Dubai Update: Plodding On

View from our villa’s roof top in Al-Barsha 3

A short mid 2009 update on life here. Dubai is boiling hot. A usual thing every summer, but I hear this year’s hotter. So much so that washing dishes after lunch at home has become a hazard, to your hands (ya, the water is steaming hot).

I am growing up extremely fast now, 6 more months to being a father, 6 more months to doubling my responsibilities. Anu’s tummy is beginning to show the bump, her usual clothes don’t fit anymore, and I’m starting to notice pregnant women around, there’re actually lots of them in Dubai, …or they may just be fat (ok, I mistook one friend of my friend).

My attention (on women around) has been switching from being exclusively on pretty and sexy, to a broader pregnant and fat selection (in addition to the pretty-sexy types of course, can’t live without ‘em). And I never noticed (until now) that there’re actually a lot of special clothes here in the departmental stores for pregnant women. (But there’re not cheap). And the stores for kids… don’t even want to think about it for the time being. Looks like shopping just grew ten-fold.

Work-wise, nothing has changed, same Quality-related position, but getting to like the Quality role now. Sort of like being a critic, we can give our comments, give our ratings, behave like an expert and not needing to take care of the shit ourselves, not bad a job huh?

Anyway, very busy, time to get back to work. Until the next update, here’re some photos of our current home (the 3rd in Dubai, the umpteenth since getting married, lost count after the seventh).


Our ‘villa’ in Al-Barsha 3, Dubai – it has 3 humongous apartment-type rooms, 4 normal type bedrooms (all with attached bathrooms), a dining room, a laundry room and 2 enormous halls in the main building; and a kitchen, 2 servant’s rooms, 2 shared toilets and a laundry room in an annexe building. It also has a small swimming pool (that’s not working, and filled with sand & slimy water) and lots of space for parking your limousines, Hummers and Ferraris.


Views from our villa’s roof top – our neighbourhood mosque


On the extreme left is Burj Al-Arab and the slide-type building on the right is the Mall of the Emirates


Anu in our bedroom


Anu pretending to wear a burka ala Dubai


The Mall of the Emirates (about 40 minutes by foot from the villa), that bizarre looking slide-thing contains Ski Dubai, the artificial ski-slope-in-a-mall.

A Desert Oasis Town

I’ve always imagined an oasis to be some sort of a lake or pond with a few palm trees flanking it surrounded by acres and acres of barren sandy desert. This apparently ain’t so. Not here in the UAE anyway.

Here’re pictures of Al-Ain a typical oasis town in this part of the world (I presume). It’s a part of the emirate of Abu Dhabi and is about an hour’s drive inland from here in Dubai. It sits just across the border with the Buraimi oasis of Oman. There're no lakes, no visible water body of any kind as far as I’d seen. But yes, there’re palm trees, date palms to be precise, swaths of it all over town, especially at the location that looks like the middle of an oasis in the map. Went all over the place looking for the oasis, and what do I find, a freaking date palm plantation that looks almost exactly like our oil palm estates.


Al-Ain Palace Museum – see those palm trees at the back just behind the palace wall? That, is the oasis of Al-Ain.


This place used to be a palace for the ruling clan of Abu Dhabi (hence the name Palace Museum)


Anu and a museum / palace guard


The road to Jebel Hafeet, a hill of crumbling rocky outcrops that’s a tourist attraction near Al-Ain. What’s of interest there? Well, it’s a friggin HILL OK? You don’t get no hills for leagues around this place.


Development at the top of Jebel Hafeet – Fancy that, a tower crane?


A restaurant, or more like THE restaurant at the foot of Jebel Hafeet