Tag Archives: rain in Dubai

On being jerked awake by Dubai Police

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If you live in Dubai, were you woken up to the sound of your phone blaring out like a police siren last Monday morning?

If, like me, this roused you from a deep slumber, did you have absolutely no idea what was going on? Were we at war? Had Iran launched a nuke?

All these thoughts ran through my head, my pulse rising, before the voice of reason chimed in – it’s surely just my alarm sounding extra … erm … extra alarming.

As it turned out, none of the above applied. It was the Dubai Police issuing a public safety alert – a loud warning tone designed to forewarn residents and visitors in the UAE about an imminent emergency.

My phone was also vibrating on my bedside table like a maniacal insect.

I picked it up in the half-dark, almost dropping it, and looked at the screen.

There was a message written in Arabic and English.

“The city of Dubai is exposed to fluctuations in weather conditions,” it read. In other words, rain in the UAE.

Members of the public were advised to “stay away from beaches, avoid areas of valleys, torrent flows, and low places.”

Putting all notions of trying to get back to sleep aside as my heart rate subsided, I got up and carried on with my day – working at home as the government had advised due to the wet weather. The schools that weren’t on half-term break proceeded with online learning.

Some people got the National Early Warning System alert up to four times.

There was indeed heavy rain, thunder and lightning across parts of the UAE, and I was glad to be able to stay home (rain in the UAE is like a snow day in the UK), but it’s funny how a downpour in this country can be so wild – and gets treated like a cyclone, even though it isn’t.

Heavy rainfall turns Dubai desert green

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When it rains in Dubai, it’s like the city suddenly gets hit by a storm of excitement and confusion. The residents are so used to the hot and dry weather that they don’t know how to react when it starts pouring down. Some run for cover, while others dance in the rain like they’ve never seen water fall from the sky before.

The roads turn into rivers and the cars look like tiny boats sailing through the streets. The infrastructure can barely keep up, but that’s all part of the fun! You never know when you’ll get caught in a flash flood, so it’s always a good idea to carry a floatie and a snorkel with you.

It’s like a party that the whole city is invited to, but nobody knows the dress code or owns an umbrella.

The city transforms into a giant slip ‘n slide, with people sliding down the roads in their cars, while others use the flooded streets as a personal swimming pool. It’s like a giant water park, but instead of paying for admission, you just have to brave the heavy rain.

Since the weather is so scorching and parched much of the year, the rain is like a cold shower to the city’s residents, and we just can’t get enough of it! (Except if you’re on the roads – then it’s no fun at all and you can expect to be stuck for hours.)

My favourite thing about the city turning into a big, wet and wild adventure, as it did last week for three whole days, is that the arid desert outside our compound is now covered with a carpet of green.

Can you spot the gazelles? Here’s a close-up…
Photo courtesy of Elika McCormick

When it finally rains after two years

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We’d waited two years for this moment! Yes, it must have been late 2019 BC/early 2020 BC when it last rained in Dubai. (BC=Before Covid).

Of course, I chose the exact moment the clouds burst to venture out in the car, to take the 13-yr-old to his basketball camp. We turned onto the new tarmacked road our compound got for Christmas, and I quickly realised we were heading into a storm. The usual cerulean blue sky had turned pigeon grey. The same solemn colour I remembered from London. 

My excitement grew!

A few days previously, the clouds had teased us. There had been talk of rain on the radio. I’d peered out the window. Large puffy clouds resembling cotton wool balls were floating past, but nothing like real weather. It never rained. Not properly. Bucketfuls of sand just got chucked at the car, that’s all.  

But this was the real thing! The heavens, black and swollen with rain, were as squally and dull as the road. The sandy scenery on either side of the quiet desert cut-through to the highway looked moody, laden with anticipation. 

Within minutes, a bolt of lightning flashed. Falling back into a childhood habit, I start counting in my head. A few raindrops splashed onto the tarmac, darkening it in small, irregular splodges, when I got to four.

“Wow!” I exclaimed, even managing to get the attention of the 13-yr-old. 

The downpour, when it came, pounded wildly on the car roof. Being in DH’s car, I didn’t even know where the windscreen wipers were and flicked every lever I could find while keeping my hands firmly on the steering wheel. 

Dubai rarely sees raindrops, but when it does … watch out on the roads

“Take a photo!” I urged as we passed the Burj Khalifa. The steely tower’s tapering needlepoint top – which reaches heights no other manmade structure has ever achieved – had been swallowed by the billowing clouds. In fact, half the concrete-and-glass building had disappeared the cloud cover was so low. 

Then the rainstorm got so intense, the visibility dropped to a few metres. While most cars slowed to a crawl – some putting their hazards on so you could just pick out blinking lights in the monsoon-like rainfall – others aquaplaned perilously along the wet highway at their usual high speed. Delivery drivers on bikes took shelter under the city’s bridges. 

I couldn’t remember the last time Dubai saw such a big storm. With inadequate drainage, the water collected in huge lakes, forming floods the size of swimming pools.

Flashing signs above Sheikh Zayed Road warned drivers to ‘Beware of the ponds’. 

Where a flooded part of the road was impossible to avoid, a bow wave formed at the front of our vehicle like we were a ship on the sea. There was a great whooshing of water and spray splashed up on both sides of the car. 

Suddenly regretting my decision to leave the house, I willed it all to stop! At least until I could get home, and actually enjoy the rare event that is rain in Dubai.

Armageddon on Al Qudra

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It’s been an unusual day, to say the least.

Children in the UAE might have squealed with delight as they paddled up and down the street in inflatables and sailed boats to the supermarket (no joke) …

kids having fun in rain

Lucky kids: School’s out again tomorrow

But me – well I lost my mojo somewhere on Al Qudra street – about an hour into the apocalyptic traffic jam attempting to inch its way through biblical floods last seen by Noah.

It all started at 4am, with an enormous crash of thunder. Lightning sliced the sky. But even then, the morning school run was fine – just a disappointed son to contend with following the cancellation of his school trip. Actually, he was more worried about the fact his lunch was in a plastic Spinneys bag (as requested by the teacher). “Mummy, go home and get my lunch box!” he pleaded while I tried to stop him lobbing his sandwiches away.

The sky quickly turned a scrubbed pigeon grey then a really ominous granite colour, sort of slated and solemn. Daylight made only a feeble attempt to break through the billowing cloud cover. The rain, when it came, drummed wildly on our roof. It lashed the windows, cascaded off our garage in a waterfall, and collected in huge ‘ponds’ that within an hour or so all joined up to form floods the size of lakes.

The schools closed, I can’t even begin to imagine what happened at the airports. Buildings flooded, structural damage occurred and the traffic snarled up until it grid-locked so badly I took a big chance and swerved onto sand in the hope of ploughing my way through a building site to escape the Armageddon on Al Qudra (I made it!).

This Dubai driver didn't make it

This Dubai driver didn’t make it


The children, meanwhile, went out in their swimming gear. A neighbour took his canoe for a paddle round the compound. Ironically, the water cut off in our villa – I did see the funny side of this, given that outside it was knee-deep, with waves rippling up the path every time a car swished by, wheels hissing. The lights started flickering … “Picked a great week for our winter-sun holiday, didn’t we?” said my Mum as she Facebooked photos of the rain for the amusement of British friends and family.

Her last photo, of tankers vacuuming up the rainwater through giant straws, was captioned: “Now we’ve seen it all!”

Dubai really doesn’t do rain.

Keep safe tomorrow everyone.

Rain scrooge – yep, that’s me!

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I’m well aware there are lots of people in Dubai who love it when it rains – and I really do hope they enjoy the annual downpour. But I’m beginning to wonder if these people have actually been out in the rain – or afterwards, when the floods are knee deep.

Given that rain is a fairly rare event in our patch of desert (maybe a few times a year), I can’t resist doing a quick pictorial on the blog, of the almost biblical event that is a decent rain-shower and the apocalyptic aftermath of a blustery and thundery night.

While we slept … ET phone home!

Lightning sliced the sky, and thunder rolled. Pic courtesy of futureofdubai.com

Lightning sliced the sky, and thunder rolled. Pic courtesy of futureofdubai.com

If I’d looked on Facebook before leaving the house, I might have seen this photo, forewarning of what lay ahead at the roundabout on the school run … (rain, meh!)

Up to the doors in places - and even posh cars get stuck. This is a Rolls-Royce! Pic courtesy of Dubai 92, Catboy & Geordiebird

Up to the doors in places – and even posh cars get stranded. This is a Rolls-Royce! Pic courtesy of Dubai 92, Catboy & Geordiebird

Left: But at least while stuck for an hour-and-a-half on the way to school, there was lots to look at. Right: And a cautionary tale for anyone thinking about attempting to skip the backed-up patient traffic!

Left: But at least while stuck for an hour-and-a-half on the way to school, there’s lots to look at. Right: And a cautionary tale for anyone thinking about attempting to skip the backed-up patient traffic!

Finally through the traffic, we find ourselves on the road to school, which looks like a canal in places …

Might look like a canal, but it is a road (I begin to wonder if we'll make it)

I begin to wonder if we’ll make it

Left: The ampitheatre at school: “Look Mummy! It’s a duck pond!” Right: Vacuuming starts all around the city-with-no-drains

Left: The ampitheatre at school: “Look Mummy! It’s a duck pond!” Right: Vacuuming starts all around the city-with-no-drains

And the final hurdle … waves outside work! If I’d known, I’d have borrowed a yacht.

photo-449

But just to prove I’m not a complete rain scrooge, and that there is a silver lining in every cloud … this was the view outside my office window for all of two minutes:

Where's the gold? (I believe it's in a vending machine at the Madinat)

Where’s the gold? (I believe it’s in a vending machine at the Madinat)

The Dubai ‘yes’ (read: no)

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Last week, on the day of all that rain, DH and I did the school run together and decided to get some breakfast before going home.

We splash through the rain and walk into one of my favourite places, which if I tell you has period-inspired, chintzy décor and looks like a dolls’ house (think pink), you’ll know where I mean if you live locally.

It’s raining hard and we run from the car park, so I don’t really look around until we’ve stepped over the cardboard mopping up the rainwater and entered via the back door.

It’s dark inside. Not pitch black, but gloomy enough that we know immediately we won’t be able to read the paper, or even see what we’re eating. There’s obviously some kind of power cut, and, apart from the wait staff, there isn’t a soul inside.

The culinary trend for dining in the dark reaches Arabian Ranches

The culinary trend for dining in the dark reaches Arabian Ranches

“Come in!” welcomes a waiter with a megawatt smile. “Wet isn’t it? Come, sit down.”

We’re not quite sure what to do. The waiter motions again towards a table and gestures for us to be seated.

“Are you open?” I enquire. “It’s dark!” I add, stating the obvious. My stomach lets out a low rumble of hunger.

“Yes, yes, we’re open. Just a small problem with the lights.”

I’m reminded of the equally optimistic taxi driver my visiting BF came across last week, who told her he knew where to drop her, but didn’t have a clue and needed help reading the signs (“Bad eyes,” he’d tutted.)

“But can you still cook?” I ask the waiter politely. I peer around the eerily quiet restaurant and spot four or five shadowy figures with tools in a corner, huddled around a circuit-breaker box. “Does the kitchen have power?”

“Ah,” our waiter replies, unsure. “Let me just check on that.”

DH and I stifle a laugh. Through the hatch, we can see the kitchen is also undergoing a black-out.

“We’ll come back later,” we tell him and bid him farewell. And I wonder: Do we look like the kind of couple whose idea of a decent meal out is hanging around like bats in the semi darkness with no food? 🙂 Or maybe the restaurant wasn’t trying to sell food, but instead offer a public service to wet expats who don’t own an umbrella.

Funny ole thing customer service in Dubai.

Outside my work: A day of rain and Dubai drowns

Outside my work: A day of rain and Dubai drowns

Silent Sunday: Dubai quirks

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Christmas is one of my favourite times of the year in Dubai, due to the cooler weather and laid-back atmosphere. But, there’s no doubt, it can be a funny thing too. Where else would a festive family fair, with a highly coveted Santa’s grotto for the children, be postponed until the end of January?

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Another quirk I’ve noticed about living in Dubai is that they don’t make waterproof buildings. I guess it rains so infrequently, why bother? But, every now and then, this oversight results in torrents of water gushing down walls and across floors indoors. Check out the leaks that sprung at the new airport during a bout of rain last week – honestly, you have to watch this to believe it!

Spit-mageddon

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Since it rains so infrequently in Dubai, it feels fitting that the events of today’s spit-mageddon are recorded on the blog. Here goes:

6.15am: Wake with an uneasy feeling. There’s a strange darkness creeping round the curtains; I peer out the window and see ominous-looking clouds.

8.15am: The children safely at school, I continue on to work. Suddenly, the sky is split in half by a bolt of lightening. Rain drops start falling.

8.15-8.18am: Spend several minutes trying to locate the windscreen wipers on the car.

9.30am: While the sky is still a pale-grey colour, and the sea looks glassy, the rain appears to have stopped.

10am: Rumours surface that the KHDA, the government body that oversees education, thinks there’s a cyclone coming, and is shutting down all schools, immediately.

10.30am: Rumours confirmed. Schools send text messages to all parents, telling us to pick up our children as soon as possible, by 11.30am at the latest in the case of Son1.

10.30-11am: The evacuation sends all the parents in the office into overdrive. Frantic phone calls are made to car pool buddies and housekeepers. “The children are coming home!”

11.10am: Mothers all over the UAE mobilise their resources and cancel their afternoon engagements. “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 imagine inconvenienced yummy-mummies saying. “And the nanny insists on resting in the afternoon.”

11.15am: Manage to get Son1 and Son2 home from different schools, by hook or by crook, without leaving my desk.

11.20am: Yet, despite the dire weather warnings, the sky looks like this:

xxxxxx

Thanks for the photo B! Brightening up outside.

2pm: Texting DH who’s just landed in Melbourne, and three hours after the event, has received the SMS messages from school. “What’s happening?” he asks. “I can’t see anything like a cyclone on the wx map!”

3pm: Still no cyclone. Not even a downpour.

4pm: Will it, won’t it? The rain watch continues.

Rain watch at our office. Just *joking*. We were actually watching the Red Arrows aerobatic team performing loops and rolls above the Burj al-Arab

Raindrop-spotting at our office. Just *joking*. We were actually watching the Red Arrows aerobatic team performing loops and rolls above the Burj al-Arab

6pm: Drive home and hear all about how exciting it was when school closed.

Look at all this rain! Good job the kids were safe at home

Look at all this rain! Good job the kids were safe at home

Rain day in Dubai

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What I really want to write is a raging post on gun control in a country I love – but although my husband and kids are American, I’m not, and perhaps I just don’t understand.

Yesterday, after hugging my children, I yelled at the iPad, my blood boiling – incensed by some of the comments left by absolute morons (who can’t even spell) on British journalist Piers Morgan’s blog. I’ve no doubt my outburst was futile.

So, I’ll spare you the rant about what to me is intuitive – and by way of distraction from a tragic topic that’s left me shocked, horrified and saddened to the core, I’ll be very British, and talk about the weather instead.

Here in Dubai, we don’t get much adverse weather. Some people would say it goes from boiling hot to hot, but this isn’t actually true: at 9am this morning, the outside temperature reading on the car told me it was a chilly, jumper-worthy 16 degrees.

The cars were making waves just outside my work

The cars were making waves just outside my work

But it wasn’t the ‘cold spell’ that was the talk of the town today: it was the rain. Lashings of it, pouring down from low-hanging granite clouds and forming small, muddy lakes on the city’s drenched roads.

Puddle-loving children always get excited due to the novelty factor (the lack of variety has led one school that actually has weather on the curriculum to lay on a field trip to Ski Dubai – the lucky kids).

And for the grown-ups – who hail from the UK at least – the dull, wet, languid weather transports us on a metaphorical journey across oceans, back to Blighty, easing a little of the homesickness that can set in as Christmas approaches.

But what starts out as a rare treat can quickly become a proverbial pain in the arse as you start worrying about flooding on water-logged highways, remember that the wipers on the SUV don’t work (they disintegrated, through lack of use), and realise you have no rain clothes. Not even a brolly.

“Look Mummy, those people have an umbrella,” squealed LB in delight, as I dragged him in the pelting rain across a soggy football field to his classroom this morning. “Why don’t we have one?”

The wettest ever Dubai school drop-off completed, I got back in the car to go to work, fully expecting the roads to be chaos and for it to take twice as long, when I realised something. The usual 10-15-minute bottleneck – leaving the community that hosts my youngest son’s school – was, to my surprise, only six or seven cars long.

Half of Dubai must be taking a rain day, I smiled to myself, imagining my fellow commuters curled up at home with hot cocoa and watching Jaws on telly. What a good and sensible idea.

The next time the heavens open over Dubai, I'm having a duvet day too

The next time the heavens open over Dubai, I’m having a duvet day too

Flooding in the desert – yes, really!

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Long-time readers of this blog will know that rain in Dubai can be as exciting as, say, a white Christmas in the west.

It’s always the talk of the town, and is usually prequeled with a will-it, won’t-it, slightly murky lead-up that puts the whole of the emirate on rain watch.

5 drops here, 10 drops there. Radio presenters add to the ripples of anticipation, as listeners text in with rain sightings.

Maybe once or twice a year, it does actually rain – and I nearly always savour the event, however quickly it’s over, from start to finish.

NOT this time.

It began with a hunch, a sort of uneasy feeling that all was not well with our usually sunny world. As a strange darkness crept round the curtains this morning, I morphed into Rain Scrooge.

Puffy rain clouds – meh! We all cast our eyes skywards to witness the perennial blue sky clouding over

“Oh no, not rain!’ I thought to myself. My Dad was going to the golf, and I had lots of driving to do (from point A, to point B, to point C, and then possibly to point D later on).

If you saw how people drive – no, make that aquaplane – when it rains here, you’d understand. And there was also the small matter of not knowing if the wipers on the car would work (they disintegrated on our other car through lack of use).

“Mummy, it’s raining – on Grandad’s golf day,” squealed LB, hurtling up the stairs like a baby elephant.

We peered out the window at the glistening ground and I reassured Dad it woudn’t last – there was no way the golf could be rained off in Dubai – but even though it wasn’t really much of a downpour, chaos was unleashed on the roads.

A puddle on Sheikh Zayed Road made it onto the traffic news, my journey to work took three times as long, and all over Dubai, there were repercussions because of the unique event that is rain in the desert.

Swimming lessons were cancelled due to debris in the pool (a few leaves, perhaps?); Wake-up and Shake-up, a weekly event parents attend at school (don’t ask!), was postponed due to the tennis court being wet.

But the most-trying news was to come. At work, my phone rang with a number I didn’t recognise. It’s BB’s birthday party tomorrow and on the other end was the manager of the venue.

“We’re flooded,” he told me. “This whole side of the Ibn Battuta mall is covered in water. We’re sorry, we can’t do the party.” (I don’t normally swear on the blog, but sometimes an expletive is necessary: @^%^@@@!)

Cue: a day spent finding another venue so as not to disappoint an excited small boy on his seventh birthday (thank you DH for pulling off that one), and contacting 25 mums to let them know.

I mean, seriously, what are the chances of a party venue being flooded in Dubai? It was only a piddling amount of rain.

Pah!

Postscript: BB’s birthday is now at Chuck E. Cheese’s – I can’t believe I’m hosting a party at Chuck E. Cheese’s. Ever since my friend’s boy attended a party there and got his head stuck between the toilet roll and the loo door, I’ve vowed never to enter Chuck E. Cheese’s lair with more than two kids. Wish me luck!