Genuinely?!

Sometimes Dubai is the place where logic goes to die. For instance, I went to the bank today to fill out a credit card application and the woman processing the forms got really freaked out because she decided my signature wasn't similar enough to the signature I have on file with the bank. (Ed. note: they looked exactly the same. I was just maybe in a different mood or using a different pen or something equally imperceptible.) After making me fill out about a dozen more copies of the form and systematically voiding them one by one because those signatures "didn't match" either, she tried to send me to the back of the queue with a pad and paper to "practice" (I AM NOT KIDDING) until I could get it right, at which point I had to channel E's "don't take no for an answer" Dubai ethos and tell her that we would be using the signature I had just done and that was that. (We did. "Don't take no for an answer" never fails here.)

So there you have it. In a country where umpteen millions of dirhams per year are laundered/funneled to dodgy causes/transfered between countries whose assets are supposed to be frozen by international banking sanctions, it's clearly logical to worry most about the signature validity of the blonde American who's applying for a credit card. As South African roommate Javs is fond of saying: "Genuinely?!"

In other news, I think I am getting too old for my lifestyle. (Thanks for the birthday wishes, by the way!) I am still reeeeally hurting from getting 2 hours of sleep on the night of my birthday, and from a bout of near-paralysis induced by falling asleep on our very sleek, super-modern, extremely uncomfortable couch the night of our house party, after which I woke up at 8 AM and had to crawl on my hands and knees across the cake-strewn floor to my bed in my favorite BCBG dress because I was that crippled that I couldn't walk. See? Too old.

But that's okay because I'm about to leave the office, work out, get my second massage of the week, and then go for shisha - all of which should ease my suffering and provide a nice transition into the end of the week and a weekend which, for the first time in recent memory, will include NO TRIPS TO IKEA (inshallah). Yes, there will be equally mind-jabbering visits to car dealerships, but I plan on reserving plenty of time to watch my brand-new, 99-channel package of dreeeeeeeeamy satellite TV, which to my great pleasure includes the fabulous Al Jazeera English ("Setting the news agenda") and the bemusing France 24 ("Pretending that France is important enough to need its own BBC/CNN equivalent"... just kidding, but that really should be its motto - it's basically a whole channel built around a massive cultural inferiority complex).

Speaking of news, if you have not already done so, please read today's New York Times article on how Hilary Duff's music is "much better than it needs to be" (um, obvi). Take that, those of you who mock my love of all things teenybopper. Next the Times will publish an op-ed on why Paris Hilton was too shiny to have deserved to go to jail, and I will expect you all to stand corrected on that as well.

Sheikhs 'n' Cakes

So the housewarming party this weekend was a resounding success, complete with entirely too much (read: just enough) booze and bacon, a variety of hijinx, and a host of crazy characters (an Iranian smuggler; a drunk incoherent Scotsman; an American colleague of E's who showed up wearing a floor-length purple taffeta cape; etc). The highlight of the evening was an early kick-off to my birthday thanks to J & M's brilliant procurement of a sheet cake decorated with the face of my husband-to-be, Sheikh Hamdan.

[Since you will all be meeting him someday, I should take a moment to explain that Sheikh Hamdan - or "Fazza3" ("Courageous"), as he is marketed by the government - is the 24 year-old Eton-educated, Bedouin poetry-writing, racehorse-owning favorite son of Sheikh Mohammed, and is the current heir apparent to the Dubai throne. Please visit his website (volume on), ogle his hotness, and marvel at the fact that I live in a place where future heads of state are promoted with a level of adoration and zeal usually reserved for Tiger Beat magazine spreads on boy bands and/or trailers for overwrought Steven Spielberg films.]

At any rate, I'll let the pictures of the party (and the Sheikh Cake!) speak for themselves...
















We have furniture!
















The men in my life - roommates Javs and E.





















L rocks her cape. No one knows why.
















The Fazza3 cake is paraded out in all its glory. (Ed. note: Sheikh Hamdan's nickname is not actually "Fazza Three" - rather, the 3 is used in transliteration to represent the Arabic letter ayn which is crazy and guttural and has no equivalent in English, but kind of looks like the number 3 when you write it. Just a bit of trivia for you linguistics nerds out there... anyone?)





















Best. Cake. Ever.
















Dreeeeeeamy...

















... aaaaaaaaaaaaand this is what happens when you get so distracted by your cake that you forget about a million bacon-wrapped dates cooking in your oven. Or maybe this was fate poking fun at the irony of my mutually exclusive obsessions with marrying an Emirati man and consuming ridiculous quantities of pork. Hmmmm.

Class, Race, and Gender

A few years back at Georgetown - more years than I care to count, in fact - I took a philosophy class called “Class, Race, and Gender.” I remember very little about the readings or the assignments (has it been that long since I graduated college?!), but I find myself thinking about that course a lot here because more so than anywhere else I’ve lived, eeeeeeverything in Dubai is structured along those lines. Since I’m hoping that everyone reading this blog will come visit me at some point, I will expound upon the most interesting of these socio-cultural cleavages (ooh, college language!) such that you may all be up-to-speed when you get here and the focus of my “Welcome to Dubai” car-ride-from-the-airport speech can shift to topics such as “Which is Better: Sweet Melon Shisha or Cherry-Mint Shisa? You’ll Be the Judge!” and “OMG let me tell you about the time they were going to build a building in the shape of a man wearing a dishdash and then the plans got canned because they decided it was un-Islamic to construct a building in the shape of a human form.” But I digress.

Anyhow, the following are some observations I have meditated upon extensively during my daily hour of driving time (when I’m not belting Hilary Duff/Jessica Simpson or cursing Indian drivers… which narrows it down to a daily 15 minutes or so, depending on how many times I get cut off by maniacal Tata buses careening through roundabouts on their way back to the labor camps).

Class: There are a thousand subtle ways class manifests itself here, but one of the most interesting (and least subtle) is on license plates. The hard and fast rule is that the fewer digits you have in your license plate number, the more of a captain you are. Mere mortals (about 85% of the cars you see on the road) have 5-digit plates; anything less than the standard 5 digits is where things start to get interesting. A 4-digit plate can be bought for a couple thousand dollars extra, which basically means you’re nouveau riche or you have something to prove. 3-digit plates are a bit more compelling, as they start at around USD $25,000; 2 digits sell for USD $100,000 and up, so usually having a 2-digit plate means you’re the “best of the rest” – not the inner circle, but the upper echelons for sure. 1-digit plates are aaaaaaaalmost always reserved for direct members of the royal family (keep in mind every plate has a letter as well, so there’s still 200+ permutations of the 1-dig plate), although occasionally you hear stories of non-sheikhs/sheikhas managing to get their hands on a 1-digiter for the bargain price of a million bucks. Okay seriously, all together now: “Where do I live?!” It’s actually quite interesting, though, the way Emiratis have taken all the guesswork out of social class (because honestly, everyone has a Range Rover these days). There are allegedly some tangential benefits to having a low-digit plate (people get out of your way in traffic, cops don’t pull you over because they know you own them, you don’t have to worry about valet because you can just leave your car anywhere you like) but these aren’t actually institutionalized and from what I understand, the biggest part of the appeal is just the “look at me” factor. And in case anyone is wondering… yes, my car will have a humble 5-digit plate. I am, after all, a woman of the people.*

Race: What I’ve realized is that there’s really no politically correct way to talk about race/ethnicity in Dubai. That’s not to say that race relations here are bad – I still maintain that when you have people from this many cultures, countries, and backgrounds living in the same place, there’s a net benefit in terms of eyes opened and cultures understood, even if the different groups only interact when forced. But even as someone who grew up in freaking Tennessee with a congressman who told me that black people needed to “stop being fed by the mother bird and fly out of the nest” when I went to DC to meet him (that’s a story for another blog), it never ceases to amaze me the extent to which race (ethnic origin is probably the better term) buckets what you do, where you live, how much money you make, where you go out, and who it’s seen as “appropriate” for you to socialize with in Dubai. E and I have spent endless car trips out to IKEA discussing the elaborate pantheon of stereotypes and trading crazy tidbits of information we stumble upon (a Jordanian colleague who’s lived in the UAE for two decades, for instance, spent the better part of an afternoon at work enlightening me about the different types of cars associated with different socio-ethnic groups: “Now the Toyota Prado, that’s the rich Indian car, whereas the Nissan Sunny is the poor Indian car…”). So much for chacun à son goût.

Gender: Being an American woman in Dubai is a funny thing. The vast majority of what I do, how I dress, and the way I act is the same as in the US – not in a culturally insensitive way (I don’t think), but simply because most of the time, most people are totally cool with it. So much so, in fact, that when I do hit up against a strikingly different reaction, it’s even more of a shock. The other night, for instance, I wore jeans and a tank top to go clothes-shopping at Massimo Dutti (it wasn’t like it was Ahmed’s Abaya Store or something – I would have been a little more conservative had I thought it would be an offensive context). While browsing through the sale rack, I saw an Emirati women next to me point to the half-inch of exposed skin between the top of my jeans and the bottom of my tank top, grab her friend, and exclaim “Shoufi, shoufi! Haram!” (“Look, look! Forbidden!”) I’ve also been told on numerous occasions that as a Western female, I need to buy an SUV because if I drive a smaller car, male drivers won’t respect me on the roads… although is that really so different from the US?! It’s especially interesting to compare my experience vis-à-vis that of my friend M, who was born in the States to Egyptian parents - even though she’s not Muslim, has a US passport, and has spent a total of maybe 6 months of her life in Egypt, the standards for her as an Arab woman are totally different from the standards for me as a “white” woman. When a bunch of us new transplants were discussing housing options, I got no negative reaction when I told people I was living with E (who happens to be male and not my husband). When M considered moving in as our third roommate, however, all her Arab friends told her she shouldn’t – even though she’s American, she’s first and foremost Arab (according to them), and thus she’s judged by different standards for what is or isn’t appropriate. Which kind of makes me feel like they think I’m just… beyond hope? But at the end of the day, I will still go to battle for Dubai by saying it’s probably the only place in the world where I can go to the mall in a t-shirt and shorts and someone else can go to the mall in an abaya and niqab and neither of us is going to get looked at like we have three heads (except by the “shoufi shoufi haram!” women, but as I said, they were the exception, not the rule).

And that’s all she wrote. Time to dash home for an evening of frantic party-planning before Housewarming Weekend (The Party to End All Parties) kicks off at our flat tomorrow night!

*Barring the future patronage of Emirati sheikh and/or Russian oligarch, in which case I would be pleased to take 3 digits or less, none of that 4-digit crap for me.

Odds and Ends

Okay, so sorry to be the worst updater ever, but I promise to get into a better blogging routine once I get settled in. You'd think after 6 weeks here I'd be further along, but every day is full of work and trying to stave off exhaustion (occasional lunchtime drives into the desert to nap in my car are key) and every night there's couches to buy and cars to test-drive and unpacking to do and pidgin English to speak with bureaucratic officials whose non-Hindi vocabulary includes only nouns and present-tense verbs ("phone line, can have today? is possible?"). Haha. Not that my head almost explodes on a daily basis or anything.

But seriously, being here is exhausting. In fact, my friend M was actually hospitalized for exhaustion/dehydration last weekend (she's fine now), an adventure which included the hospital mis-registering her nationality and then insisting that she was, in fact, American Samoan and demanding that she produce her American Samoan passport. They then sent her to a doctor who told her he would be conducting a variety of "investigations" (tests?!) but that she could not know what they were lest she influence the results.

What else is new... last Thursday my team at work took a field trip out to the desert in the company's Land Cruisers to check out our project site (which right now consists of dunes and camel farms). What was supposed to be a 20-minute trip to see where our new offices would be ended up being a 2-hour desert safari, with my various male Emirati coworkers competing to play "Impress the American" with their ability to drive up and down dunes at 90-degree angles and insane speeds. (They were all impressive, but the best part was watching them adjust their headdresses to "desert style" with great flair when they got behind the wheel.)

Over the weekend E and I house-shopped for about 30 hours and I came out of the experience with, among other things, a pimped-out but very cheap LCD flat-screen TV from the famous faux-Canadian "Hactc" brand (upon closer inspection, the box says "Made for Canada"... I guess the "Made in China" is implied). I figure it will be perfect for watching bootleg Chinese DVDs, if nothing else.

Last night - in preparation for the massive housewarming party we are throwing this Friday - we made a pilgrimage to the Ajman Free Zone two emirates away, where you can buy $6.75 1-litre bottles of Stoli without the liquor license (or 30% haram tax) required in Dubai. We had heard stories of local teenagers following people out of the free zone and ambushing them in Sharjah (the emirate between Dubai and Ajman, which just so happens to be dry), but luckily we had no such Wild West-style misfortune and we made it home in time to enjoy our 800PIZZA (run by Filipinos, but the best Italian-style pizza I've had outside Naples) with a glass of tax-free, license-free Montepulciano before turning in for the night.

And so. Now I have to finish up a presentation on strategic direction in the hopes of sneaking out during lunch to go sign us up for Showtime cable. Just another day in the desert!

Perspective?

You know you've been driving a piece of shit car for the past month when you get behind the wheel of your new glorified Tinkertoy rental and it feels like a sports car... such power! Such exhilaration! Such ability to hit 120 kms/hour in under 5 minutes! Anyhoo, I've decided not to buy a car quite yet and to keep renting for another month, partially because I haven't really had time to shop and partially because I keep getting distracted by shiny things every time I try and firm up what I'm looking for. (You tell me: French car - Bad Idea or Best Idea Ever?)

Wow. Who would've thought I would ever care about cars. Next thing you know, I'll be caring about... something else that was never even remotely a part of my life before I up and moved to Krazyland.

So what else have I been up to... oh, you know, the usual. Thursday morning before moving into my new flat I shot a TV commercial that will air on Tapesh, the #1 global Persian-language satellite channel. Wha wha? Lest anyone think I'm embarking on a second career as a cross-cultural television star, I should concede that it was a spot for the real estate company where E works and that I was awarded my star turn in the role of "British Receptionist" mostly because I was - ehrm - the only white female that anyone who works at the firm knew. Apparently it's easier to sell Dubai property to the Iranian diaspora by depicting a fictional white receptionist than actual Indian woman who is the receptionist? The whole experience was somewhat surreal and involved having my makeup done by a krazy Turkish-Iranian woman from Tabriz who is apparently a famous talk show host/producer and was full of helpful acting instructions ("Now, vhen you say 'Good morning, how can I help you?' I vant you to geeve me a very lovely smile and some small and gentle laughter at the end, can you do dat?"). Anyhow, if you have satellite TV and/or live in an area with lots o' Persians, keep an eye out for my mad acting skillz.

Friday was devoted to brunch and beauty maintence with M&J at "Pretty Lady Salon" in Satwa (the Filipino neighborhood), where I got a hair cut, blowout, and mani-pedi all for USD $47. Oh Dubai... land of dichotomies. On Saturday I got an elaborate mate preparation lesson from New Argentinian Flatmate J, piling another culture onto the United Colours of Benetton campaign that is life here. Now I'm headed back to the flat to celebrate E's return from a 48-hour, 14,000-mile trip back to New York... oh, the things we do for love. Adios!

The Surreal Life

Sorry to be such a bad updater but I checked out of my hotel and moved into the new flat last week and it's been a flurry of packing, unpacking, working, and the like.















Um... this is my move-in view. Doesn't it look like I live in some kind of crazy, cracked-out video game? (The twin buildings are Emirates Towers, where my company is headquartered; the one towards the right with the white pyramid on top is where M lives - we want to build a zipline across Sheikh Zayed Road connecting our apartments; the tall building between the two is the Burj "yes, I see 'history rising' from my window" Dubai.)















The (slightly) less cracked-out part of our view... out over Jumeira and Satwa to the Gulf.















Home sweet (crazy, post-modern, perfume bottle-shaped) home.















By our pool... and actually, this shot doesn't really do it justice. (But I hope it still makes you want to come visit.)















K's visit from Yemen.















Lawrence of Arabia-ing it out into the dunes for our desert picnic. (Yes, those are tiki torches... we don't mess around.)















With E in the desert, picnic-style.















Golf-carting it to the club with M.

Code Red

In deference to Schmom's worries about someone in Dubai finding my blog ("This is your career now!" ... oh crap, it is) my musings are now available by invitation only. A sad, sad sign of the times, but probably a necessary one. Such is life.

So, Sunday morning, back in the office, triple-shot latte by my side. The weekend got off to a rocky start with what turned out to be a highly ill-fated trip to Oman - we didn't leave Dubai until 11 PM and finally made it to the border at 1 AM only to be turned back when we realized that M's temporary visa didn't permit her to leave the country and no amount of pleading or wusta (palm-greasing) was going to change the UAE border patrol's mind. After finally making it back to Dubai at 3:30 AM without managing to kill each other or hit any camels along the way (and oh, there were many), we called it a night.

The weekend got considerably more entertaining with a visit to the (elitist, obnoxious, but okay-okay-I-also-kind-of-loved-it) 400 Club on Friday night thanks to a bling-bling Lebanese friend who got us on the guest list. The new thing here is that whenever someone orders a magnum of champagne (dropping $500 on a regular bottle isn't enough, mind you, it has to be a magnum), they turn off the regular music and play something that sounds like a dance remix of the "Chariots of Fire" theme while it gets carried out to the table on a big platform with blazing sparklers on it. Seriously. Insert analysis on the psychology of conspicuous consumption here.

Yesterday E and I spent the day in true proxy-boyfriend fashion by car- and furniture-shopping together for 10 hours, bookended by all-you-can-eat North Indian thalis for lunch in Karama (total cost: USD $3 each) and oysters/chardonnay for dinner at the new Four Seasons Golf Club in Festival City (total cost: more than USD $3 each). In between, I managed to buy all my bedroom furniture (bed frame, armoire, dresser, nightstand, trunk) for under USD $500 because I am The World's Best Bargain Shopper - and it's not even from Ikea, thankyouverymuch. I also found the car I want to buy and I think it would "make every day an adventure" and help me "find my true identity" but have yet to decide if buying a new car is prudent for someone who is, well, me.

Time to work!

Fun with Arab Bureaucracy

This has been an exciting week for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that I have managed to elaborately procure not one, but two of the coveted and long sought-after documents that will help me become a (real! official! lease-signing! car-buying!) resident here: my residence visa and my UAE driver’s license!

Behold, in all their glory…

I had M check the Arabic to make sure that my company hadn’t secretly sponsored me as a prostitute (hey it’s Dubai, you never know) and she assured me that I am, in fact, here as a legitimate white-collar employee… however, my title in Arabic is apparently “Helper to the Director,” as opposed to the slightly more official-sounding “Assistant Manager, Strategy and Business Development” in English… I’ll take what I can get.

The residence visa involved a meandering process of surrendering my passport first to my company and then to the government, and weeks later getting scheduled for what was supposed to be a battery of medical tests (reality: as the only white person in the immigration queue, I was led ahead of several hundred Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi men and taken to a Filipina nurse who gave me a quick glance and then signed off on the form saying I had successfully passed my chest x-ray).

The license was slightly less of a schlepisode, involving a bit of queuing, the requisite back-and-forth with bored/disaffected Emirati officials, and an “eye test” (see above). This might be an appropriate time to tell the story of how I got pulled over by the police last week because I had made “seven mistakes” and they were suspicious that I was driving drunk - sadly, I was completely sober, I’m just that krazy of a driver. It’s a learning process, me on the roads here, but at least I was saved from a ticket by K’s cultural savvy (“Smile and flirt! Smile and flirt!”).

Next week is move-in day for the new apartment, so last night E and I took a preliminary trip to IKEA. The highlight, aside from the cheap-furniture euphoria fomented by my current nesting obsession, was checking out model rooms that featured closets full of sample clothes… only instead of, say, dress shirts, they were full of sample dishdash. When in Rome…

E, for those who have asked, is not a mysterious boyfriend who has materialized here in the UAE to cohab with me (despite the fact that our landlord thinks as much). Rather, he is another ex-intern from last summer and we are each other’s “proxy boyfriend,” since his boyfriend is in New York and my boyfriend is… non-existent. On that front, we’ve also secured our third roommate – an Argentinean who works in software sales. Should be an interesting mix.

Tonight I’m road-tripping to Oman with a fabulous crew of Brits/Americans/Canadians for a day-long dhow cruise through the fjords at Musandam tomorrow… if last year’s similar excursion is any indication, it should be a weekend full of dolphins, snorkeling, booze, sunburns, and the occasional Iranian smuggling boat passing us in the Straits of Hormuz… par for the course, I suppose.