House hunting - Dubai (21st Sept.'08)

Talking of hassles, the biggest of them all is of course finding an apartment here. Rents seem to be increasing 5% every month, and they've increased by as much as 25% in some areas since the time I came here in July to tie things up.

And not that apartments are not there. You find apartments of all kinds listed in newspapers - 1/2/3-bedroom apartments, 4/5-bedroom villas, furnished & unfurnished, all kinds. But if you're looking to find a place with all reasonable amenities nearby (supermarket, medical facilities, transport) at a reasonable rent - just forget it! All such areas within reasonable cost are either just too far away (e.g. International City), secluded blocks (e.g. Discovery Gardens) or still coming up (with lots of dust around) e.g. Jumeirah Lake Towers. On two successive days, I walked something like 5 miles (each day) in the Bur Dubai/Mankhool area, just looking for an apartment, without any success - I'm sure at the minimum it'd help me lose some of my tummy!

So your choice is between the devil & the deep sea - either chose a place with no amenities nearby (and probably far from everywhere), or pay through your nose. As for me, I've been scouting around for close to four weeks (my colleagues tell me they - collectively! - didn't take that much time to find an apartment). Finally I plumped for an area with all reasonable facilities nearby i.e. Bur Dubai. Some people tried to dissuade me, citing the distance from office & consequently the time to be spent commuting every day. But, at the end of the day, you need to be assured that while you're at work the 12 hours or so, your family is well provided for and secure.

Even here, it's not easy to land a good apartment. There are so many permutations and computations. Old building, new building. Open kitchen, separate kitchen. With gym/swimming pool, or without. And the clincher for us - with balcony and without. After all, we Indians do need a bit of Sun to dry our clothes. So it seems I'd finally have to stay on at the hotel apartment for some more time. Not a bad idea as the rent here - almost the same as that of a regular apartment (for a year) - is inclusive of utilities and daily cleaning (plus you save on the 5% commission), something for which you'd otherwise spend a small fortune.

Trying to settle down - Dubai (21st Sept.'08)

It's such a long, long time since I wrote the blog. So many things have happened in between. I left my last job, joined another, then left it after a bit less than 2 years. 

First thing anyone who comes to Dubai in the summers notices is, of course, the heat. Quite different from India. It hits you like a wall. Anyways, I coped OK for a few weeks and now it's a bit cooler (though not 'cold' by any standards - you still need the aircon indoors all the time). And people in my office at Jebel Ali (outskirts of Dubai, on the Sheikh Zayed Road to Abu Dhabi) tell me that the temperature here touched 61C in peak summer - I'm lucky! The second thing you notice here is that Fridays are Sundays!!(:-)

Staying in a hotel apartment in Bur Dubai and commuting the 65-odd kilometers to office everyday, it's a more than 1-hour commute in the morning & an hour in the evening. Vehicles move at more than 100 KMPH here on an average (and some people even exceed the mandated max. of 120, speed at which the cars start beeping - factory setting!). However, the volume of traffic is so much that it crawls during peak hours. Many evenings (most!), the traffic on Sheikh Zayed Road is so much that (esp. when we get advance info. from one of the office cars going that way) we take the alternative route through Emirates Road (the road which connects most of the emirates in UAE), and still end up spending an hour on the road.

And all this even when the RTA (the road transport authority) keeps imposing toll tax ("Salik") on more and more stretches of the highway, perhaps to keep out the traffic. Alongwith this, the RTA has two more weapons in its armoury to reduce traffic - most free parking spaces of yore are being converted to paid parkings (about 2-3 US cents an hour) and, the biggest hassle of all, reducing the rate of issue of driving licences to a trickle (smart move - you can't drive if you don't have a licence, even if cars are much cheaper here than almost anywhere else).