Doing things in Dubai

It'll be very familiar to everyone living here, but possibly an eye-opener to the people outside who read our blogs to find out the reality of living in Dubai. My last few days have been typical of trying to do something in Dubai.

My Residence Visa is due for renewal, which of course means a medical report - a blood test is required.

My sponsor has a small list of clinics from which they will accept reports, the nearest to me being in Jebel Ali Village. I used that last time, it was small, friendly and efficient so I decided to use it again.

The first problem is that working hours are shortened because it's Ramadan, so an early start is the obvious thing. But the RTA-created gridlock in Dubai Marina makes that not an option. I've been talking about that for a while now and it's getting no better, so rather than spending unproductive time sitting in the traffic jam we've been working at home until after 9am to let the worst of it thin out.

(To give you an example of the problem, yesterday Mrs Seabee needed to be at the Dubai Metropolitan on Sheikh Zayed Road at 8am. The taxi she'd ordered for 7am was on time - and it took one and a half hours to travel the first one kilometre in the Marina. She eventually arrived at the Met at eight forty-five - nearly two hours to do a thirty minute trip).

Anyway, back to my medical report. Leaving it to later I fought the marginally better traffic to take Mrs Seabee to her office in Knowledge Village, then headed off to Jebel Ali Village.

The clinic is closed. Shut down. No longer operating. A piece of paper stuck to the door says we have to go to the clinic 'next to Satwa Post Office'.

It's too late now to try that, so I schedule it for tomorrow.

Tomorrow dawns, the usual gridlock-avoiding late start, drop Mrs Seabee at her office and head off for Satwa. The usual traffic snarl, an hour to get along Satwa Road.

There are more than two hundred people, mainly labourers, jammed around the clinic. I can't even get to the door so I give up.

I call my sponsor to check which other clinics I can go to. Iranian Hospital is the nearest choice so I decide to schedule that for the next day.

Today was the next day so I headed back up Al Wasl Road this morning, heavy traffic but moving. I found a parking space at the side of the hospital, was dripping because of today's awful humidity by the time I got to Reception.

A pleasant, smiling, helpful lady directed me to the Blood Test Clinic. The less smiley but equally helpful lady at reception there told me she needed a copy of my passport and Residence Visa plus a passport photo. I always carry plenty of those with me when I try to do anything in Dubai so I handed them over, with my Health Card.

She stapled it all to some forms which included a ticket with a queue number on it. It also had a note that I should expect to be called at a very precise 11.23 (it was now 11.05).

This is one of the huge improvements in Dubai. Until very recently all such places were a huge indisciplined rugby scrum of people pushing and shoving, waving papers about, climbing over others to get to the counter.

We all sat in an orderly manner and I was called to the counter at 11.20.

A small bit of computer work, a form with numbers and stuff on it, pay Dh250 and I was directed to the Blood Test room. Straight into the chair, blood taken, that's it, off you go.

My form tells me to collect my report at 11.30am on Thursday. I had noticed a section of the counter with a sign 'Reports' above it, so that seems to be well organised.

At just after 11.30 I was headed back to the car.

In the end, after all the aggravation of the previous days, a few minutes was all it took.

Dubai real estate - the good & the bad

You want the good news or the bad news?

There's both in the story about what was going to be the $3.3 billion Plantation Equestrian & Polo Club.

The bad news is a dispute, payment default, repossession, corruption investigation, executives in custody, worried buyers...

Land for the project has been repossessed by Dubai Islamic Bank over payment default by the developer because it was the collateral for the loan.

But there is good news in the story. RERA, the Real Estate Regulatory Authority, has said that investors' rights are 100% guaranteed and they will be compensated.

That's a sign that the laws and regulations are catching up. Better late than never I suppose, although, like so much else in the way of infrastructure and laws, all of this should have been in place before development was allowed to begin.

Hundreds of billion of dollars in developments were allowed to go ahead in a free-for-all, just about everything was sold off the plan, there were no laws or regulations. It amazes me that there's actually relatively little fraud because the opportunity to take the money and run was wide open.

More luck than judgement, methinks.

Gulf News has the Plantation story here.

It isn't funny.

All of us here use aircraft, so I don't suppose any one of us will see the joke when a fellow passenger tells us he has a bomb which he's about to detonate and holds a mobile phone in each hand.

Brit MW is in court accused of doing just that on an Emirates flight into Dubai and he's admitted saying it and admitted being intoxicated.

A drunken passenger saying he's about to detonate a bomb. Great, that makes flying so much more fun.

You know what he told the court?

He told Presiding Judge Fahmi Mounir that he develops anxiety and when he consumes liquor he suffers from constant worry.

I hardly know where to begin.

If that's the effect alcohol has on him why does he drink? And why does he think it's a funny to to impose anxiety and worry on others?

I hope the court throws the book at him.


Gulf News has the report here.

UAE feels the Iran earthquake

Three pm yesterday and there were tremours from an earthquake in Iran felt across Dubai and the northern emirates.

Reports are saying that in Iran seven people were killed and forty injured, bad but it could have been so much worse looking back at previous 'quakes in the country.

Here the authorities say there was no damage, although many buildings were evacuated. People are saying their buildings shook noticeably, desks moving, lights swinging back and forth.

I was in Dubai Marina at the time and felt nothing. Mrs Seabee said her office building in Knowledge Village trembled slightly, but that's only three storeys high.

Many people are relating their experience of it to the media, but not the ones I'd like to hear from - the guys in the cranes above the world's tallest building Burj Dubai.

The beach romp...

...what's going on?

Two Britons charged with sexual activity on a Dubai beach had their hearing adjourned for a month on Tuesday because the policeman who caught them failed to appear in the witness stand.

Uhh?

If the defendant fails to appear, isn't an arrest warrent issued?

Here we have the prosecution's star, only, witness failing to appear and the case is adjourned. For one month?

That can't be right.


Gulf News are reporting it here.

MORNING UPDATE

Gulf News this morning is also telling us that MP didn't turn up either - she's 'fatigued' apparently. Only Vince bothered to attend.

The update story is here.

Cutting edge Dubai

Dubai, the ultra modern city of opulence, high tech, cutting edge, state-of-the-art.

Sitting in the RTA-created gridlock again this morning I saw another example of it...

And this morning, as all mornings, there are the sad inadequates who have a need to feed their egos by feeling more important than the rest of us, speeding up the wrong side of the road to push their way into the queue...

Bigotry update

There's a follow up to a post I did back in May about the bigotry from the far right in Australia, because a twist to the story has just been reported.

Back then a proposal for a 1,200-student Islamic school in Camden on Sydney's rural outskirts was rejected by the local council 'on planning grounds alone' - traffic, noise, amenity. That's fair enough and it's what councils should do.

My objection was to the residents who used the opportunity to froth at the mouth with their bigotry. Before the vote, protesters placed pigs' heads on stakes and draped an Australian flag between them on the proposed school site.

Their pin-up girl was Kate McCulloch, shown here at the meeting disgracing the Australian flag:

She summed up the feelings:

Mrs McCulloch, who owns a hospitality business in Camden, accuses Australia's Muslim leadership of saying nothing while mothers and children are used as suicide bombers.

"The ones that come here oppress our society, they take our welfare and they don't want to accept our way of life," she said after the council vote.

The post I did about that is here.

Now a Catholic school has applied to build a 1,000-student school, which has the bigots applauding.

As the Sydney Morning Herald reports:

The Camden residents' group that fought a Muslim society's proposal for a school in rural Camden has welcomed a Catholic organisation's plans to build a school nearby because "Catholics are part of our community".

The president of the Camden/Macarthur Residents' Group, Emil Sremchevich, said the Catholic school plan "ticked all the right boxes", even though he is yet to see its development application.

Pin-up Kate wasn't in the news this time, it was President Emil doing the talking.

A spokesman for the Quranic Society, Issam Obeid, said: "Everyone can see there is a double standard … No one knows anything about the Catholic school and they say, 'Yeah, give it a tick already.' I think racism is affecting this."

President Emil rejected that:

"Why is that racist? Why is it discriminatory? It's very simple: people like some things but don't like other things. Some of us like blondes, some of us like brunettes. Some of us like Fords, some of us like Holdens. Why is it xenophobic just because I want to make a choice? If I want to like some people and not like other people, that's the nature of the beast."


Cartoonist Wilcox had it about right:


The Mayor has stated the council position:

Camden's Mayor, Chris Patterson, said religion had nothing to do with the the council's decision in May. "And this DA will be treated exactly the same. The council will take into account traffic, amenity, noise."



The Sydney Morning Herald story is here.