Burqalicious

by Becky Wicks

  This morning, same problem. This time it was a bus, and it almost forced us off the road and over the side of a bridge. I actually screamed today, causing much alarm among two of my colleagues in the back seat who were still drunk from last night’s shenanigans and barely noticed. I literally screamed: ‘NO, JESUS, NOOOOOO!!!’ And the driver just smiled as if I was a major cause of amusement in the moment preceding our imminent doom.

  He even continued resting his head on his hand against the door in a sleepy, bemused fashion. And then he chuckled. Yes. Chuckled! He sees it all the time. To him, dangerous driving is a daily encounter. Near-death experiences are the norm. It’s not worth batting an eyelid unless his car is literally spinning off the motorway and bouncing 50 feet across six lanes into a set of scaffolding, eliminating an entire team of construction workers like a swipe from a giant Transformer, and landing face down in a sand dune.

  It’s getting increasingly worse on the roads here, now that most of Dubai seems to be back from a summer away. The schools are back in action, the heat is dying down and the city has a different vibe to the sleepy place we arrived in two months ago. I’m not sure I like it as much, sometimes. However, it’s bound to be a hundred times more homely once we move out of the Iransion at the end of the month (more about that later). And when the temperature really cools and the bars all open with outdoor seating, we’ll be able to sit and watch day turn into night without the risk of our blood boiling and losing half of our body weight in sweat.

  But it’s the traffic on the roads that terrifies me. I’m a nervous passenger as it is. My friends at home will vouch for the fact that I’m a door-clutcher, even nipping round the corner for a pint of milk. I know it’s because of an accident I had with an ex-boyfriend when I was eighteen, and maybe a little bit because … well, I’ve been known to be a bit of a control freak … but if I’m squeezing my eyes shut and reciting the Lord’s Prayer in a spacious Volkswagen, with fifty airbags and a parachute system, imagine having me squished in the back of your Porsche.

  The thing is, though, as I’m sure I’ve reiterated many times, you need cars to get around here. Everywhere. Take the other night, for example, when Stacey and I decided to pop out for some sushi. Oh, sweet Lord, I’m feeling the Rage just remembering.

  Suffice to say, there was no ‘popping out’ involved in what became a two-and-a-half-hour expedition halfway down Sheikh Zayad Road, after realising the local sushi joint is closed on Sundays. We made it about a mile down the road on foot, dripping with sweat, our hungry dinner companion, The Trader, driving round numerous one-way systems to try and reach us, only to discover we were blocked at all angles by a mammoth roundabout, a crumbling apartment building, a vast stretch of desert and a wailing mosque.

  Eventually The Trader found us, sitting in a heap at the roadside, covered in dust like the victims of a volcano tragedy. It’s probably not even worth mentioning that by the time we’d climbed into his terracotta seats and reached another sushi restaurant, it was acoustically polluted with the sounds of a baby screaming and otherwise had only marginally more atmosphere than the moon.

  Thoroughly pissed off, we made our excuses, squished back in the Porsche (not ideal for me) and sped off to the nearest five-star hotel — the Dusit — where we calmed our Rage with the sweet sounds of some live jazz, a glass of wine and a lobster pizza in a lovely restaurant called Pax.

  But that’s not the point. The point is that by the time that gourmet pizza blessed my mouth, almost three hours had passed. That’s not popping out for dinner. That’s a food-focused expedition through torture, pain and hunger, rivalled only by the ancient tribal warriors of Eastern Tibet. In rainy season.

  I don’t want to get a car here, even though taxis are annoying. I don’t even want to be on the roads at all. But until Dubai recognises that it houses people who walk, as well as gas-guzzling, death-defying motorists, I can only keep grabbing car doors from the insides (and maybe invest in a crash helmet).

  07/09

  Who lives in a house like this?

  One-eighth the size of the Iransion, yet still an impressive erection, a tiny house made of muddy-brown-coloured fabric has appeared quite suddenly, next door to the Iransion. I don’t know where it came from. One minute, the space was a vacant, dusty patch of sand and the next, a Bedouin tent of surprise. It even has a doorstep made of stacked pink bricks, and what looks like double-glazing in a square, sliding window. There’s a curtain and drape over the door, a sloping roof in case of a miraculous downpour, and a funky blue stripe spanning the width of the entire thing. I like it a lot.

  I thought for a moment that the Iranian’s neighbours must be a little jealous of the fleet-horse. Its astounding greatness still lingers on the driveway, commanding attention and diverting eyes from all the other villas on our street. I thought maybe someone’s fighting back. Guerrilla-fabric housing could even be the next big thing in Dubai, until they finish all the buildings.

  But M&M was quick to inform me that actually this little house of mystery is a Ramadan tent, soon to be used for prayers and evening entertainment. Apparently, very soon, this little cotton house will be filled with the sweet scent of apple shisha and if Stacey and I are very lucky, we might even be welcomed inside by the neighbours for some mint tea, for Ramadan is also a time for sharing.

  I’m dying for a visit. I’m tempted to even ask if I can stay there, look after it during the day and keep the cats out. It looks far more

  cosy and comfy than my room, with its concrete slab, and we’re used to not having a working kitchen anyway.

  I’m half-considering knocking on the door or pulling back the curtain to see about rental costs. The air-conditioning system might not be sufficient, and true . we wouldn’t have the Iranian’s artistic creations watching over us as we slept but, in one fell swoop, Stacey and I would have graduated from sharing a shabby room to sharing a house with soft, billowing cotton walls and a welcoming patchwork doorway. I can’t imagine anything better!

  08/09

  First comes brunch, then comes Iftar …

  Those who push the lettuce leaves around their plates while breathing in until their ribs interlock with their spinal cords would be shunned, ignored and ridiculed in these parts. Thin might be ‘in’ elsewhere, but as you can probably tell, it doesn’t take long to adopt the attitude that eating is far from cheating in Dubai. For most people, me included now, it’s a lifestyle. The stick-thin lollipop heads of Hollywood could learn a thing or two from a few weeks over here.

  Everyone knows about the Dubai Stone. That’s how much weight the average expat gains within roughly a month of being here. But when it’s far too hot to enjoy the beach, or anything outdoors for that matter, you’ve really only got the malls or the vast expanse of restaurants offering brunches to keep you entertained. Or the gym, but that’s for losers. And I am, by now, definitely a gainer. I embrace my extra pounds. I never had this much fun with food at home.

  That said, as much as I’m enjoying it, Ramadan’s due to arrive just in time; some time this week, apparently. For those who aren’t aware, this is a month of fasting, based on the lunar calendar.

  It’s against the local law to eat or drink in public between sunrise and sunset during this time. Alcohol is banned (obviously). If you so much as crack open a bottle of water on the street you could be fined or maybe even imprisoned, and as for tucking into a homemade sandwich as you browse the Internet on your lunch break … well, just who do you think you are?

  At night, however, there’s Iftar — the breaking of the fast. There are buffets and shisha tents all over the place now, much like the one outside the Iransion, and large marquees on the grounds of most hotels. In some places, you can sit on the sand and drink tea and eat all kinds of awesome food during parties that go on all night. It’s a time when people forget about their daily concerns and sacrifice the things they love in order to spend even more time praying. It’s also a time for deep thinking, appreciating all you have and giv
ing a lot to charity. It sounds like it’ll be an interesting experience, and Stacey and I are determined to stick to the daytime fasting, as the weekend feasting has most definitely taken its toll.

  I don’t think I’ve ever eaten as much in one day as I did last Friday. It was positively disgraceful. I’ve thought the same after every brunch I’ve been to, if I’m honest. And I’ve always felt guilty. If I were to call my mother and inform her that I was ploughing through a plate of fresh seafood, having just consumed sushi with mashed potato and a chocolate waffle, she’d be on the first plane over with the indigestion capsules and a care parcel.

  But there are no rules at the impressive JW Marriott twelve-hour brunch. Yes. It lasts an entire twelve hours. I’ve always been excited by the all-you-can-consume concept. Four hours at Al Qasr was exhilarating, but the thought of an entire twelve hours’ worth of gluttony in a five-star hotel was enthralling enough to make me lose sleep over it the night before. Eventually, the buffet tables danced through my dreams, like that scene in Beauty and the Beast. Be our guest, the cutlery cried, as I scooped entire wheels of cheese onto my plate, with half a Peking duck and some cola bottle sweets. OK, I will. Thanks!

  In reality, we actually did sit at the same table for twelve whole hours. There were more than fifteen people there whom Stacey and I have met along the way: Private Banker, The Trader and Heidi included. We ate, we drank, we ate some more. We followed fresh oysters with strawberry cheesecake. We preceded a prawn stir-fry with a chocolate marshmallow kebab. We drizzled hoi sin sauce over octopus salads and topped our steaks with Stilton. Personally, I even marinated gummy bears in vodka for later consumption and stuffed my handbag with sweets. Next time I’m taking some Tupperware.

  They actually stopped serving alcohol between the hours of 4 to 6 pm, before the second shift commenced. But the staff had no complaints when we stocked up with two hours’ worth of cocktails and covered the food-splattered tables with glasses containing every spirit under the sun. And if they’d complained, we would have snuck out to the toilets in shifts and swigged from the open wine bottles they’d put on our tables earlier, which we’d then promptly hidden in our bags, complete with the caps screwed back on.

  The hilarity ensued all day, from midday till midnight, with a restaurant full of what were once normal, respectful, hungry humans looking more and more like a zoo full of savage, intoxicated animals by the hour. There was cheering, there was singing, there was dancing. There were games involving dares, involving shots, involving arguments. There were girls shoving cake in guys’ faces. But the highlight of the day came at roughly 11.30 pm, when a bloke celebrating his birthday at a nearby table was force-fed what’s known as a Bullfrog — a lethal concoction of spirits that left him slumped in his seat with his shirt round his head, unconscious and drooling into a napkin.

  Oh, grow up, that’s not funny, you might think … Well, it wasn’t, really … until the manager appeared with a fold-out wheelchair and evicted him via the back exit like a Big Brother reject, as his friends cheered and sang ‘Happy Birthday'. (I hear he’s still alive.)

  Thank goodness for a brunch-free month. An Iftar feast every night after work won’t affect us as much as an all-day blowout once a week, will it? Actually, don’t answer that.

  12/09

  Romance and the Ritz …

  M&M whisked me away last night. Or rather, I whisked him away. Thanks to my new and increasingly blag-tastic job, I received an invite to review the swankiest hotel I’ve been to yet — the Sharq Village and Spa in Doha, Qatar. The Ritz Group run the hotel, although I think the idea was to go for a little more than tea.

  Qatar is just a forty-minute flight from Dubai, so we made the trip after work and were deep in the confines of luxury by 9 pm. And I mean luxury. Not only was the bath water deliciously warm and loaded with frothy bubbles when we arrived at our room, but a heart-shaped cluster of rose petals had been lovingly sprinkled on top, which of course meant we had to get straight into it … so to speak.

  It might seem a little extravagant to fly somewhere for a night’s hotel review. It’s definitely something I wouldn’t have expected to be doing a few months ago. But then, I never thought I’d be anywhere like this with someone like M&M, who offered to pay for our flights so we could get away. Of course, I still feel guilty whenever he whisks me anywhere, as I’m sure he does. It’s something we don’t talk about, which gets to us in private. I sometimes wonder who the other woman is, and why he’s not happy, and how he got into this situation, and whether he’ll suddenly pull out of it. Or whether I’ll have to, eventually.

  I never, ever thought I’d be a mistress. I’ve barely had more than three relationships in my entire life, so trust me — the pickiest person alive — to pick this. I always pictured a mistress to be someone dark and shady with billowing breasts; the kind of woman who, whatever the weather, can always be found oozing out of a scarlet corset and perching confidently on 6-inch heels as she waits for her lover in a stationery cupboard, or an empty car park, with a whip. I might be mixing mistress with dominatrix here, but I guess they can be sort of the same …

  Not that it justifies my actions, but I’m pretty sure there are thousands of affairs happening all over Dubai, and with only a small minority of them featuring corsets or stationery cupboards. There’s certainly the money to fund them all in secret, and you often see what look like totally mismatched couples dining in darkened corners of swanky restaurants, probably thinking no one they know will ever see them. I wonder if anyone’s ever seen me with M&M and just not mentioned it.

  If I’m honest, I think about these things all the time. I wonder when it would be sensible to stop, and I constantly ask myself why I haven’t already. The fact that I think about it doesn’t make it right, of course. I carry on letting him fall for me, and I really do think I’m falling for him too, unless it’s just this swanky spell he’s cast over my life since he walked into that bar and bought me not one but two Coronas. Something keeps reeling me in.

  It’s fun, doing stuff like this. Really fun. I’ve never been the object of anyone’s desire before. Not to this extent. He buys me presents all the time. He even sends bunches of flowers to my desk, so Stanley has to stand there awkwardly, looking over the top of a huge lily when he wants to reprimand me for something. It’s an amazing ego boost, if nothing else, to know that me, a normal girl from a humble hamlet in Lincolnshire, appears quite unwittingly to be rocking an Arab’s world.

  But then … I really don’t want anyone to get hurt. Does that sound pathetic? I’m worried I’m just weak.

  He’s told me quite a few times now that he loves me. I really do think he means it. I’m still not sure if I love him back, though. It’s kind of scary, hearing it. He makes me want to say it in return, but I know I shouldn’t. The only person I can really talk to about it all is Stacey, because to the rest of the world M&M and I are separate entities, with nothing whatsoever but a few pissed-up nights on the town to link us together. And this very fact gets to me more than I care to admit.

  I’m not very good at keeping secrets. I like to share my life … as you can probably tell. But I can’t leave him cutesy notes on his Facebook wall. I can’t call him late at night for a chat, or invite him out for dinner whenever I feel like it. I can’t expect him to be there if something breaks in my bedroom, or God forbid I should wind up in hospital in the middle of the twilight hour. I can’t have him bail me out if I accidentally kill a camel. I can’t go home and meet his mum — and I definitely can’t go to his house now that his wife’s home.

  But he can still do whatever he likes, of course. He can go where he pleases. He can promise me the world and then go back to her bed. And he can also, as displayed during ‘that’ night at The Trader’s place, up and leave me feeling completely repulsive.

  At the moment, you know, although I’m strangely in awe of M&M, I’m not sure how much I can handle the wall that sits between us. We’re from totally different worlds, M&M and I.
And if I’m truly honest, aside from a shared appreciation of the finer things in life, we don’t really have a lot in common. He’s very wise and knowledgeable and I’m . not. He speaks to me like a grown-up about politics and business and money, but sometimes, because none of those things excite me, I feel like a stupid child.

  There were more rose petals scattered on the snowy white sheets of our enormous bed when we moved there, after dinner. I never thought I’d see a bed decorated like that until my honeymoon. And I’m not sure it isn’t slightly greedy to expect it for a second time, if that day ever comes.

  It’s quite annoying actually, how it suddenly strikes me on the most romantic of occasions, when most girls should be planning forever with someone so incredibly wonderful and fun, that M&M, although clearly in transition, isn’t really mine to speculate about at all.

  13/09

  Ramadan kareem …

  Everyone’s been saying Ramadan Kareem to me all day. It’s the first day of the holy month, according to the moon. Ramadan Kareem is a bit like saying ‘Happy Christmas’ really, only you can’t spend five hours cooking a turkey and getting pissed on whisky. Food and drink are illegal, banned, wrong, insulting and offensive for the next four weeks, as is smoking and having sex during daylight hours (sigh — I’ll really miss that).

  After work we can go to Iftar, which as I’ve mentioned is when we break the fast by stuffing our faces, but there’s to be no music at all, so Harry Ghatto’s is closed all month. I know. It’s a tough one to deal with, believe me, but as Heidi quite rightly pointed out to me today, ‘music leads to dancing, and dancing leads to sex,’ so it’s for the good of all mankind that it bolts its fine self up for a while.