Jim's birthday cruiseWe've been here over 2 weeks now and finally have Chloe signed up for school! She will start school on Sunday (yes, Sunday -- the weekend here is Friday and Saturday, and apparently used to be only Friday!), and she's plenty nervous. I'm hoping it's anticipation nerves, but it can't be easy to start fresh in a new school. We got her uniform stuff yesterday: navy slacks and white golf shirts with navy trim, with gym shorts & top and a hoodie for these cold 20°C days. The other options for bottoms were so scary she's totally sticking with the pants. There were 2 skirt lengths available, the shorter option being mid-calf length. The so-called skort was a weird pleated confection that poufed out and went to the knee. I picture a skort as a mid-thigh short with a skirt-y flap in the front, but nope. She's not ecstatic, but it will make getting dressed in the morning less of a chore! I'm just glad we found a school that was ok and had spaces available for immediate start; that was a difficult task in spite of the dozens of schools here.
We hope to start moving in to our apartment this weekend. I ordered appliances today and we had a totally successful Dubizzle night last night. Dubizzle is like Craig's List, a classified ad website where people advertise to sell everything from household stuff to cars, and they have job listings as well. I spent several tortured hours combing the site for gently used furniture for our apartment, and after a few misses where I didn't get back to sellers in time and they sold the perfect sofa bed or whatever, and one totally fruitless trip way across town to see some ugly couches (ask for pictures, ask for pictures!!), we set up 3 appointments last night and had success at each one! For just under $1,000US, we got a queen-sized bed for Chloe that was only used as a guest bed, a 6-month old bedroom set for Jim and me with a really great mattress, and a sofa/love seat set with TV table, coffee table, end table and rug! It's great for furniture hunting here right now, as many people are moving around due to the crisis. Yes, we are profiting from others' misfortunes in one case; the other 2 sellers are just moving within Dubai. Anyway, it was great to score 3 for 3, and we celebrated with dinner out at Trader Vic's at Jumeirah Madinat, a beautiful outdoor plaza with shops and restaurants, built in the style of an old arabic madina (market thingy), complete with canals. It was fun! And as a bonus, they serve alcohol there so we celebrated with fancy drinks! Alcohol is only allowed to be served in hotel restaurants and certain other areas, not in every restaurant. You also have to get a special license to buy from the liquor stores. We have to wait for our visas to be all done, then we can apply and wait 2 weeks + to get the license. Jim has to give me permission to get a license! I think he'll let me...
It will be great to finally be in our own place, though our stuff doesn't arrive from Moscow until February 12th at the earliest. We'll just have to camp out with our beds & sofas until then, because none of us can stand staying in the temporary place much longer. The whole going down to the lobby to use the internet thing is really wearing on me, and made my Dubizzle shopping extra challenging. I will miss the man who cleans our room every day, though. I'll have to do my own dishes from now on, drat.
Last item on our to-do list (for now), is getting cars. We've hit a few roadblocks, but apparently Dubai is famous for its endless paperwork and red tape & we're just not used to it. We tried shopping for cars last Friday, but it was the holy day, so everything was shut. Then we tried again Saturday, only to arrive at the beginning of the 2-hour lunch break. We finally got to look at some cars later in the afternoon, and I fell in love with a tiny purple Peugeot hatchback, and Jim with a BMW convertible. We started all the paperwork to get quotes to take to the bank, and then found out you need your UAE driver's license before you can get a car. Jim thought he'd get his on Sunday, but then found out he needed some other thing from HR, plus an eye exam...it goes on and on, but he still doesn't have it. Car buying is on hold until that's all sorted so we thought we'd rent a car for a week, but you can't rent a car if your residency visa is either in effect or in process! This means you can't get the special tourist license, because you are living here. So we're still taking taxis everywhere. At least they're fairly cheap! And they have right-side driving here, so I won't have to get used to driving on the other side!
It's been fun checking out Dubai, it's a pretty fascinating city in all its shiny newness and ongoing construction. There are about 1.5 million people here, and the city's spread out along the Gulf, with a little extra inland growth around Dubai Creek. We took a dinner cruise along the creek for Jim's birthday last week, and even though it's a total tourist thing to do, we had a great time. Anyone who comes to visit will have to do this, and we'll come with! We haven't done much else in the way of exploring, aside from the seven or eight malls Chloe and I have seen in our school travels. There are A LOT of malls here, each fancier than the next. I get the feeling that it's so hot here most of the year that you really can't wander around outside, so the malls become social destinations. Lots of great restaurants and movie theaters in addition to the endless consumer goods. Chloe and I also checked out a shopping area called Karama, where they sell all the designer knock-offs. The salesmen follow you around offering "copy bags, copy watches", and if you are interested, or just too polite (ie, Canadian) to say no, they take you to the secret showrooms. Usually this means a hidden doorway that leads to an upstairs room filled with Louis Vuitton bags, but it can also be that they take you to their apartment! We were told about this in advance, and assured it's quite safe, so we weren't totally freaked out to go to a stranger's apartment to look at Prada sunglasses. It was kind of fun! But you have to have your shopping shields up to deal with all the guys trying to lure you into their shops. It can get a bit wearing.
That's all for now, I promise I'll send photos as soon as I feel more settled!
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