Hot & dusty

There's a whole team of street cleaners in Dubai Marina, each with their own patch to keep clean and rubbish free.

I see this guy every morning with his broom and black plastic bag.

It's hot, it's dusty and like his colleagues he does the sensible thing and wraps up to keep the sun off and the dust out.



Cap with a large neck flap which he ties across his face, sunglasses, gloves...fully covered.

It's an interesting comparison - people, from hot sunny climates cover up to keep the sun off, people from colder climates wear as little as they can in the sun; shorts, singlets, flipflops being streetwear of choice it seems.

Trivia - these street cleaning guys are, according to the ID across their back, part of 'House Keeping'.

Ignorance about Dubai

With all the publicity that Dubai's had internationally over recent years it astonishes me that there's still a huge lack of basic knowledge about the place.

While a few people, to their credit, are trying to get the facts by asking questions on forums, the questions reveal this lack of basic knowledge.

On various forums in recent weeks I've seen, for example, questions about which areas tourists to Dubai should avoid because they're unsafe, about whether women can go out on their own, about whether women can drive.

The ignorance about Dubai shows up in some of the answers too. Inevitably there are replies from people with no knowledge, who make no effort to get any. The internet is full of them.

I've seen adamant statements that women can't drive in Dubai, are spat on if they go out on their own, that bikinis can't be worn anywhere including the beach, that it's a place to be avoided at all costs. Spoken with great authority but total ignorance.

One of the very basic misunderstandings seems to be where Dubai actually is. It shows up regularly in the questions. I'd have thought it was pretty clear after all the exposure, but obviously not.

It's just come up yet again on what I think is one of the best forums, Expat Forum, with a question asking whether it's difficult being a single American woman living and working and Dubai.

The reason for the question is explained: " I've just seen a few things that make it seem like you'll need a male co worker with you at all times during meetings."

As some replies pointed out, Dubai is in the UAE not Saudi Arabia.

After all the exposure Dubai's had, people still don't even know which country it's in, whether it's a country in its own right, or perhaps even if there are different countries making up the Gulf region and if they might have different societies.

There's still a lot of work to be done by Brand Dubai.

Meanwhile, back at the coalface...

Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid has approved a document setting out standards for federal public employees.

"The document identifies 13 core values which distinguish professional behaviour and the ethics of a governmental job in the federal sector. These 13 core values included excellence, diligence, efficiency, leadership, hard work, objectivity, honesty, sincerity, impartiality, adhering to economy and transparency values, plus integrity, fairness and equality.

The document also clearly pointed out that gaining preferential treatment through nepotism and favouritism in a public post must be avoided, a Federal Government representative said.

Another important principle mentioned in the document is the commitment of employees — it must preserve the professional dignity of public posts, to not exploit a profession's authority due to rank or status, to be committed to using resources in an honest manner and to refrain from practices that result in conflicts of interest."

It's another of the well meaning directives from on high, introduced in all sincerity, that we see around the world from governments.

High flown phrases, laudable principles.

The problem is that it has a long way to go to get to the end of the line, to the public servant who's actually face to face with the enemy - us. The public.

So back in the real world the friction between public employee and public won't change. Nor, I'm sure, will the use of wasta.

They'll continue to be bureaucrats, doing what bureaucrats all over the world do, talking their impenetrable language, tying us up in kilometres of red tape, making life difficult for us.


Gulf News reports here.

A classy election

The Australian election is under way, our first female PM having called the election a few weeks after taking power.

The quality of the debate & the candidates and the tactics the parties stoop to never inspire confidence, and this time the bar's been set as low as ever from the outset.

It began with the handling of a TV debate between the leaders.

Demonstrating how seriously it was taken, the original 7.30pm broadcast time was changed to 6.30...so that it wouldn't clash with the cooking show Masterchef.

The choice: to watch the one and only TV debate between the contestants who will set the country's policy for the next few years or a 'reality' cooking show. It was obviously assumed that the electorate would choose the latter.

As for candidates, the Liberal (conservative) opposition party - led by a former trainee priest known popularly as the Mad Monk - put up in a Sydney constituency a 'conservative Christian' (don'tcha love euphemisms) to stand against a self professed "non-practising Muslim", Ed Husic.

Guess where the debate in that electorate was headed.

Fortunately the candidate has been making his views known on Facebook:

The NSW Liberals appear to have had something of a road to Damascus conversion in the lightning-fast decision to dump the conservative Christian, David Barker, as their candidate for the western Sydney seat of Chifley.

Questioned about Barker's anti-Muslim Facebook comments by Laurie Oakes on Channel Nine on Sunday, shadow treasurer Joe Hockey condemned Barker for "trying to use religion as some sort of tool in the election campaign"

Shock, horror! Bringing religion into the campaign!

Obviously it was purely coincidental that a Muslim candidate had a radical Christian put up against him.

Oh, but wait:

In 2004, the party chose another conservative Christian, the Hillsong Church member Louise Markus, as their candidate in the western Sydney seat of Greenway to go up against Husic. That campaign, too, was marred by allegations of religious scare-mongering.

Anyway, you'd be forgiven for thinking the choice of a radical Christian was deliberate, especially as the cat's out of the bag about a deal between Barker and the party powerbrokers to keep his extreme views out of the public arena. He'd agreed "to give the answers they had recommended".

There's still a month to go before polling day so the fun's only just started.

Oh, and some fun trivia. The Libs' leader, the Mad Monk, is Mr Abbott. And the candidate who's replaced the dumped radical Christian is Venus Priest.



Masterchef wins.

Religion & politics.

Crime in Dubai

One of the plus points about living here is the lack of crime. Safety is always high on the list in surveys about what residents like about the place.

That's not to say it's crime free - you can't expect that in any city which has a population of nearly two million. But for a city this size it really is noticeably better than most places.

That was the theme of comments left on Wednesday's post about abandoned cars.

All sorts of cars are simply left on the streets or in car parks by expats who are leaving, including Jaguars and BMWs. But no-one takes them, and it's the same with so much valuable equipment.

Take restaurants for example. Back home the pavement chairs & tables have to be taken inside every night and the whole shop barred and shuttered.

But here the furniture is simply left in place overnight. And it's still there the next morning.



The dhow loading stretch of the Creek in Deira is the same. All kinds of material is left on the dockside, a completely open public area in the centre of the city.

Back in Oz a truck would pull up on the first night and anything valuable would disappear, and I'm sure the same would happen in many cities. But not here.

Our crime rates are also given some perspective in a report in The National this morning.

Dubai police are warning that juvenile crime is on the increase, and that's obviously a concern.

But look at the figures. How many big cities around the world would love to have a problem of this magnitude?

An average of five crimes a week are committed by children, with the figure expected to rise over the summer break, according to police.

Dubai Police registered 110 juvenile crimes carried outby 161 children in the period between January 1-May 31.

Remember we're talking about a city of over 1.7 million people.

Juvenile crime.

Population.

"Loans threaten residency"

That's the lead story in today's Gulf News, with a related report on page three.

They begin with these paras:

"Residency departments will not renew the residence visas of expatriates if they are wanted by police for financial obligations, Interior Ministry officials said."

"Residency departments cannot punish people who have arrest warrants against them for financial disputes by not renewing their residence visas, legal experts have said."

I'm not going to comment now because tomorrow there's bound to be a 'clarification'.



See what you make of it. You can read the reports here and here.

Car dumping

The reality behind that very silly tabloid story of thousands of cars left at the airport by fleeing expats is that abandoning cars is par for the course in this area.

There are figures based on reports from banks, car dealers and the police that about 1400 cars a year on average are abandoned around Dubai.

I guess the reason for the phenomenon is a combination of factors.It's a very transient society with people moving in or leaving every day. People come here 'for a couple of years', or they decide they don't like it and leave, or their contract finishes or, in more recent times, they lose their job.

Then there's the draconian debtor law.

And the time & frustration involved in doing anything like selling a car.

People borrow money from a bank to buy their car. Then for whatever reason they leave Dubai.

The easy way out is to think of the payments as a car rental or lease...and just leave it where you last parked it.

The giveaway is the amount of dust on the car.

Those left while the owners are on holiday get a layer of dust, but it's not too thick and it's cleaned off as soon as they get back.

Others though have a thick layer and they start to attract message writers.

In just over one kilometre in Dubai Marina this morning I saw a few that could still be holiday cars, but there are others in the thick dust category. It's quite a few abandoned cars for a short stretch of road:

But they're not all from Dubai:

And this BMW is a permanent fixture. It had already been there for months when I first posted about it in August 2009.

Here it is this morning...