The Weekend

Me & Jared at Calabar in the Address Hotel on Thursday night... a nice night out with our friends Laith and Melissa for drinks and tapas.

View of The Address from the terrace at Calabar where we were sitting... The terrace was covered with comfy chairs and bean bags (Jared was in heaven... for anyone who knows Jared's bean bag room fantasy you'll understand). So nice to be able to sit outside at restaurants and bars now that the weather is comfortable. Maybe my favorite thing to do here.

View of the Atlantis Resort on the Palm Jumeirah from JBR Beach

I am always amazed at how quickly weekends seem to go here in Dubai... possibly even faster than they used to when we actually had friends and a very busy social calendar in Boston. This weekend was no exception, although we had a major development in terms of getting settled... Drum Roll Please... wait for it... WE GOT A CAR!!! By which I mean we rented a car. :) This is a very exciting development for many reasons. Not only does it make our lives a million times easier, but it also saves us lots of money (we actually got a good deal on the rental) and saves us the hassle of always having to call for or flag a taxi anytime we want to go anywhere. Before we moved here, we had very high aspirations of not needing a car because the Dubai Metro was about to open... And it has opened, but only maybe 1/3 of the stations are currently open and operational at the moment, and the only time we have tried to ride the metro it was a complete mob scene similar to the stampede scene in Slumdog Millionaire. So, to put it nicely, unpleasant at best. Also, coincidentally, the only stations even remotely near our apartment and both mine and Jared's places of employment are not yet open. So we had to quickly rule out the Metro as a viable daily transportation option at the moment. Then, on top of the inconvenience of public transportation, Dubai can in no way be considered a 'walking city,' which is definitely difficult to adjust to when moving from Boston, where we didn't think twice about walking absolutely everywhere. So we had to come up with some solution.

Enter our decision that we needed a car. We continue to hem and haw over whether we should just buy a cheap one to get some equity and then be able to recoup some of our money by selling it when we leave, or else just renting one to save the trouble of registration, insurance, toll passes (called Salik here, similar to E-Z Pass ), etc. At the moment we've decided to rent at least for this month, because my resident visa is still pending and if Jared bought a car I would not be able to drive it (without a resident visa and Dubai Driver's License, you can only drive rental cars).

So the major excitement of our weekend was Friday morning when we woke up and decided to pull the trigger on the rental car. Unfortunately, Friday is the Holy Day here so most things are closed on Fridays, including every rental car place but one in Sharjah (the next Emirate over). So we make a few calls and they tell us they have a lovely Mitsubishi Lancer available for us to pick up, but that they close at noon (and it was 10:35am). So we immediately went into high gear gathering all the necessary documentation, copies of passports and driver's licenses, and I called my friend Clare who works in Sharjah to borrow a map and get directions. So we called a taxi and got ourselves to Sharjah before they closed and successfully rented a car.

The immediate snag being that I am the only one who can currently drive said car because people with Resident Visas can only drive in Dubai if they have a Dubai Driver's License. They allow US Driver's Licenses carriers to just kind of 'waive' into a Dubai one without having to take any Road Tests or anything, but make you jump through bureaucratic hoops of fire to get one (seems to be the theme to get anything done here) so it will probably take Jared at least a week to get his driver's license. So for now I am Jared's private chauffeur and learning to drive in Dubai, which is like driving in Boston schizophrenic and on crack, should be fun...

A Para sailor off the Palm Jumeirah

The rest of our Friday was then spent practicing driving around Dubai to all the most important locations... From our apartment to Jared's office (where I will be dropping him off every morning), then getting back to our apartment from his office (since I don't leave for work until about 12:30pm), then driving from our apartment to my office and back home again. While we were out near my office though, which is near the Dubai Marina we decided to take advantage of our 'free' transportation and relax for the rest of the afternoon at the beach (one major advantage of now having a car, we can go places like the beach and not lug all our beach stuff in a taxi and then have to flag one at the end of the end. We parked near Marina Walk which reminded me a bit of downtown Waikiki but on a much smaller scale... basically a pretty boulevard with restaurants and shops right on the water. We stopped at Starbuck's for some cold beverages and then walked across the street to the Jumeirah Beach Residence Beach (supposed to be private for the residents of JBR, but not)... A beautiful beach with a view of the Palm Jumeirah (giant man-made palm tree shaped island project everyone has heard of) and swam and relaxed and watched an animated beach cricket game occurring in front of us, and then watched the sunset before heading to dinner at a delicious Mexican restaurant (where Jared enjoyed a non-alcoholic marg unintentionally) at Marina Walk. All in all a lovely and productive day...