by Becky Wicks
17/07
Dodgy deals, desert drives and a Middle-Eastern marketing machine …
Since arriving here four weeks ago, a guy at work has moved in and out of a place because of a lizard infestation in the corner of his bedroom. He ummed and aahed for a while before packing his bags. He carefully considered the mammoth balcony, the en-suite bathroom and the pair of Russian sisters living in the apartment next door, but still decided on the whole that his scaly roommates were too much to handle. Poor guy.
Most of the places to rent in Dubai sound incredible, but more often than not people want ridiculous deposits to move in. They also want six months’ to a year’s payment in advance. Who has that kind of money? Certainly not a twenty-seven year old who has spent the years since graduating from uni shopping, travelling the globe and struggling to make a living in London.
When I emailed HR at work about whether they had a policy of lending employees the money for things like this, in exchange for a monthly reduction in salary (I’ve heard some companies do this), the answer was, ‘Most people take the money from their savings, or borrow it from their parents.’ Hmmm.
I did some sums and even with my limited mathematical capabilities, there seems to be no way around the fact that the amount I would need to have saved in order to move into a room, at a monthly cost of the average 4,500 dirhams, is 7,400 pounds sterling. That’s a lot of money. And asking my parents for a wad of cash equating to half the annual sum of their small-town English lifestyle would seem, perhaps, a little like taking the piss. After all, they gave me fifty quid to last the month when I moved out here.
I wrote back: ‘OK, thanks a lot, I’ll reconsider my options.’
I’m weak like that.
Rent has risen drastically in Dubai over the past few years. There never used to be a cap on how much landlords could increase it year by year, so they just got greedy, milking it for everything they could get. Of course, now it just means there’s no cheap housing alternatives anywhere. It’s just extortionate, expensive or ‘bedspace’ — which is basically a mattress on the floor of a hovel.
Now, I know I’ve lived in some hellholes in my time, the most noteworthy being a warehouse apartment I shared with a bipolar girl in Brooklyn, who had a penchant for naked nighttime rollerblading. But I kind of think that as an educated twenty-something who left a perfectly reasonable, two-bedroom East London apartment just a few weeks ago, I automatically bypass the cockroach-ridden bed-sit situation.
A viewing last night, our first, was the miraculous result of a recommendation by the very nice Private Banker boy I met at Harry Ghatto’s karaoke bar the other night. We’ve been sending the odd email back and forth since we bonded over ‘Endless Love’ (the Mariah Carey version) and he actually called to tell me there was a massive room to let in his colleague’s shared villa.
We met this landlord at McDonald’s near Al Safa — an area on the map that seems to consist of a road junction, two hypermarkets and a Boots pharmacy — and drove with him to the villa for what seemed like an eternity. Eventually we pulled up in an enormous driveway, next to an extremely well-tended garden and a glistening swimming pool. We were in the farthest region of an area called Al Barsha. The place was huge. In fact, the room Stacey and I were to share was the size of the entire flat I’d just vacated in London!
The only drawback, aside from a South African family, including young children, occupying the space downstairs, is the fact that it’s so far away from anywhere we’d ever need to go. And the fact that neither of us really drives a car.
Also, it’s so new that there’s literally nothing else there. There are no landmarks from which cabs could identify our home — if they’d even travel out that far to collect us. There are no shops, the Metro won’t be open for two years, the roads are literally dusty tracks and the only green things around are a few trees, perched on dirty mounds. They’ve left them there, apparently for a religious reason, standing tall above the ground like withered hands in a manmade sprawl of what’s bound to be, I’ve no doubt, total luxury. We just arrived twenty years too early.
Dubai’s online listings site, dubizzle.com, is full of rooms to rent. This said, I’m not quite sure if agreeing to take the one on the landing of a villa with an eccentric Iranian inventor living downstairs is the best decision Stacey and I have ever made. But this room is only 2,500 dirhams each a month if we share the space, which is less than I paid for my shoebox in London. It also leaves me even more of my monthly salary to spend on hanging out in karaoke bars and restaurants, trying to find a rich boyfriend.
I’ll admit, sharing a room isn’t ideal. It’s sort of like reversing in status from independent career woman to student backpacker, even though Stacey and I get on well so far and clearly won’t steal each other’s baked beans. The room is big enough for the two single beds the landlord has promised to put in there, I suppose, and it comes with a telly and built-in wardrobes. We’ll have to share the bathroom with the three or four other randoms about to move in and the kitchen doesn’t have a cooker, and actually, the whole set up is situated on the landing right by the staircase … oh all right, it’s a shit-hole. But we’re seeing it as a temporary solution. Miraculously, we don’t have to pay any ridiculous amounts up front for this place.
Back to the Iranian inventor. He seems to be a very sweet man. He’s renting the upper level of this giant mansion (Iransion?) in case any clients want to come and stay. How thoughtful. By clients, I mean people who might be interested in funding his latest invention, which happens to be a vehicle that’s powered by a horse running on a conveyor belt. No, seriously.
When we sat down in his ground-floor living room and he faced us, twiddling his thumbs and enquiring as to our heritage (very common here and not considered to exhibit possible prejudice at all), a quick glance around the room revealed a professionally produced display stand, featuring a certain ‘fleet horse’ machine. He also had a map on the wall outlining the world tour he’s planning to take in this contraption. ‘I was going to start in UAE,’ he told us, ‘but now I think I start in America.’
Because they won’t laugh at him there?
When we got outside, there was actually a ‘fleet horse’ on the driveway. Amazing. It looks a bit like a greenhouse on a tractor, with a strappy apparatus in the middle, presumably to hold the horse in place. Apparently, he’s going to market the polythene surrounding as an advertising tool, the idea being that companies will pay him to display their logos and slogans on the side of this thing. I’m sure it will attract a lot of attention. I know I’d certainly stop and stare at a galloping horse doing a treadmill workout on the motorway … in a greenhouse. Even if I’d call the RSPCA afterwards.
I’m not sure he’s really thought the whole thing through, you know. When I pointed at the suffocating, polythene sheath, trapping the desert heat inside and threatening to melt his entire invention all over the driveway, I asked: ‘Won’t the horse get a bit hot in there, seeing as it’s 45 degrees outside?’
He looked at me for a second, then at the floor, as though a little dream had just been euthanised.
Shit, I have to start all over again, said his eyes. ‘Er, yes … I just, er … put something inside … um … some cooling,’ said his mouth.
Yes, I think living with him will prove quite interesting. Maybe he’ll even let me go on the road with him. Maybe I’ll become the stable girl and recognise my true calling as a travelling salesman. Or maybe, when he pops his clogs through heat exhaustion, I’ll just inherit his villa.
19/07
A Samsung fairytale
Once upon a time, on the taxi ride home from a pissed-up night in a karaoke bar at the top of a golden tower, a young girl called Stacey lost her phone.
If a sparkling gem like a Samsung phone went missing in the dangerous land of thieves and beggars from which young Stacey came, it would undoubtedly stay that way. Lost. Forever. Perhaps, she thought, the taxi driver might keep it for himself, or another Dub
aian explorer would pounce upon this urban treasure with a magpie’s glint in his eye and a heart of stone. She called her phone to no avail. It was switched off. Alas, alack, poor Stacey and her treasure had parted much too soon, no thanks to her Shiraz-fuelled shenanigans.
The faithful Stacey dialled her number throughout the day with hope in her hung-over heart. The verdict never changed. ‘Perhaps the insurance will cover it,’ she whispered into her monitor, as she scrolled through Vodafone’s terms and conditions. But those unspoken words echoed around the office like a tragic love song: ‘We all know it’ll take fucking months for them to deliver out here.’
But little did Stacey know her luck was about to change. That night, as she sat in the food court of a palatial shopping mall, dejectedly shovelling plastic forks full of teppanyaki beef into her mouth from a Styrofoam plate, she gazed unseeingly at the passers-by, dreaming, no doubt, of a life free from mobile communications. Across the table, her good friend Becky — a stunning princess from foreign shores with full red lips, killer tits and reams of thick, shiny blonde hair — dialled her number once more, just for the hell of it. And someone answered.
The ladies almost spat out their food in surprise. ‘Ah, I been waiting for your call,’ said the voice at the other end. ‘Your battery die. I put your SIM card in my phone. I bring you. Where are you please?’
At first, Stacey couldn’t speak. In turn, Becky bit a chunk off her plastic fork and almost swallowed it. Could it be that an angel had landed in Dubai, with a heart of gold and a taxicab?
Two hours later, Stacey was reunited with her sparkling Samsung phone. The angel drove it right to her door and placed it into her welcoming hands. She noticed as he handed it over that his own phone had itself been created at the dawn of time. Its weathered screen was devoid of colour. It was so large it would probably break the lining of his trousers if he tried to keep it in his pocket, and who knows if it even doubled as an mp3 player with unlimited Internet access and a built-in Tomb Raider game with infrared headset attachment, like hers.
As she kissed her phone goodnight, back once more in its rightful place beside her pillow, Stacey swore she would never be mean to a taxi driver in Dubai again. And the moral of this story? Just because someone can’t drive, speak English or navigate their way around a city for which they are paid to know every inch, doesn’t mean they’ll nick your mobile phone if you leave it in the back of their car.
22/07
Day one at the Iransion …
Moving Day went relatively smoothly at the weekend, and our Iranian inventor greeted us merrily on the stairwell of the villa, ladder in hand as though he’d spent the morning renovating our bedroom. I harboured a glimmer of hope he might have invented something for us. Such was not the case, although he has now installed two single beds, each with a built-in headboard that doubles as a shelving unit. Very handy. I can fit at least three books in mine and when I lie down I lose half my head to the bottom shelf. With some clever imagining it’s almost like being in a cave.
We do have a fabulous view of the fleet-horse contraption, though, still sitting proudly on the driveway. And also quite nice (although clearly not as cool) is that the Burj Dubai, soon to be the tallest building in the world, stands about half a mile away from the villa. Technically, I suppose, I could watch them build it from my bed, if my head wasn’t wedged in the shelf.
Worthy of note in itself perhaps, are the channels we can receive on the telly. The Iranian has given us cable, but along with an Internet connection that’s so slow it’s most probably powered by another animal on a conveyor belt somewhere, the only channels that aren’t scrambled are some French news stations and a whole load of porn. I’m not saying our Iranian inventor is subscribed to the porn-package, but when you can watch an Asian secretary being pounded on her office desk by a longhaired Lothario in an eighties patterned shirt, yet you can’t watch the BBC, there’s something amiss.
Oh, and in a separate note, we also discovered he’s shagging the cleaner — an Asian girl young enough to be his daughter. Which is nice.
24/07
Girls just wanna have brunch …
House hunts and fleet horses aside, I realise I haven’t yet written about losing my extravagant Friday brunch virginity. This is probably because I’m still recovering. It can take a while, so I’m told. Waxy’s was one thing, but as so many people kept telling me, a grotty Irish pub in Bur Dubai is a far cry from what this city is fast becoming famous for — an all-you-can-eat-and-drink extravaganza in a five-star beachside hotel, with requisite posh frock, high heels and an insatiable appetite for expensive food.
Even if I didn’t feel it, I’m sure I looked the part as I tottered into the glimmering lobby, wearing my hot red TopShop dress and silver strappy shoes. I have to admit, although it’s nice, it kind of feels a bit silly, dressing up for a daytime feed — like you’re heading to a wedding where the only marriage about to take place is a variety of food to a ridiculous amount of booze.
The Al Qasr hotel in the Madinat offers a life-changing experience that has since left me floundering at the edge of reality. How can I go back from this? The brunch starts at noon and goes until 4 pm, costs the equivalent of roughly sixty quid, and sets a fairytale scene of exquisite dishes heaped in glistening crystal bowls, giant ice sculptures and cocktail stations at every turn. It’s located across three different restaurants and the idea is to walk between them all, rather like the kids in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, gaping in awe at all you see, loading your plate and then filling your face back at your table as the people all around you rejoice in a banquet like no other. Reservations are a must. To my virginal eyes, this brunch was heaven with angel hair pasta and a whole lot more.
Want seasoned, spiced squid, mussels in white wine, an entire lobster cooked just right, just for you? Roast beef with radishes, salad with salmon, Italian spaghetti, a petrified-looking piglet on a carving tray? (Oh yes, if you pay enough and hit the right places, you can have all the pork you want in Dubai.) Lashings of cheese, sesame seed bread, Cumberland sausages, beef sizzled in a wok before your eyes, smoking with Jim Beam sauce? Fresh watermelon, apples with ice-cream, marshmallow chunks for the chocolate fountain, no need to ask, don’t be silly! Glasses of creamy custard and mini cakes that melt in your mouth, topped with a side of mashed potato sprinkled with jellybeans? Do what you want. You’ve paid for it. You work hard. You deserve it.
And that’s just the food.
Endless champagne? Go right ahead! Bacardi cocktails? A mojito, red wine, white wine, vodka and cranberry? You want gin and tonic followed by whisky, topped up with cider by the drunken guy sitting opposite? Maybe a milkshake, a Baileys, a Breezer, or even just an orange juice? Sure! You can even have coffee, if you want. For four hours straight, you can enjoy a despicable act of gluttony you never thought was in your power to display, and then, when you’re totally hammered and your clothes are stretching over bulges in all the wrong places, you can leave and fall asleep somewhere comfy. Or … you can get a cab with some very nice boys to a seventies disco night in a club called The Lodge and dance to Wham! until your ears bleed. Which is what I did.
Oh, yes, so I’m told, the partying never stops at ‘brunch’ — not when you’re new in town. There are too many places to go, too many people to shower you with even more booze and too many egos to grace you with their business cards. I’m planning to spend every Friday like this, for the rest of my life.
27/07
Moving on up …
Tonight, Stacey and I met our new flatmates — two Indian brothers, one who works in finance and the other who runs an events company. The latter deals a lot with laser beams. He showed us no less than 300 photos taken at various luxury events here in Dubai, all involving laser and light displays, and then said I could work for him on a cricket event he’s organising.
If I can get some companies to sponsor it, I’ll get a cut. And we’re talking three times my monthly salary, which is a pittance (if
I haven’t mentioned that already). I’m earning 10,000 dirhams a month in Dubai, which sounded like a lot before I got here, but when you consider rent is 2,500 every month when we’re sharing, and could go up to 4,500 a month or more each when we’re not, it’s not that much at all. We were never told how expensive it is to live here before we left. I guess we could have done some research in that area, but sussing out the nicest bars and restaurants and making sure we had dresses to wear to them all seemed more important at the time.
Freelance on the sneaky side might just be my answer. There are tons of mags launching all around us. I also picked up some work for a funky dot com the other day, which deals in gift experiences and entertainment. The manager sounds like a great guy — the generous M&M put me in touch with him.
M&M (the sexy Corona-buying guy we met at Barasti on that hot and sweaty night) has been very nice lately, by the way, helping Stacey and me get settled and taking us out on the town. He’s living in a big house on his own at the moment, apparently, so I think he must be glad of some new, impressionable friends to party with.
Anyway, I can now reveal I have applied for what I think could be my dream job, as the editor for the online version of the UAE’s biggest selling glossy mag. I feel a bit guilty for wanting to leave the travel publishing company, but I honestly do feel like it’s a bit beneath me at this point. Call me a demanding cow but working on an online trash mag, chatting about celebs all day and attending parties full of free cocktails, hot guys and goody bags seems far more up my street. Oh, the job description didn’t contain any of that, obviously, but I know that’s what it would be like. I’ve done it before. It would be even better in Dubai. Think of all the new places opening up every single day!
