It's That Time Again

Home Sweet Home

I've said this before, when it comes to visa renewal time I'm always a little surprised. Can two, three or five years really whistle round that quickly?!

The last time was back in 2011, before that 2008. My first visa took forever to come through, but more than that, I couldn't help but wonder: would I stay in Dubai for a WHOLE THREE YEARS??!!

Fast forward five years to my second renewal and it's fair to say that should they ever announce permanent visas for UAE ex-pats, I will be first in the queue. Elbows at the ready!

My Name's Monica, and I'm a cleanaholic

Love it! (Disclaimer: not my hand, not my sofa.)

I make no secret of the fact that I like things neat and tidy. It's not for nothing that I've been compared to Monica from Friends in the past. In the words of the woman herself: 

"If it's not a right angle, it's a wrong angle!!"

OK I'm not quite that bad, aside from anything else I have precious little time to arrange things symmetrically like a crazy person, but I am a sucker for a tidy room, organised closets and orderly drawers. I just feel more calm and soothed when everything is in its rightful place, and will happily pad around the villa for an hour on Friday morning neatening things up after the usual whirlwind of the working week.

It's meant a few clashes with DH. He's a pretty typical man: ie just doesn't seem to SEE mess or be bothered by it all. He can step over pants on the floor for a full week without thinking: " what are these clothes in a heap here?" or "perhaps I should move them."

We've rubbed along ok - I've relaxed a little about high-jumping the pile of pants, he's learnt the route to the washing machine and dishwasher.

One thing that has bothered me for a long time (and is nothing to do with DH, god love him) is our sofa. It's been around for a few years, survived a few years, and it's textured grey nature has meant for me, it just MUST have been hiding a multitude of sins.

This being Dubai, one quick call, 25 quid later and a team of little men turn up to clean it. They arrived with what looked like a white dalek, and giddily went about what can only be described as 'wet vaccuming' the couch.

Their giddiness reached fever pitch when I got giddy about the whole process too. I was then treated to a description of the process so detailed and enthusiastic that I'm pretty sure I could now turn my hand to the career of sofa-vacuuming, should I wish to.

One hour later they left, the sofa was resplendent in its new, sweet smelling, sparkling glory. I swear it looked brand new.

"Look!" I exclaimed to DH!  "It looks amazing no! And smells fantastic, hey!"

He cast an eye over their results with a bemused expression. "This makes you happy darling?" 

"Yes!" I squeaked.

"Well in that case let's get it cleaned whenever you like."

Ah. His housework misdemeanors were all forgiven in a flash.

Good Morning World!

Good morning world!

I love my journey to work. Aside from the fact that it's 8 minutes by car (used to be the same on foot) it's a really great route. 

After pootling through some of the oldest residential streets in the city, I head down a large main road. Although this is sparkling and well groomed (as are all of Dubai's roads) you can tell it's been around for donkey's years. It's flanked by trees: big trees, not the skinny, newly planted ones in Downtown. These are so wide you'd struggle to get your arms round them, with branches so vast you could get the cast of Fame in the shadows they spread. 

The palm trees are old too. Like the gnarly older brothers of the Downtown Boulevard palm trees, their knotted trunks and oh-so bushy tops make them look markedly different to the usual sanitised Dubai palm trees.

At the end of the road I turn onto the huge highway that takes me into the office, and am met with the (always) resplendent sight of Sheikh Zayed road, complete with skyscrapers, the Burj Khalifa, but also piles of low rise villas back from the days when Dubai was a pile of sand with no electricity and A/C. Oh, and 99.9% of the time there's a backdrop of blue sky and sunshine. Joy. I love love loved my walks to work through the Manchester streets, but it's hard to beat this view as I head to the office each day...

Always impresses me...

The Card's in the Post...Oh Really!?

My reaction to the bill. Minus tie and dodgy hair.

You probably know by now that Dubai has no postal system. Ridiculous, I agree. 

If you're in the UK, you CAN still send things here, if you're prepared to go to the post office and pay a little extra for an air mail stamp. 

Or, you could of course courier something, if you really wanted to. 

No one ever uses this option. 

In fact, it's rare to get any post at all. 

I have a few friends who do send me mini parcels on a regular basis, and when they arrive, they are like GOLD. The office boy chirpily brings them to my desk like one of the wise men clutching precious Frankincense. Honestly, it's THAT big an occasion when a parcel arrives from the mystical 'U.K'.

If you're in Dubai and want to send anything to the UK, the post office is a bit of a waste of time. There's a very good chance it will never get there. This means that in order to sort birthdays, Christmases, and general gifts, you have to use a courier.

I use the office UPS service. It's easier, quicker, no hassle of trekking to an office or a mall. I have to pay for it, it's not a freebie. Each month a finance bod brings me my bill, I sign it off, and it's deducted from my pay packet.

Want to know what this month's bill was? Really? Ok then:

• 200 GBP.
• TWO HUNDRED UK POUNDS
• $280

Whichever currency you write it in, that's a whole lot of dosh in my opinion.

I didn't feel like I'd sent a lot of things...a letter, a few packs of wedding photos, a couple of gifts. But wowser! Call me tight,but that bill made me flinch.

Here's the thing: I want to stay in touch with my lovely friends and family. I don't want to be the kind of person who gives to receive. But it's hard not to feel like things are a little one sided when you see the black and white evidence of the effort you make to stay connected, and compare it to the number of birthday, Christmas and wedding cards you've received over a five year period. Which barely make it into double digits.

What are your thoughts, Dubai chums and overseas ex-pats? How do you correspond with the UK? Rely on Moonpig? Never send gifts or parcels? Or bite the bullet and cough up, like I've been doing? Would love to hear your thoughts.

Just Call me Grandma

Comfy, no??!!

Heels. High heels. Women salivate over them, lust after them, covet them. And years ago, I was never out of them. In my twenties I went from office to bar to club to bed with a pair of them stuck to my feet like glue. In my raving days I'd dance for 12 hours without flinching in a pair so vertiginous it would make Posh look short.

And then something happened. Living and working in Manchester city centre meant that walked a lot, and realised that I couldn't reach the warp speeds that I like to move at if I was teetering in heels. 

But more than just practicality, I realised that THEY HURT. This revelation was a huge surprise to me. This had never bothered me before. Perhaps in the past I was always anesthetized by wine, perhaps I just got older. Whichever, heels are not the friends they used to be to me these days. I'm tall, so I'm lucky that without them, I don't look like Kylie's twin sister (although I'd love her bottom!) so I don't feel the need to wear them day in day out.

We started an office clear out this week and as I rifled through my cupboards I discovered I have SIX pairs of heels tucked away to change into for meetings. I simply can't stand them for a full day so just jump into them when I want to. Rock, and indeed roll, my friends.

I paused in Marks and Spencer a few months ago - they have lovely heels with (whispers) padding inside them. Is this a step into middle age? Will it be a slanket and giant slipper next (have to confess have always thought these look ace.) Answers on a postcard, please.

Storing Nuts for Winter

Me, about to head to Choithrams.
You snooze, you lose!

My Facebook chums will be familiar with my annual search for seasonal items...iced mince pies, hot cross buns...CREME EGGS.

Last month's plaintive cry for help in sourcing Creme Eggs meant I gleaned a huge amount of intel about where exactly the fondanty little critters were hiding in this fair city. What with my enthusiastic (some might say Holy Grail searching dedication) to finding them, and my lovely visitors and friends supplying care packages, my fridge now literally overfloweth with these treats.

Last count: 19 Creme Eggs. Make that 18, I just scoffed one.

Happy Days!

Bills, Bills, Bills

I prefer the bills these gals warble about..

NO, not some whimsical post about the back catalogue of Destiny's Child (although, to be fair, I could write a few tomes about my mis-spent youth and dancefloor bogling to these fine ladies), more an exasperated mini-rant about bills of the 'drain your bank account' kind.

There's a definite load of assumptions made about living in Dubai, the tax-free salary, the savings we must all be making. That's a separate post. But I'd be very interested to know what people cough up in the UK on monthly basis for utilities. You know, electricity, water, the kinda stuff you'd struggle to live without these days. Because my tax-free salary is disappearing into my meters!

From memory my Manchester bills never crossed the 150 GBP mark per month, absolute max. I had a large two bedroomed apartment, and Manchester is COLD most of the year round, you hear me. I wasn't skimping on the (electric heaters). 

Dubai is HOT for most of the year which means the reverse is needed - from May until November our air con is on pretty much 24 hours a day. To be honest, I can't sleep without it now, and it's only April. This means our monthly bills average the $600 mark. That's about 400 quid. Call me old-fashioned, but that's a lot of money, no? 

And it can be even more when you hit the 'think you might die if you're outside for more than 5 minutes without a white wine spritzer/gallon of water' death-months of July and August. Oh for the days of apartment living when my monthly bills were so small they were less than a bag of groceries from Spinney's.

Tell me, UK chums, am I way out of touch with the price of fish back home? 

Dubai chums, how does this compare to your monthly outgoings - and any tips to reduce them? I'd love to hear from you...

6...Is the Magic Number

A Golden Age....

I'm an only child. I didn't grow up in a house full of rambunctious brothers and sisters. I don't have any children. So it's safe to say I'm not massively familiar with the ways of children, young and old. So what an eye opening pleasure to was to have my niece and nephew to stay with us for a week this month. 

Of course we threw ourselves into general visitor related tourist fun: as my favourite blogger says: 

"Having visitors of any sort staying means you do more interesting things, too, doesn’t it – when someone’s paid £400 to fly here, they rarely want bad TV on the sofa every night, do they?"

I learned a lot about children - well 6 and 11 year old children anyway. They're both gorgeous, well mannered and entertaining kids. They eat a lot. They use untold amounts of toilet rolls (How? Why?). They LOVE the swimming pool. 

And I also learnt that basically, I am a 6 year old girl inside a 30 something (ahem) woman's body. What do I mean? Well we just have SO much in common. I hereby present the evidence:

She adores Molly The Cat (MTC). Hours of fun stroking MTC, chatting to MTC, having her photo taken with MTC, throwing toys for MTC. Enough said.

She has an eye for fashion. Take the girl to a shoe shop and she was snaffling up pink Ugg ankle boots faster than a rat up a palm tree. Whilst never owning a pink pair (if only they did adult sizes!) I am rather partial to wriggling my toes into my fur lined Uggs when the Dubai mercury plummets to 20 degrees.

Bikinis are very important to her. As a woman who owns upward of 20 such items, we had numerous chats about the merits of various styles and colours.

She's a big fan of the otters and beavers at Dubai Aquarium. As both these critters make it into my top ten favourite animals, you can only imagine the fun we had gazing through the glass at them. And taking photos. And oohing and ahhing. You get the picture.

The Build a Bear workshop was a highlight of her holiday. I've wanted to get into this place since the day it opened, but with no ankle biters, did not feel appropriate to barge in. Words cannot express the joy at finally getting in there! And making a bear! (It's called Kelly, natch.)

She's a beach bunny. Hours of endless fun were spent paddling, collecting shells, laying out and examining shells, basking in the sunshine and generally prancing about in bikinis. Whilst I confess this involves slightly more movement that my typical day at the beach, it was a joy nonetheless.

Make up your own mind, but I ended the week feeling that we were practically the same person. I think this says much more about me than her. Hurry back to Dubai little one, we miss you.

Garden Joy!

Best money we ever spent. Note: the sea is not in our back garden.
Just the sofa.

Before we moved to the villa, I have to confess, my interest in anything garden related was minimal. Back in Manchester my balcony gardening resulted in a number of (non-intended) deaths, resulting in the purchase of some beautiful and expensive artificial plants. They looked just like the real thing, required no watering or upkeep and could survive the hideous Manchester weather.

I did try a few plants on various Dubai balconies, but despite my dear dad being a landscape gardener by trade, I lacked any real skills or enthusiasm.

Fast forward to villa living and it's a whole different ball game.

We're blessed with a front and back garden, the latter of which has proved a revelation. I have to admit, when we were pricing up the villa, I wasn't sure at all about the extra work/water/dirhams (monthly bills of 500 GBP, anyone?!) involved in keeping a garden, but oh! How we love it now.

I've never been a morning person, so after dragging myself out of bed for work on my hands and knees each morning it's a beautiful treat to stagger to the back terrace with a coffee and Molly the Cat to contemplate the world before the melee of corporate life. There's a 99.9% chance of blue sky, sunshine, and sometimes little fluffy clouds. At this time of year there's a cool breeze, the birds are singing, butterflies waft past (no, really) and the whole thing feels a bit like a Disney movie. It's an absolute treat.

Fast forward 14 hours and it's still a treat. Darkness has fallen, the stars have come out, there's the same cool breeze, mingling with the call to prayer from the mosque next door.  Our huge garden lounger comes into its own, and there's something so soothing about lounging on it, glass of Sauv Blanc, or fizz (depending on severity of the day) either reading a book, chinwagging with DH, or sometimes (the treat!!!) catching up on UK TV on the ipad.

In a month the sweltering Dubai heat will rule the garden out of bounds until October, but just for now, we're eking each and every minute from it.

Eggs, Buns and Easter

You KNOW by now that I love living in Dubai not least because all of the nationalities and religions seem to co-exist here in peace.

We celebrate Diwali, Eid, Ramadan, Christmas in equal measure, and last weekend saw Easter roll into town. My frinds with kids giddily set up Easter egg hunts in their gardens, took the ankle biters to meet the Easter Bunny (no, really) and I even got given Easter Sunday off work (the owner of my company is Christian.)

As I spent this precious extra day off reclining on the garden sofa (sorry!) in the sunshine I too a moment to reflect on the bliss of this cultural melting pot. We are blessed. 

Then I reached for Cadbury's Creme Egg. These suckers cost more than gold here in Dubai (5 GBP a box) but boy oh boy they are worth it. I ate two, just to check their import quality. They passed.

Happy Easter everyone. (A few weeks late, I'm behind on the blog, sorry!)