Category Archives: Expat

A sticky story about having a housemaid (and please don’t go off me!)

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It’s no secret that many of us here in Dubai have housemaids, who double up as nannies and sometimes cooks too. A very small minority even drive, meaning the school run is magically done too.

I’ve heard this wonderful perk described in various ways:

“My wife at home,” is a common one from expat mums, or “I should have married her!”

Another friend who’d just hired the sweetest lady from the Philippines told me, “She’s marvellous! She can stay at home and be me and I can go off and be somebody else!”

Introducing the efficient, gorgeous and all-round wonderful Catherine the Great (with baby LB)- can you tell how much we love her?!

And it’s amazing how you’re suddenly inspired to do baking, three-course meals, or catering for multiple kids when you have a self-cleaning kitchen.

The only draw-back is if you get too used to having a housemaid – dare I say it, dependent – it can be quite a shock when real-life catches up with you, ie, you have to move back to your home country (or go on a two-week holiday without her). In fact, it’s common for local families and a few expats to take their maids on vacation with them.

This summer in England, a friend asked me if our live-in nanny Catherine the Great spends her whole time tidying up after our two very messy boys.

Well, we are, in fact – and have been for some time – on a drive to get the boys to tidy their own toys, as a precaution against one of my worst fears, expat brat syndrome, which I’ve blogged about before.

But, inevitably, the rest of us, and in particular C.the.Grt who’s at home all day, still end up doing plenty of clearing up – and it drives BB bananas.

So he’s taken to using sellotape (American sp. scotch tape) to tape his trains, planes, cars, pieces of track and even lego to the floor – in the hope all his bits and pieces won’t get thrown back in the toy box.

Once he taped up the whole living room, cordoning it off like it was a crime scene that couldn’t be touched.

Double-sided, poster tape, mounting tape, he doesn't discriminate - he'll take what he can get

He also uses sellotape to make roadways on the floor and he gets through miles of the stuff.

I’ve found myself bribing him with it: “If you’re really good today BB, I’ll get you a roll of sellotape at the supermarket tomorrow!”

This morning I had two rolls stashed away, but BB found them and got busy. The end result was this sellotape superstructure, which we’ll be unsticking for days.

So that is the reason, my dear friends, why when your children receive a present from us, it’s always wrapped in Toys R Us gift paper – because our sellotape is all over our floor and is never, ever to be found when I need it.

PS: I really recommend two superbly written blogs by Dubai writers on this facet of expat life (housemaids, not sellotape) – Housewife in Dubai: Maid wanted: Must love cleaning and hate gossip and We have it maid by SandboxMoxie, who has good reasons for resisting the lure of live-in help.

A fire and a sandstorm all in one day!

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It was mid-morning when the school sent text messages to all the mums.

I say mums, but ours actually came to DH, as the teachers still seem to think he’s a better bet.

The first words, “The Civil Defence has advised…” were carefully chosen to make sure we sat up and took notice.

“…that students should go home due to the possibility of fumes coming from a fire in the industrial area.”

Of course, this unscheduled evacuation sparked a flurry of text messages and phone calls among the mums – to spread the word that any afternoon plans were toast.

“Have you heard?”

“The kids are coming home!”

“I was planning on an 11am Ashtanga yoga class, followed by a gellish manicure and a triple berry smoothie at the Lime Tree Cafe,” I imagined inconvenienced mums saying. “And the nanny insists on resting in the afternoon, I might actually have to take the kids to Magic Planet.”

My work plans thwarted yet again, we headed out when BB got home – and were plunged straight into our second excitement of the day.

While driving along, the 4WD was suddenly engulfed in a billowing sand storm. One minute the sky was clear and blue, the next minute a yellowish mist had descended, the wind was gusting and there was sand swirling everywhere. Visibility quickly reduced to about an arm’s length.

Apart from the high temperatures, we don’t get much in the way of extreme weather here so everyone in the car with the exception of me was loving it.

I was having visions of being swallowed up by the desert, while innocently on our way to watch Horrid Henry. I could see the headline in my mind, ‘Expats vanish in Barsha triangle’

Either that, or we’d get into an accident on the road, which you could hardly see through the thick, fog-like dust.

Thankfully, DH was at the wheel, and noticing that I was clutching my seat, he smiled and said kindly, “Don’t worry, the visibility is at least 50 metres – still legal for landing an airplane.”

Which is precisely why he’s in the right job, while I – my eyes nearly closed by this point – could never do it in a million years.

The sandstorm rolling in

Sand flying about everywhere (and if you happen to be outside, sand gets in your eyes, mouth, ears, hair and up your nose)

With visibility so poor, driving becomes hazardous

Why working from home isn’t working

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There’s something I’ve learnt about work in Dubai – it’s quite different from being gainfully employed back in the UK or US.

You can ‘get away’ with things here – so you hear stories such as my friend’s tale about a meeting in which her boss got angry and swirled around to tell her colleague, “My, you look spotty!”

On the job section of a website called Dubizzle, you’ll quickly find adverts that specify what nationality they’re looking for, or not. For example, ‘Models & promoters needed (No Filipinos)’; and another stating, ‘Only expats or Russian girls may apply.’

After just five minutes of living in Dubai you realise that with so many people from South Asia terrified of losing their jobs, working conditions are not always what they should be – and nor is the pay.

But I didn’t mean to dwell on the negative stuff, because actually the chance to work with such a diverse mix of people from all over the world (not to mention the tax-free extra dirhams) has been wonderful. My intention was merely to point out some differences I’ve noticed.

So yesterday, when a publishing company I won’t name asked me to come into the office for “a couple of hours” to do some proof-reading, what they really meant was “would you give up 10 hours of your time to re-write swathes of copy put together by writers from Syria, Egypt, etc, whose first language is most definitely not English.”

Spot the difference: H&M adverts featuring sexy Brazilian model Giselle were censored for the Dubai market

I’m also finding out that there are certain things you won’t ‘get away with’ in the media industry here. I’ve been told that designers and journalists who have put together a layout with a camel above a sheikh have lost their jobs – and international publications have been known to have inappropriate images (like a rear view of a naked woman at the back of The Times Style magazine) blacked out with marker pen.

This is apparently done by those doing time in the UAE. And anything deemed offensive may also be ripped out. One publisher had government approval to write about wine for a food book. Once the book was published, the decision was apparently reversed and the book was sold with the wine chapter listed on the contents page, but no chapter actually in the book!

To date, I don’t think I’ve said anything on my humble blog to get me deported. And working down in Media City, where there are numerous good-quality magazines, from Time Out to Esquire, has been a really positive experience.

And when I went to see the movie Friends with Benefits the other night, it had been so heavily cut, there was no evidence of any benefits at all!

Perhaps my biggest challenge has been the projects I’ve taken on from home, because at the moment I’m finding working at home to be the equivalent of walking up the Burj Khalifa backwards in Jimmy Choos.

It’s just too tempting to think, “I’ll just squeeze in that mammoth grocery shop / go through that drawer of clutter / lie down for a quick nap.” And, the hardest one to resist, hearing the kids the other side of the wall being looked after by our nanny.

I keep finding myself at the computer at 11pm trying to catch up. Hence I was intrigued by a couple of jobs landed by friends of mine recently (as a quick aside, it never ceases to amaze me how expat women here who don’t want to work full-time, don’t want to have another baby but want to do something to stave off boredom, reinvent themselves – sometimes several times over).

So my friend who was a nurse, and discovered that the pay here for this particular profession is abysmal, is now a chocolate taster for the Mars factory! And another pal, who used to be an airline pilot in the US, became a mystery shopper (she actually got paid to shop!) and now reviews movies for Virgin Radio Dubai.

Perhaps the answer is to only accept jobs that take me into an office in Media City, where household distractions aren’t a problem – except all the girls down there are young and thin, with sashaying hips, trendy clothes and perfectly flicked frizz-free hair.

Anyway, enough – I’m procrastinating again and must get back to editing a delightfully bad feature (because there’s only so many times I can tell them my lack of productivity is due to our internet being down).

PHOTO CREDITS: TNT Magazine; Collider.com

I don’t know how she does it!

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“I know I’ll get lost,” I told DH this morning, somewhat nervously. The truth was I was feeling reluctant about attending my first activity of the day – partly because it involved walking into a roomful of strangers, but I also wasn’t feeling particularly sociable at 8.45 in the morning.

I mean, who meets before 9am, other than high-powered working people? And Mums. Of course.

You know it’s coming at the start of every school year – and you know you should go to the meet-the-mums coffee morning. And it’s never as easy as just nattering with all the Mum friends you made last year, because the classes are mixed up each year – plus there are always several new arrivals to Dubai.

“You’ll find it,” responded DH, sleepily from bed. “Just use the compass on the car.” (like I even know where that is)

The movie of the book: I’m imagining Sex and the City’s Carrie with kids and letting herself go a bit. Hope I won’t be disappointed!

Needless to say, I had to be guided in by Host Mum, whose beautiful, enormous zillion-dirham villa was the venue for our first get-together of the term. Once inside, she led me to a table laden with baked treats and pastries – prepared, I suspect, at the same time as jigging her toddler, child #3, on her hip and flawlessly applying mascara.

I made a bee-line for Swiss Mum, who I knew from last year and always looks effortlessly chic in designer clothes. “I got here at 8am,” she confided, her bobbed hair framing her sun-kissed face perfectly. “Thought it was straight after school drop off.”

“Really?” I replied, thinking how come she didn’t get hopelessly lost in the rabbit warren like me?

Having missed the initial chit-chat, we were invited to sit in a circle by Class Mum, who last year voluntarily held drama classes for the kids and this year is the co-ordinator mum for, not just one, but three different classes.

And, as we took turns telling everyone a little bit about ourselves including what we ‘used to be’, I learnt that among our group – most of whom had moved here fairly recently from places such as Germany, Australia, Jordan and South Africa – there was a lawyer, a banker, a child-protection officer and a social worker.

But none of them working, because everyone had given up their careers to become a “trailing spouse” (ie, husband gets well-paid job in Dubai, wife and family pack their bags to follow).

Instead, they were setting up home in Dubai, caring for children full-time and protecting their kids like tigresses.

With the expat schools in the UAE all fee-paying, expectations are high so the conversation soon turned to the finer details of our children’s lives at the international school BB attends.

All very interesting, especially as when BB gets home he always tells me he did ‘nothing’ – and rather humbling, because, having got him on the school bus this year and gone straight back to work, I haven’t actually been into school yet this term. Never mind where the kids get changed for swimming, I’m not exactly sure where the new classroom is – and the teacher is still emailing my husband rather than me.

I nodded in agreement when the mums all promised to not try to outdo each other when it comes to our children’s birthday parties (while thanking my lucky stars that BB’s birthday is first so the stakes won’t be too high!) and tried to enter a debate about what kind of cupcakes it was OK to send in for the bake sales (note to self: will open my cupcakes-that-have-never-been-made folder this year).

And, as we discussed having a BBQ to get the Dads together, the Christmas party, fundraisers and playdates for younger siblings, I found myself thinking, “I really don’t know how these women do it!” Life is so much easier in the office, I swear.

PHOTO CREDITS: socialitelife.com; www.squidoo.com

Double deal: On having two homes

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There’s something I should reveal about expats in Dubai: we lead double lives.

Most of the year is spent in our adopted country, the place where we’ve made good friends, the kids go to school and we work, have pets and own a 4by4. And you can feel perfectly happy and settled there, until July – when you realise you could probably fry an egg on your car so off you go on your long summer sojourn to your other home.

During this time in the motherland, I’m always reminded just how much I love seeing family and old friends, how much I enjoy cooler air, greenery, more effective customer service, and people who understand what I’m saying.

There’s an initial period of adjustment, of course. A kind of reverse culture shock, where you have to get used to looking the other way to cross the road, taking a brolly ‘just in case’, knowing only two people in your childhood town and feeling a bit disconnected. But once you’ve settled in, your old life fits like a glove (helped along by the fact you’re there in summer not winter and everyone’s happy to see you after so long).

This means that, however much you enjoy the country you’ve moved to and also call ‘home’, returning to it after an extended holiday always evokes mixed emotions. As the plane takes off, you look forward to getting back to your own space, re-instating old (and easier) routines and no longer living out of a suitcase.

But there’s also sadness at leaving and guilt, too, because you’re taking the kids away from loving grandparents and extended family. You know you’ll miss family get-togethers and that Facebook doesn’t make up for not being there in person when things happen at home.

The exhilaration and impossibleness of cramming a year’s worth of socialising into one or two evenings with your oldest and dearest friends also leaves you wanting more.

Unless you’re a frequent flyer who jet sets regularly from one home to another, transitioning from one country to the other is never as easy as you think it should be.

Dubai International Airport: The first clue that everything's super-sized

Landing in Dubai after a prolonged stay away is also the only time you see the city through a tourist’s eye. The cavernous, marble-floored airport, with its elevators the size of my first flat, wall of water and endless shopping. The heat and humidity that hit you as you step outside. The crazy drivers on the six-lane highways and, outside our compound, the sandy dunes that stretch for as far as the eye can see, punctuated by desert shrubs and the odd tree.

Seeing camels by the roadside is a novelty again – as is coming across a bus shelter that looks like this:

Comfort zone: One of the city's air-conditioned, enclosed bus shelters, although if the air-con doesn't work they tend to turn into roadside ovens

The contrast between the two countries couldn’t be greater and it takes a few days to reacclimatise – to get back in the saddle. But soon it should cool down, and with some precious memories from the summer and the kids back to school today after the epic 11-week holiday, it feels good to be home with DH.