Dubai Update #12 – Odd Spot

Small post of some odds and ends

When next you are stuck in a traffic jam, have a thought for this lot –  7 lanes at a stand still.

And if you get upset with the traffic, they don’t tolerate road rage.

A couple of typical homes near Amanda’s Villa

 

An impressive waterfall inside the Dubai Shopping Mall

Amanda and Christian’s villa complex -“Toy Town”

Our Local Grog Shop

The only clue is the faint champagne glass outline on the door.

You cannot enter without a license to buy booze.

It is part of Islamic belief that if you are in a position to, you should contribute to the community.

So scattered around the suburbs you will often see cooled water dispensers for use by the public.

This one for example is near Amanda’s villa and we see it when we walk to the local shops.  The houses (mansions) are surrounded by 3-4 Metre fences and this house has gone to the trouble to mount this cool water dispenser on the outside of the their perimeter wall. You can imagine how long it would last in a serviceable condition in our suburbs.

Today Chris and I walked to the local shops for coffee and cake (yes, in the Dubai area, western style cafe’s are around with good coffee and cake).

Reading the local paper we came across an interesting article.

A child in a public area (park) reported to her mother that she saw a man and a woman wrestling.  The mother took a look, and in fact remained watching them canoodle for an hour before reporting them to authorities.

They were subsequently arrested, sent to gaol for 12 months and will be deported on their release. They are a Filipino couple. It is likely the woman was a maid and the man a builders labourer living in a labour camp.  The labourer would probably earn around 800Dhs a month ($200) and his living and working conditions appalling.  The maid would have very austere maids quarters and their only opportunity to see one another would be the one day off a week on a Friday. Obviously it took the dobber an hour to decide that she was offended. Public display of affection  between men and women is not on. However men are seen to touch noses in a traditional greeting and hold hands as they walk around in public. Go figure! Women will also show some affection toward one another but  a man and woman arm in arm is forbidden.

A little background to the labour situation; native Emiratis have a very high unemployment rate as they refuse to work at starting levels in private enterprise and do not like working in retail. They consider themselves above all that. Most are employed on very high salaries for menial tasks in the public service, but the public service cannot possibly employ the whole Emirati Native population.  They do get about $20k pa year just for being Emiratis even if they are not employed.  There are no unemployment benefits for any other sections of the community.

Consequently all labouring, retail, waiters, and hotel staf, taxi drivers etc., are imported labour from the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, none of who are able to get residence status.

This will probably be my last post from Dubai, so thank you for coming along for the ride. Hopefully I haven’t bored you to distraction. And to those people who would like to see more photos of family and grand kids, that will have to be in a different forum than my very public blog site.

Cheers

Graham

For those interested, all my blog posts this trip have been done with my Asus, Android Tablet.  While not as good for processing photos, as a laptop, still very capable.  I would suggest it would have been considerably more difficult with an iPad as it is little more difficult to get photos onto them and they have no USB or SD card capability.