Flash Friday

Another week has flown by. I can't believe it's mid-February already. This was the first week I started to feel like I'm getting into a routine here, so not much to report other than I walked a 10k and attended by first book club. It's starting to get hot in the afternoons (30 degrees C, 86 degrees F), which is way too reminiscent of Houston weather, and I don't likey!!!! I was promised that we would have nothing but 70 degree weather until end of May, so hopefully this week was just a fluke.  Anyway, that's where our pool comes in handy:

Luckily goes from 4'5" to 5'0" so us shorties can stand in it:) We need a volleyball net pronto! 

We just found out our shipment has arrived and is presently clearing customs! So hopefully by next Tuesday, I can start piecing our house together and figure out how to decorate the rest. Of course Ram will be out of town next week when this all happens...I'm sensing a pattern here.

Anyway, in my excitement, I've decided to give y'all a sneak peak into the living room and breakfast room. These rooms are by no means complete, but here's the before:

We still can't bring ourselves to wear shoes on our rug, lol

Who needs a fireplace in Dubai?! 

Breakfast table that I <3

Hopefully by end of March, the entire house will be decorated and furnished, so I will send updated pics.

In other news, Baby Luca turns 8 on Saturday. I still remember the day I got him at 5 weeks old. He will always have a puppy face in my book! Wish we could take him to a park, but maybe I'll throw him into the pool instead....

Luca at 6 months

Birthday boy! He's embarrassed of his bad hair cut:/ 

Mardi Gras

Did you know that Mardi Gras is celebrated in over 6 countries? All over Europe and US, Mardi Gras celebrations occurred over the weekend. So I was pleasantly surprised when there was a Mardi Gras party in Dubai. It was an expat charity gala at the Ritz Carlton. I haven't celebrated Mardi Gras since college (Galveston, oh the memories). So I had no idea what to expect in Dubai...

They had a silent and live auction.  (We had some high bidders at our table!) They also did an amazing job with the decor. I felt like we were at a wedding. Cirque du Soleil was in town for their show, Drailon, and they made an appearance. What a treat!

 

All in all it was a fun night with great food (though they didn't really attempt cajun food:/), drinks & great company. 

Table centerpieces

Tuesday Happenings

Yesterday I sent Ram off to work in a taxi and kept the car for the day. Woohoo! What's a girl to do with this freedom? I'll tell ya...

It was a crisp and cool morning, so I started my day with a jog (and managed not to get lost, yay me!).  Then I drove to the Golf Club in our neighborhood to attend an expat women's meeting.  This is another group of expats that has weekly meetings and a bunch of activity groups. The best part is that all their meetings and a majority of the members live in our area. My first meeting went well, the women were really nice and genuinely interested in getting to know me, which was a nice change. I even got some digits, holla! 

Afterwards, I treated myself to lunch at Shakespeare's (super cute cafe) in our shopping center and then headed to Le Marche for some groceries. Alright, so my one day with the car wasn't super exciting, but at least it got me out of the house for a few hours.  

While I was at the Golf Club I learned that they were having quiz night that night. Ram and I used to love going to quiz nights in Houston, so I was excited to see that this is a weekly event in our own backyard. Bonus: the golf club restaurant has an alcohol license! 

When Ram and I walked into the restaurant we saw that pretty much every table was reserved. I panicked. I mean who makes reservations for quiz night?! Apparently this is a popular event in the community. Luckily, they found us a table. An hour and 15 minutes later, the room was filled with tables of 6 or more people (one table had 14). We were the only team with 2 members but we weren't scurred. We quickly came up with a team name and got ready to the play. 

Round 1 was general knowledge. This gave us an ego boost because we actually knew a lot of the answers and it was focused on American trivia. So we were off to a great start. Could we actually be in the top 10 of this thing? The next round was famous Pirates. The only pirates I know are Captain Hook and Jack Sparrow. Fail. Next was a celebrity childhood picture round. We only got half of these right. How many can you identify (without cheating)? 

Fourth round was about famous Willies. The only Willy I know is Willie Nelson and the movie Free Willy. Double Fail. And the last round was a music round. When they played Destiny's Child "Say my Name" I got excited again and thought we could redeem ourselves. Out of 10 songs, only 3 were from our generation. Triple Fail.  

Turns out most of the trivia was focused on every part of the world except US. But hey, at least we weren't dead last! Smarty Pints rock! 

A hop, skip, and a week...

It's been a week since we moved into our new home. Though the past week has felt like an eternity, this is what we've been able to accomplish throughout the week. 

We had living furniture delivered (yay a place to sit), a bed for our spare bedroom (yay a place to sleep), all our kitchen appliances (yay I can cook and store food), and a washer and dryer (yay for laundry). We finally have a SEPARATE dryer. So that means our days of waiting 10 hours for our clothes to dry are O-V-E-R.  Dryers are seriously a luxury that us Americans take for granted. I hugged our new dryer today when I pulled out dry clothes in under 2 hours. I suggest you do the same. Seriously. 

This weekend we will get cable and Internet along with our new smart TV. It's been torture not having Internet during the day. But hopefully this is my fourth and final time to go to an Internet cafe. Four times in seven days, not bad eh? 

We still await the pending arrival of our UK shipment and the next 2 weeks cannot go by fast enough. I've discovered that with age I've become more impatient. I do not like waiting 29 days for my stuff to come from the UK. 29 days?! Really?? I do not like waiting for my visa to come through, I still have to get medical tests done. I do not like waiting another 2-3 weeks to get my driver's license and car (side note, I must have a no objection letter from my husband that I can drive, WTH). My list goes on, but I'll turn it around.  

The best part of my day is a) waking up with Luca and b) having a pool. We've been getting it cleaned over the past few days so hopefully we can take a dip tomorrow. So is not all bad. It's the simple things in life, right?  Okay, these next 2 weeks need to hurry up!!! 

Alright, so life is not all that bad. It's the simple things, right? 

-- 

Tanvi Nagarsheth Aiyer

http://aiyerinternational.blogspot.com

The Carrefour Experience

Anytime we visit a different country, the first thing on the agenda is to look up restaurants. Anyone else plan their trips around food? When we moved to a different country, one of the first things on the agenda was to check out the grocery store. Which begs the question, what do they not have that I need? In the UK, it was hard to find some basic food items, so we were interested to see the difference in Dubai.

As I mentioned in my last blog, most of the grocery stores are located in the Malls. The grocery store in the Mall of Emirates is Carrefour, which is known for their cheap prices. I would say it's like Walmart, a one stop shop for groceries, electronics, and clothing. Our first time we made the mistake of going on a Saturday (work week here is Sunday-Thursday).  It was packed and people are not accommodating. They are never in your way, you are in their way so you need to move. And since this was our first time at the grocery store, we had to go down every aisle.

We started by perusing the meat section. Immediately we noticed they don't sell mince turkey (or any form of turkey aside from deli meat).  Okay, no worries. Upon further inspection, we noticed that none of the meats contained caloric information and they all expired within 3 days. Furthermore, the label cautions against freezing. Say what?! This is why I have to go to the grocery store EVERY. OTHER. DAY.  For a city that prides itself on vision and modern technology, they can't find a way to make the food last longer? Really efficient guys.

We soon discovered the lack of caloric information goes for EVERYTHING and the 3 days expiry limitation is for all meats, dairy, fresh fruit & produce.  I think this is the Universe's way of telling me to stop counting calories. Hmmm. Next we hit up the produce section. No surprises in terms of variety here. They had pretty much everything I needed and I began to bag my items, one by one. As we started going down each produce aisle, we began to notice huge crowds on 2 different ends of the produce section. We saw a sign that said "Weighing Point." Ram and I looked at each other utterly confused. Surely they weigh and price your produce at the checkout, no? NO. I was so close to ditching all my produce in that moment, but I decided that would be stupid. Stupider than waiting in that stupid line. So we stood and waited 15 min to get all of our produce weighed and priced. Ain't nobody got time for that.

As we hit up the rest of the store, we could not find Pam or any form of fat-free cooking spray, no carbonated lemonade (got addicted to this in the UK), no cooking utensils (no spatula in our hotel), nor could we find a few other must have American food items. Seems like, just in the UK, I may have to go to several grocery stores in order to complete my weekly list. There was one cool thing to note. They have a section where you can select your seasonings and only purchase the amount you need. So if you're like me and try new recipes often, you can now buy the spoonful of a seasoning you may never consume again, instead of being stuck with the whole bottle. And they allow you to do this for grains and beans too! Touche.

Dubai Shopping

January is the month of the annual shopping festival in Dubai.  All the stores are required to offer some type of sale on a majority of the items in their store.  This is the time you may be able to get that couch you have been eyeing for 30% off or those shoes you want for 40% off.  It seems like the whole month of January is like Black Friday in the US.  Depending on what you're shopping for, it may or may not be a good deal.

By my count, there are 13 "Galleria-sized" Malls in Dubai, over 50 shopping centers, and 10 more malls/centers under construction.  Because 60+ shopping centers is just not enough for the population of 2M, y'all.  To date I've been to 2 Malls and a handful of shopping centers. Temporarily we are staying at a hotel near the Mall of Emirates and I've been there almost everyday. At first, the sheer size of the Mall was intimidating. Flash forward 1 week and 5 days later, I know where everything is. Before you judge, you should know that most of the Malls have grocery stores (a whole different blog topic) in them so it's necessary for me to go the Mall everyday, okay? Okay. Moving on.

There are some other cool types of markets here. The most popular are the Souks. (Reality check, we're not in Europe anymore!) There are a few Souks in Dubai.  When I think of a Souk, the scene from Sex and the City 2 instantly comes to mind:

Blast from the past!
Source of Photo

In Dubai, I've only been to the Madinat Jumeirah Souk.  It's smaller than the one in the movie, but it's really artistic and I fully intend to buy a thing of two for our house from there.  I was too lazy to snap pics there, so here's one that's an accurate image of what I saw:

Source of Photo

The area surrounding this Souk is filled with restaurants and you get a great view of the unique architecture and buildings that draw people to Dubai (if you're into that sort of thing).

Today, I visited Satwa, another open air market that's nicknamed "Little India."

Source of Photo

I was on a mission to find a merchant to get our UK IPhones unlocked so I didn't really look at the other stores. Apparently, it's a good place to get things repainted, reupholstered, and misc. items for a bargain.

In Dubai, the cell phone companies do not believe in the whole 'sign a contract & get a free/cheaper phone.'  Nope, over here, the IPhone5 costs ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS and the IPhone4 is around nine hundred. Had I known about this rip off scheme, I would have purchased unlocked IPhones in the US or had our UK ones unlocked before we left. (Reality check, we're not in Europe anymore!) Of course, asking a posh Mall merchant, located conveniently within walking distance of my hotel, to unlock my phone was greeted with roaring laughter in my face.

But I've been hearing that Satwa or Karama are the places that will take care of this sort of thing for 150 AED ($43). The cell phone merchants at Satwa must've been confused with my American accent and olive complexion because they wanted 370 AED ($105) for each phone and I had to leave it with them for 1 week. Um, yeeeeaaaah...NO. I'm pretty sure you're ripping me off fellow Indian. My attempts to negotiate were ineffective.  After he offered to come down 20 AED ($5), I did the whole "forget it" and walk away bit but he didn't bite. Fail.

I intend to check out another market called Karama this weekend. I plan to take the beard along and let him do all the talking. Hopefully the beard will prevail. Of course this is all anti-climatic since I cannot get a phone plan until I get my residency visa, but at least all this nonsense is keeping me entertained.

Dubai: The Good, the Bad & the Ugly

It's been a week now that we have landed in the city of sand. We've covered some ground already, so here are my initial observations about our new home.

The Good
1.  Restaurants: We've reacquainted ourselves with PF Changs, Shake-Shack & Nobu (multiple times). We tested out Buddha Bar and Siddartha for some yummy Asian fusion food. And the Lebanese food here is just amazeballs. They also have an Irish Village here. Sitting next to people with British accents felt like home.

Friday Brunch @ Warehouse

Buddha Bar

My handsome man at Siddharta Lounge

2. New Years Eve: we had a low key night at the 360 lounge overlooking the city. At midnight we got to see not 1, not 2, but 3 firework shows. It was pretty spectacular. Here's a pic of one:

3. The Weather: the constant 23 degree weather (70 F) is nice. Not having to drag along a raincoat everywhere I go is nice. But I know I'll be singing a different tune come June, so we're sitting on patios and sporting our sunglasses until then.

4. House Hunt begins on Tuesday! CANNOT WAIT.

The Bad
1. Taxi drivers: do not know where anything is! Coupled with the dodgey internet service at our hotel and no smart phone = major frustration. I also miss the friendly chatter from my local Scotsman during the drive. Over here, no one cares why you're in town and why you have an accent.

2. Residency visa: Apparently I can't get mine until they process Ram's. He begins the process this week but if that goes beyond 60 days I will have to leave the country and come back. No visa = no car, no cell phone & no DL. There's got to be an easier way...!

The Ugly
1. I don't get to see my baby Luca everyday. The hotel we're staying at does not allow pets. Dubai is not a pet-friendly city, which is a major bummer. But we have visited our little guy a few times at the kennel so far and he greeted us with this smile, so he's definitely a trooper:

2.  It's not Aberdeen. I'm very homesick (and the home I'm referring to is the 'Deen). I miss the countryside. I miss my friends. I miss my house. I miss our life there. I'm finding it very hard to not be sad these days. At least I have a few meet ups to look forward to this week, so stay tuned.