Number Plate Madness - updated

Dubai police auctions number plates, or how to maintain a strange hobby. And more information on Dubai number plates than you really need.

The latest money-spinning discovery for the municipality is the sale of personalised number plates. There are limited options for personalisation, since Dubai plates are just a letter for the year of registration followed by a row of one to five digits. We heard that you can recognise important locals by low numbers (single or double digits) and have seen Sheik Mohammed's car, which sports the number '1'. Some of Dubai's most creative drivers drive cars with low numbers...

But the whole arrangement of car registration is in flux right now with an explosion of new cars being registered. Vehicle registration is expected to rise from 400000 now to one million by 2020. Dubai has been through four different schemes in the last four years, including one of differently coloured backgrounds and numbers, which was abandoned because colours faded too quickly in the hot weather. A scheme that included a picture of the Burj Al Arab was given up because the remaining space left was too small to allow deciphering of the actual numbers. The new scheme should be able to provide plates for registration for the next 30 years.

Two weeks ago new plates starting with the letter 'E' were auctioned. Unbelievably a single number (E33) went for Dh 1.14m (£130k)! The man who bought the plate also bought another 4 plates for an additional Dh 1.07m. Apparently the collection of number plates is his hobby. He told Gulf News that he was looking for a plate for either his BMW X5 or his Porsche. When asked what cars the other plate were to grace, he said that he did not have that many cars: "I will have to buy some more".

A total of 36 plates brought a profit of Dh 10m for Dubai police.

Update

A few days later the police department of Ras al Khaimah (a tiny Emirate on the Indian Ocean coast in the North-East of Dubai) ran a similar auction. The plates on sale, though from RAK, were more desirable, as they included single digits from 1 to 9 as well as double digits 11, 22, 33, etc, to 99. Plate number '1' went for the incredible amount of Dh 8m, the highest price ever paid for a number plate in the world. More interestingly, the second most expensive plate, number '2', was sold to the Chief of RAK Police, Brigadier General Sheikh Talib bin Saqr Al Qasimi. The Director General of the RAK Economic Department later warned that people shouldn't take out loans to purchase plate numbers just as status symbols or as a hobby. Some hobby...

Final Touches

As a last favour from the impeccable service we received from Crowne Removals they sent a handyman to hang our pictures, clocks - and the hammock!

Stuart was initially not keen on the hammock, but, like everyone who tries a hammock for the first time, is now a total convert. Impossible to to get him out of there.

Troy at the movies - UAE-style

We had been putting off going to the movies after our first trip due to the unreasonable and brutal censorship of American Beauty, but when Troy came out we thought there probably wasn't much that could be chopped.

As it turned out, Troy was a very average movie (it's probably more enjoyable to just read this 15 minute synopsis instead), but the trip was memorable for something that didn't happen and some things that did, but were a bit unexpected:

We had been warned that due to the total dependence of Dubai inhabitants on their mobile phones they would be using them in the cinema, too. We heard horror stories of insistently ringing phones and conversations carried on at full volume. So we were prepared. But apart from a guy who was still chatting while getting seated before the movie started there was total silence.

The unexpected thing was cigarette advertisement. This has been banned in the UK for so long now that watching it felt slightly illicit, even if it still didn't make us want to go out and pick up the habit. It was just such a blast from the past, we almost felt like we were back sitting in the local flea pit as kids, having snuck in with fake ID to watch Star Wars.

After American Beauty we had learned a bit about local censorship. Swearing is fine, so is any kind of violence, and strangely the male kissing scene at the end of American Beauty was spared, but the slightest whiff of female nudity was mercilessly - and very crudely - removed from the movie. In the case of American Beauty it meant that the dream sequence in the sports hall with the rose petals was excised which made some of the later events totally incomprehensible. Troy only has a few scenes with female nudity (strangely Brad Pitt's naked arse was left intact, thank Goodness), but all of them were hacked in the crudest manner. The big surprise, though, was the audience reaction. The cuts were very obvious, like a fault in the film roll rather than a proper edit, and every time a scene was censored, the audience laughed, as if it was a good piece of unintentional comedy. People were amused by the patronising attitude reflected by the cuts rather than annoyed. It was a strange reaction.