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Now I’m convinced we moved to the right place Michael Jackson visits Dubai and considers buying property there.

Apparently Australians in Sweden have compiled a pretty funny list of things that indicate you’ve been too long there. Could a similar list perhaps be compiled for the UAE? I’ll volunteer to compile and host it. If you have ideas, please email them to me (magnus@nystedt.org).

For all of you back home, weekends here are Thursday and Friday. So Monday is Saturday, and Sunday is Friday. We’re slowly getting used to it but it’s still very strange. First Friday we were here I went out looking for some mobile phone accessories without thinking first and of course everything was closed. Other than that it works almost like home in that most places are open Thursday (which would be Saturday) and most places are closed or have limited opening hours on Friday (which would be Sunday). The major shopping centers and malls are open both Thursday and Friday.

It’s so true that you don’t know what you have or how much you depend on something until you don’t have it anymore. We went to Spinneys tonight and found the pork section and it was like Christmas. We’ve only been in the UAE for a few weeks so it’s not like we’ve been going without for very long and some things you get used to do without, but when you’re brought up on pork bacon, sausage, chops, etc. you do miss it pretty fast. We spent a small fortune (way too much!) so now our little freezer is full of goodies.

For those of you who don’t know, muslims don’t eat or handle pork in any way and so it’s not sold in most stores and it’s not on the menus in most restaurants. At hotels you can often ask for pork sausage and bacon, but not always.

Food here is very cheap, and Magnus feels as a Swede that you feel right at home here with the food in the stores.  There are a lot of breads, cheeses, and yogurts to pick from that remind him of home.  For me the stores are nice and the stores do remind me of the stores in Sweden or the UK, but it is not as home in the US.  Today I was telling Magnus that I really wanted some fried chicken, rice and gravy, butter beans, corn, and some squash, and you could add a slice of pound cake to that as well. We also really miss our Lance crackers (peanut butter on cheese) and our greek seasoning to cook with.  Now I just have to remind Mom to add the crackers to the long list of things to put in a care package for us.  

We brought our cell – sorry mobile – phones with us from the USA and they do actually work here. We got them unlocked before we left so they could connect to the network here (that was $10 per phone) and although they still say Cingular, they work on the Etisalat network here. However the reception was really bad on our Sony Ericsson phones so we ended up buying new Nokia phones and they work in a lot of places where the Sony Ericssons would not. And Nokia seems to be a wise choice – everybody here has Nokia it seems. Having a mobile phone here is absolutely vital it seems since everyone has one. You might think a lot of people have mobile phones in the US or Sweden but here I bet you there are more users as a percentage than pretty much anywhere else. And there’s not any of that stuff about picking a provider when you pick a phone. Like in the US you pick a network and then you pick a phone and with that phone you can only call on that network. Here you only have Etisalat to choose from so you buy a GSM SIM card from them and then you go buy whatever phone you want. So phones are not tied to the operator which is nice.

Another thing is time… People seem to have there own time, and it probably is not your time. Their 10 minutes are probably 30 minutes and their 30 minutes is probably an hour. Your meeting may start at 11:00 or it may start at 10:45, 11:30, there is no telling really Time is not as important as timing is. Now to be fair businesses are usually on time, and they expect you to be on time, but deliveries and others are not on time, they are on their time. So there is a different perception of time here and for us coming from the time-obsessed west, it takes some getting used to.

Driving can be a bit of adventure here it seems. We haven’t been able to buy a car yet but we will as soon as possible but driving seems a bit of a daunting task. I have learned to not watch that much while others are driving, because it can be a bit scary. The only thing that most people watch are the stop lights, they will obey all stop lights. For people that do not follow time, they do seem to be in a hurry in traffic, and they will blow their horns if you are not quick to move when they want you too. So you have to have a good horn, if you are to drive around here We’ve seen a couple of accidents in our time here and it seems amazing that there are not more accidents than there are.

A few things you have to watch out for here…  The taxi drivers do not have any idea where you live unless you speak their language or have a map.  If you call a taxi you have to give step-by-step directions because you have no street address, and you will probably have to repeat yourself many times. But they will learn your area and know where to find you after awhile. And make sure you stay with simple instructions in English. So instead of ‘Go straight ahead and then turn right just before the Palace’ you go ‘Palace, right.’ Even if you have a map or go by a map to describe the way for them, they may not understand. They largely go by landmarks and their names for streets are not necessarily the ones you can read on the map. Oh and the taxi driver may have a bit of a smell about him, and it is not the nice kind But most are very helpfully and they try really hard to take care of you. And there are taxis everywhere. Small Toyota Corollas or Nissan Sunnys are everywhere and to get across town is rarely more than 5 Dirhams ($1.25).

Abu Dhabi is a beautiful city with around 2 million people living and working in the city. But the city seems to really come alive at night. That probably has more to do with it being so hot during the day and people are off from work. However at night it seems like the humidity goes way up or perhaps you just notice it more and sometimes you wonder if it’s not actually worse at night even though the temperature is lower. Abu Dhabi is made up of many different people, from many different places. Magnus has become an expert on Abu Dhabi, so I am pretty sure that he will blog more about that later.