Gubbi of Arabia: Expat Life in Dubai

On July 9, 2007, I hopped on a twelve-hour flight from New York to Dubai with four orange suitcases, a slightly dubious job offer, and some vague plans to live abroad for “a year, maybe two.”

Three years later… well, here I am. I hope to - at some point in the future - write a more lyrical post waxing philosophical about what I’ve learned and how I’ve grown. But for the time being, come along with me as I do what all good consultants do and analyze the numbers…

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THREE YEARS IN DUBAI, BY THE NUMBERS

THE JOBS

• Jobs held: 2 (1 year in strategy / business development with a local investment holding company; 2 years with my current strategy consulting firm)
• Percentage salary increase since moving here: 26% (hey, a girl’s gotta keep herself in handbags student loan repayments)
• Powerpoint slides produced: 1,000+
• Percentage of projects completed only to be ignored, shelved, or otherwise produced in vain due to the inexorable tendency of various Middle Eastern government clients to get distracted by OOH SHINY THINGS! in lieu of implementing the work they paid for: 66% (est.)

THE TRAVELZ

• Trips back to the US: 7 (3 Christmases, 2 summer holidays, 1 wedding, and 1 business trip to negotiate the contract for a comic-book theme park… my first job was ridic, don’t ask)
• New countries visited: 26 (in chronological order - Ethiopia, India, Kuwait, Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Palestine (West Bank), Israel, Egypt, Azerbaijan, Uganda, Kazakhstan, Yemen, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Zambia, Saudi Arabia, Armenia, Canada, Mozambique, Tanzania, China, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Iraq - bringing my total lifetime “Countries Visited” tally to 67)
• Percentage of new countries visited that have outstanding State Department Travel Warnings / Travel Alerts at the time of writing: 35%
• Terrorist (or other) attacks I have been victim to while traveling in aforementioned countries: 0 (although I did, predictably, have a nasty bout of food poisoning in “incredible” India)
• Times I have schlepped my passport(s) to the US consulate to get new pages added: 3
• Instances of questioning by INS officials upon reentering the US with admittedly Osama-esque passport: 0 (proving that the Department of Homeland Security has truly never seen the season of “24” in which the blonde girl turns out to be the terrorist)

THE MOVING OF MY BUTT

• Marathons completed: 5 and change (Dubai 2008, Beirut 2008, Dubai 2009, Dubai 2010, Seoul 2010 … plus Two Oceans Ultramarathon 2009 and Ras Al Khaimah Half Marathon 2008, 2009, 2010)
• Marathons completed in a time I would have been proud of before I moved to the desert and became fat lazy and complacent: 0
• Times Linds and I heard the voice of God on a long run: 1 (attempting to use the highway underpass that connects the main part of the Palm to the Atlantis… we got about 200m in before an Arabic-accented voice filled the tunnel from above, yelling “no bedestrians on the underbass, no bedestrians on the underbass”… with 15 heat-beleaguered and delirious miles behind us, we decided it was definitely God, and we’re sticking to our story)
• Times I have rounded a corner on the Safa Park track at night and run smack into a flock of local women covered in black abaya / niqab (it’s dark! they blend in! all you can see is the whites of their eyes, and that’s a little too detail-oriented when I’m cranking 7:30 miles!): at least a dozen
• Net weight gain: 10 kg (yes, kilograms - I believe that’s approximately 45 lbs, which means I might as well have had a baby… or something)

THE ROOF & WHEELS

• Number of apartments inhabited: 2 (up on the 39th floor for 2 years, plus a year in my current garden digs)
• Number of roommates lived with: 6
• Cars purchased: 1 (2008 Hyundai Tucson, aka “Big Blue”)
• Car accidents: 3 
• Car accidents that were my fault: 3
• Car accidents reported to the police: 1 (I got smart after the first time and learned I was better off paying sweet-talking my way into an informal settlement rather than ringing up the local po-po… when in Rome, do as the Arabs)
• Total value of speeding / parking tickets paid off: AED [redacted] (let’s put it this way, it’s in the “many thousands of dirhams” range… plus a couple hundred Omani riyals, if you want to get technical)
• Number of “black points” acquired: 8 (don’t worry, you can get 32 in a year before they take away your license)
• Number of American flag decals stuck on my car in fits of patriotism, only to wake up the next morning after a dream about terrorism and run outside to rip them off: 1

THE EXPAT LIFE

• Number of times that someone in America has said to me “wait, so you’re a ‘rag head’ when you’re over there?!” in response to my explanation that I have to cover when I go to Saudi Arabia: 1 (at my hair salon, in Nashville)
• Number of occasions on which, while standing in the check-in line at Nashville “International” Airport, someone has struck up a conversation with me about where I was going, and then not had any idea where Dubai (or in drastic cases, “the Middle East”) was: [ponders how many times I’ve been home to Tennessee… let’s see, five times] 5
• Percentage of increased certitude that, despite any evidence to the contrary, America is the best gee-dee country in the world: 100%
• Times I have cried when saying goodbye to my family: 6 (initial departure plus all 5 trips home)
• Times my parents have put my dog on the phone to talk to me: 20-30
• Percentage chance that I could have hacked it as an expat in the pre-Gchat, pre-Facebook, pre-BBM era, given my extreme reliance on these media for staying connected with people I love back home: 0%
• Instances in which I have seriously considered leaving Dubai so far: 1 (my first night here, alone in my hotel room, on the verge of a full-blown “OMFG what have I DONE?!” panic attack … luckily, it’s only gotten better from there)