you do interact with, however,are always cheerful, greet you energetically, call you “Sir” or “Ma’am”, all with the intonation of a Stepford wife. This is customer service on steroids.

Cinderella's Castle

Walking down the main streets of Dubai you can’t help notice that all the newer buildings and skyscrapers are modern day works of art. The designer tile work and reflective mirrored windows give you the impression that this city must be the world’s center of prosperity and have it all. The architects left no detail ignored and created an experience of reality that really isn’t there.  What you don’t realize is that many of these buildings are just shells, mirrored on the outside to hide that fact. Look behind the windows and you will find that the majority of these commercial buildings are unoccupied, a symptom of the pre-economic crisis mentality of “build it and they will come”. These areas, built to attract tourists and western expats are litter and dirt free as countless entry level cleaners constantly sweep away any hint of disorder and chaos. You don’t interact with these people as they are probably trained to be as inconspicuous as possible. However, every store clerk, taxi driver, doorman, waitress and mid level employee you run into drips of customer service overload and always addresses you as “Sir” or “Ma’am”.

As I said, I live in Disneyland.

Hot Buns Cafe

Spotted near the Oman / UAE border checkpoint near Hatta.

This coming Friday I am going to participate in one of the most popular expat activities this country has to offer, the visa run. At first you may think I’m talking about an organized group running event down the Cornish of Abu Dhabi, the entry fees of which might go to some worthy charity. But this is not an aerobic sports run, it’s even more exciting than that.

Visa Stamps

You see, when you arrive in the UAE, you get a little stamp in your passport that allows you to stay in the country for 30 days and in some circumstances, up to 60 days. This is usually plenty of time for most tourists to come, enjoy a little vacation time and go home with a minimum of paperwork to be legal staying here.

If you come here to work, your company gives you a work visa which then allows you to apply for residency, then eliminating the need for the border stamps. These are things that aren’t necessarily possible to do in 30 days. Having spent 10 years in Portugal and seen first hand how countries wrapped up in endless red tape operate, I seriously doubted that this can be accomplished in several months. My suspicions were confirmed shortly after starting work as most of my colleagues have spent up to a year getting these two critical documents in hand.

Running Man

So what happens as your 30 day tourist stamp comes close to expiring? The Visa run! To remain legal in the country, you have to leave the country and then return. That means crossing the border, then turning around and coming back, gaining a new 30 day stamp in your passport, or flying out to some other country, turning around and coming back into the UAE. This event is practiced every day by hundreds of expats waiting for their work documents to come through.

Great, I say. A chance to get away for the weekend to some nearby culturally significant tourist destination. But every 30 days? For possibly an entire year?

Welcome to the Visa run racket. A million dollar plus industry that has created relatively cheap turnaround airline flights to keep you legal in this country every 30 days. You fly out and back into the UAE in just one day, get your stamp and go back to work the next day.

I chose to fly to Oman this Friday, my day off, so I won’t miss work. Trouble is that the flight leaves at 3AM and I get back to Dubai 10 AM. I don’t think there will be much to do in the Muskat airport when I land at 4AM. What a waste of time and an entire day.

I named this bull Mr. T.

Who says there’s nothing to to on a Friday afternoon in the UAE? I was cruising the east coast of the UAE with my friend Richard about two weeks ago when we came across what seemed like an open field surrounded by hundreds of people peering into a small arena. At first I thought we came upon a small local camel race but upon exiting the car and walking over, noticed several bulls tied up along the perimeter of the fenced in field.

Bloodless bullfights

Welcome to the UAE’s version of bullfighting. Before you get upset, you have to realize that here the bull does not get killed, nor is it injured in any way. This is an actual bull fight. Two bulls are brought into the arena and they “fight” by facing each other, locking horns and PUSHING. It’s sort of a push-of -war, the bull who causes the other to back up wins. Or so it seems. There is a referee who decides who is declared the winner and keeps the bulls facing each other.

Spectators with a deathwish.

Most of the spectators are safely outside the fence, but a collection of spectators (VIP’s, bull owners, daredevils?) are sitting in the arena a few feet from the fighting bulls. The most entertaining part of the afternoon was watching these internal spectators scramble when the bulls got too close or when one got free from it’s restraints and charged the crowd.

NOT a good substitute for paper towels!

People around here are obsessed with Kleenex. You know, facial tissue, those individual sheets of toilet paper stacked and packaged with perfume pretending to be something better. I can’t tell you how many times I have been in a public washroom here in the UAE and found nothing but Kleenex to dry my hands with after washing up. What ever happened to the trusty paper towel? Have you ever tried drying your hands with just one Kleenex? It doesn’t work. They either instantly congeal into a colloidal pulp or disintegrate and break down into individual fibers which then get all over my clothing making me look like the poster boy for Head and Shoulders shampoo. Have you ever had Chinese rice paper candy? Each candy comes individually wrapped in a little piece of rice paper, which is edible. The trouble is that if you try to unwrap each piece, the moisture in your fingers starts to gel the rice paper so you end up just putting the entire candy, wrapper and all, in you mouth. Drying your hands with Kleenex is a similar experience. And my hands are still wet.

I have big hands and it usually takes me three or four paper towels to get my hands dry. Using Kleenex to accomplish the same task raises the eyebrows of the restroom attendants (yes, every public bathroom has a full time attendant here) because it looks to them like I am trying to steal the entire box, one tissue at a time. I swear it takes about ten of those things to get my hands dry. Not very environmentally conscious if you ask me. But then again, the UAE doesn’t exactly have a small carbon footprint. Sorry – that’s UAE bashing and I promised not to do that anymore until I have lived here long enough to have the right.  I’m merely asking a question here today.

I even see boxes of Kleenex on the dashboards of most automobiles here. Do cars sold in Dubai have wash basins as an upgrade feature or are the people around here perpetually blowing their nose? I’m sure they are not being used for perspiration control, as hot as it is here, unless people want to look like they used a brand new razor to shave with that morning. Somebody please explain.

My living quarters for the next 4 weeks.

Well here I am again in Dubai, this time to lay low and study, finally removed from the threat of the ever unpredictable volcano in Iceland. My studio apartment/hotel is quite adequate for my needs this month. It’s basically a hotel room with a kitchenette and refrigerator. There is a small washing machine, a two burner stove top and a microwave. A basic kitchen pack includes the bare minimum in utensils and plates for two people which means I only have to wash dishes every other meal and by hand on top of that.

The quality of the facility is good, not great; I’d say between a room at the Ibis and a room at the Holiday Inn. The shower tile is chipped and stained, the shower head is too low (what’s new?) and I can’t get the thermostat to turn off and it’s stuck at 65 degrees, which means there is a 24 hour a day stream of cold air blowing on me at all times. It’s actually too cold in the room. I turned the adjustable vents toward the ceiling but may have to resort to adjusting the temperature like they do in the apartment blocks in Moscow, Russia. There the apartment blocks have one central heating unit for the entire building and your heat is either on or off. Friends of mine lived there several years ago and I witnessed this personally when B and I visited them. They adjust the temperature by opening the window to let the cool air in. Here, I might have to open the window to let the heat in to compensate for the cold room. We’ll see what the front desk says when I call them.

View out my window.

As is true for most things in the UAE, and for MacDonalds cheeseburgers, what is portrayed in the advertisement is much nicer than the actual item. What you see is not what you get here. The workout gymnasium that is part of the complex has two treadmills and a combo weight machine with 4 stations. OK if there are only two or three people using the facility but this complex is about 500 rooms large.

Actually I should be happy with the facility as there are no luxuries to distract me from my real purpose for being here which is to finish studying for the big exam. There’s nothing on TV as its all Arabic stuff and CNN. I either watch something I don’t understand or listen to something that tries to destroy my ability to think for myself. The complex is not located near anything exciting. Let me rephrase that. The complex is not near anything. The grocery store is a half kilometer walk through a complex of parking lots and sandlots. There is an on site restaurant open 24 hours a day serving decent but expensive food – Denny’s quality if you were wondering. Arriving late last night I had dinner at 2:30 in the morning, the only customer in the place. It’s sort of the feel of being in a college dormitory but with maid service. I could hole up here like the characters at the end of the movie Paper Chase and never leave the building, forcing myself to study until my brain swells to the size of a creature from the Outer Limits.

My chattering teeth tell me it’s time to open a window. More later.