cars Archives - Circles in the SandCircles in the Sand

Today was National Day, the 2 December anniversary of the creation of the UAE – and a big birthday, too, as this year the UAE turned 40.

I can sympathise as mine is just round the corner, although compared to a soon-to-be 40 mum wondering whether I should be having a mid-life crisis, a 40-year-old nation sounds like a spring chicken.

This is actually someone's house! The photo is from last year, but we saw a quite a few villas just like this today while driving down Jumeirah Beach Road

BB came home from school this week waving a flag, the Emiratis decorated their cars and put lights up, and the Thursday before National Day was declared a public holiday for the Islamic New Year, making it a long weekend.

The parades, including a Ferrari and classic car parade, the fireworks, the shows, the Dubai Fountain dancing to the UAE National Anthem, the flags on cars, hot-air balloons and the Sheikh reading poetry on the radio combined to create an electrifying buzz.

Both boys enjoyed celebrations at school and nursery earlier in the week. The Arabic department at BB’s school requested that the kids wear national dress on Tuesday, leaving us mums scratching our heads over where to buy an abaya or dishdash small enough, but this was quickly followed by an email saying national colours would do.

LB’s nursery put on a lovely morning of activities that I went to with high expectations as they’d advertised among other things mosque-decorating and a dhow (traditional sailing vessel) to climb on board – they really pushed the boat out (excuse the pun!) and I wasn’t disappointed.

National Day is never entirely smooth, however – a number of young drivers always go a little crazy and indulge in stunt driving, such as driving on two wheels, which led to the impoundment of 440 cars during last year’s celebrations.

This year, the prize for the best-dressed vehicle went to an Emirati business woman who spent 162,000dhs on decorating her car with 150,000 individual Swarovski crystals – here she is showing her bling BMW to the media.

But my favourite National Day story is still my boss’ tale from last year, because it sums up perfectly the kind of exotic pets the wealthy Emiratis can afford to own. He took his kids down to Beach Rd for a ‘cultural experience’ and, amid all the spray foam and silly string, they spotted a funny-looking dog in the back of a car. Closer inspection revealed it wasn’t a dog – but a lion (not fully grown, but even so!).

Over the past year, the car park at our local supermarket has got busier and busier – so that now we have a situation where huge SUVs lie in wait for shoppers and stalk you as you’re pushing your trolley back to your car.

If you are lucky enough to find a space that’s not a 10-minute walk from the store, it’s likely that manoeuvring into it will involve squeezing between a badly parked Land Cruiser and a concrete pillar.

A pet peeve in Dubai: Cramped, British-style parking for enormous American cars

Given that grocery shopping at this particular store entails handing over 200 dhs for some milk, bread and a sausage, the whole experience can be rather frustrating from start to finish.

To make things a little less stressful, I always go to my secret parking spot downstairs – OK, it’s not exactly secret, but I do find that fewer shoppers make the right-angle turn to go down the narrow ramp into the bowels of the car park.

Today, though, I wish I’d stayed upstairs. To cut a long story short, there was a car in the way of the self-important type, I ended up going in a different direction to usual and was looking for the exit rather than what was right in front of me (do these sound like excuses?)

There was the most awful crunching noise – the sound of concrete and metal being welded together – so loud and splintering I saw the faces of two shoppers visibly wince.

When we first arrived in Dubai, before the debt crisis, there was so much development going on it felt like we were living in one big construction site, with a quarter of the world's cranes rumoured to be located in the emirate

“W-t-f was that,” poured out of my mouth as I leapt out of the car – and our nice car too, a Dubai purchase that we splurged DH’s bonus on earlier this year (and being of the sporty variety, very low to the ground – this is relevant, you’ll see why).

The car was stuck, its back wheels spinning – stuck on a divider I should have driven round rather than over. In my defence, it was one of those ‘Dubai moments’ – where else would you find a concrete island in the middle of the road with no distinguishing features (no poles, no stripes, just exactly the same shade of grey as the ground)?

Only the other day I was laughing as a friend told me how she’d walked out of a spa treatment and straight into unset concrete – completely ruining her shoes as well as her relaxed mood.

The two witnesses – who at first shot me a look that said, “Dumb expat blonde in an Infiniti, she should know better” – ended up taking pity on me and helped push the car off – and away I went, trying to retain my dignity behind the tinted windows, but thinking “Oh god, what have I done to the chassis and will I fall out the bottom of the car on Emirates Rd on my way home?”

I’m reliably informed that the planet Mercury is in retrograde at the moment and apparently things always go awry during these periods – I’m not usually superstitious but can't help wondering if this is why I accidentally cut up our bank card this week and stranded the car on a concrete island. Things return to normal, astrologically speaking, on 14 December – or am I just making excuses again?