Tuesday, December 25, 2007

Christmas in the Emirates

The Weasel is a little out of sorts at the moment, stranded in a friends vacant house for Christmas and waiting for Dubai Municipality, Du and Dewa for the new place.
Could be here for a while then.............

Monday, December 24, 2007

Oh I do like to be beside the seaside

The Weasel has hopefully made his last house move in Dubai, the 3rd in 4 years, it gets more stressful every time though the opportunity to clear out the accumulated rubbish of 2 years is welcome.

Moving away from the empty quarter and back to the sea is the best part of this latest flit, the opportunity to finally kiss the Ranches goodbye is a day to be savoured.
Of all the developments in "New Dubai" the Ranches is, for this Weasel, easily the worst.

The issues surrounding this development and Al Reem 1 in particular are legion but we can list a few here:
  1. Access, this is the greatest bugbear and one that on its own drove the Weasel from the Ranches. In Reem 1 heading for Mall of the Emirates the main gate is a congested 7km, 20 speed bumps, and a constuction traffic jam from the exit, heading toward Silicone Oasis the Weasel could drive for almost 6 Km to arrive back within in a few yards of his den, but now on Emirates road. On the original models and plans for the development there was a Reem 1 exit, that, like so much of Emarr's hype was an empty promise.
  2. The Reem 1 houses are actually crap, dark and miserable inside, the number of serious cracks in the plaster would worry this Weasel if he had bought one (though to be fair they were cheap when launched- just don't buy one now...). Reem 2 and 3 are a bit better with an improved design including a garage roof that actually keeps the elements off the car, though residents are still not allowed to put doors on their own garages.
  3. The enfored community spirit trumpted by a few busybodies who voted themselves onto the Commitee is laughable, it's a housing estate NOT a "community" and the sooner you silly people realise that, the better. Their private website lists calamity after calamity in the most hysterical fashion, the latest is, - shock horror - parking on the road outside your own house. On serious issues such as access and the woeful supermarket they have proved to be utterly toothless.
  4. Speed limits, the "community" is covered by a blanket 40kmph speed limit, this is the favourite bugbear of the commitee, with daily rants against "lunatic drivers". However what they fail to address is that the access roads are just that, access roads, and trying to enforce a ridiculously slow speed limit will result in it being ingnored. So Emarr in order to enforce the unenforceable have installed hundreds of speed bumps around every junction that quickly result in suspension damage to cars and congestion as traffic queues up to crawl over the bumps. This in turn results in drivers overtaking around slow cars at the speed bumps, and exiting vehicles chancing their luck to force themselves into the traffic, in turn making the junctions more dangerous, not safer.
  5. Shopping, not normally a Weasel worry but the standard of supermarket in particular at the Ranches is appalling, Le Marche, a well known chain in France has been imposed on the development by Emarr. Their imposition of their own personal dogma on the residents (no pork), and crap out of date food would be fine if there was a choice, but there isn't (see access above) so you are stuck with it - for 10 years...
  6. Distance, can't really complain about this since they havn't moved since the Weasel set up house there but seriously the distance and time to get to anywhere remotely interesting is tiresome and expensive. The famous interchange that was to solve all access problems was due to be completed in 370 days......18 months ago.......and it is barely half finished, it still takes up to an hour to do the journey from media city.
  7. The lake......this was a glorious lake in the middle of the development, quite pretty really and houses overlooking it were sold at 25% premium, all well and good, until Emarr drained it and started building on the lake bed, guess the space was too much to resist eh.
Still there is at least one good thing about the place, the tempreture and humidity in Summer are far more bearable that far out into the desert, a small but significant difference.
The entire development is not one of Emarr's better efforts, though to be fair, it is still very popular, just do not live in Al Reem 1.....

So where to next? Dubai marina is the next abode, should the weasel be reviewing his name? The sea weasel perhaps?

Sunday, December 16, 2007

Moving on and again

A good friend of the Weasel's left Dubai today, and thinking of the good times that had been shared the Weasel became aware that he had little or no record of many of them.

Those times are of course all in the collective memory, but the Weasel does like to savour a good tale, and like a fine wine they are sometimes best laid down for a while before being brought out, dusted off, decanted, garnished as necessary and recounted over a bottle or two.

Fortunately his leaving friend has his own far superior blog and this has driven the Weasel to resolve to maintain this, albeit flawed, record better. On a sadder note, the Weasel is also witnessing a close relative start the slide to old age memory loss, distressing, and something that maybe these accounts scribbled late at night can in some way offset.

One of the oddities of Dubai is that people are always leaving, and not just moving to the next town but literally thousands of miles away, this means that local legend even within small circles only generally lives as long as the last resident of that group remains in Dubai.

The only experience that comes close to this city of temporary residents harks back to the Weasel's youth and a period spent as a cog in the military wheel. There, on constantly rotating postings you were never more than a couple of years from saying goodbye to everyone and meanwhile had to farewell all those you met on day one as they in turn left.

It's an exhausting process and can lead to insulation and shallow relationships, something immediately apparent in the the long term crowd in Dubai when the Weasel first arrived. All friends that were made at that period were themselves newcomers, while this could have been ageism, it was also a shared experience thing and possibly a desire on the part of the old timers to avoid the emotional roller coaster.

In the last few years however the Weasel has seen this gradually change, prior to 2000 Dubai seemed to have two types of resident, those who came for 2 years or those who had been here for 25 years, the difference is now that the churn rate has reduced, the Weasel still has many of the friends that were made on day one and strangely many are still in Dubai, some even left and came back.

This in someway is great but makes their leaving harder when it does come (as it will to all).

Have a good one mate, this furry friend wishes you all the best, we will see you soon.