Life in Dubai....
Sorry no pictures just yet.
Brief history - we've been here for close to 7 years now. I was brought out here by a small company, working in the graphic arts and printing industry (GraphiTools - Barco Graphics agent). THis page is now rather out of date - I'll have to re-write it one of these daze.
Next worked in a similar position to what I was doing in Cape Town, with a company in Sharjah selling and supporting Icom radio and Trimble GPS products. Very pleasant there, not too far from home, but working 6 days per week. I was there for over 1 year - also did a lot of work in Sharjah Airport. Saw a good eclipse from Sharjah - there's a separate page for that.
We now live in Jumeira, to the south-west of Dubai - see the Map of Dubai page. Takes some time to load tho, so be patient! We're off the left side of the map, not too far past the Trade Centre in a small compound with the villas arranged in a u-shape around a central pool. Compared to the compound in Sharjah this is paradise.
We lived in
Sharjah for quite some time, about 20 km from Dubai - not
very far if the traffic is light (most times it isn't).
It used to take almost an hour to get in to work when I
worked in Dubai. I would take a short cut across the sand
which cut the journey down to 25 minutes, and only the 4x4s
can do it, altho you'd get the odd person in a front
wheel drive Honda Civic trying their luck! The wife's
driving about in a Land Rover Discovery with a 4 litre
fuel-injected V8 engine - but petrol here is cheap so the
V8 is affordable. Look at The Cars
page to see what I'm driving (ok if the page doesn't load, the car is a Mustang GT 5.0 V8). We had an automatic hired
car for a few weeks when we got here so that was a good
introduction to driving in the UAE. Driving here is crazy.
Firstly you drive on the right, but that only takes a few
days to get used to. The real challenge is staying in one
piece on the roads here. Following distances are far too
short (and if you leave a good distance someone fills it),
indicators are unknown and people are VERY impatient. The
traffic circles are interesting! Needless to say the
accident rate is high.
Temperatures at the moment are low (15C - 25C) - about as
cold as it gets in winter. Far too cold to swim!! In summer the temps reach 50C with very high humidity at night (like 100%) and the temp at night falls to 40s. Dubai
is safe - we can walk late at night in areas which by
Cape Town standards would be considered suspect, if not
downright dangerous, and we feel completely safe. Don't
even look behind us. People buy e.g. TV sets and leave
them on the pavement while they fetch their cars. Try
that back home.
