24 Hours on Sheik Zayed Rd

This link will take you to a time-lapse movie of the view from our bedroom window along Sheik Zayed Rd, taken over 24 hours (7MB, requires Quicktime).

Housing Options

We had basically two kinds of options to choose from when we were looking for somewhere to live in Dubai.
There are flats and there are villas. Of course there are lots of different kinds of both. From the small flat sub-divided by the landlord to accommodate as many Indian bachelors as possible to the luxury split-level penthouse suites with maid's room.
We opted for a flat since it was central, with decent services and very secure (villas have the greatest chance of being burgled, this being one of the few crimes one has to worry about here). Now that we have met a few people we have been to some villas. They are either detached houses with own garden and sometimes a small pool, or blocks of 6-12 semi-detached houses, usually quite large, with a shared pool and sometimes gym in the central courtyard. Gardens aren't too popular here, since it is too hot most of the year for anything meaningful to grow. So the gardens are paved with barbecue areas and seating, loungers round the pool and jacuzzi.
There is so much construction going on in Dubai that it is normal to rent after seeing a show home or example flat and then live in a hotel or temporary accommodation until the building is finished. Whole areas of Dubai are being developed like this, with communities of 15 sq. miles of villas in the middle of the desert.

The Meadows development
We have so far only had experience of the way Western ex-pats live, apart from driving through the older parts of town, where much smaller blocks of flats are located with external air-conditioning units and washing hanging on the balcony.

Postal Services

Nothing as simple as getting the mail, right? Just tell people where you live and the postman will deliver. Not so in Dubai, one of the few civilised countries in the World that does not have a postal delivery service. You are given a post box with your

You are given a post box with your accommodation, or get your own. Then the fun starts. The post boxes are located in huge rooms in the area post offices or built into pillars just outside. There are hundreds and hundreds of them. All painted blue, with a slot for 'Unwanted Letters' occasionally. You have to go and pick it up regularly if you want to get your mail, or send the maid/driver/gardener to get it. The exception is a few apartment blocks (like ours) that have arranged a central mail pickup service. This means that someone from the management company gets the mail. In the case of our block unfortunately they are very slack and so we only get mail every few days. It also means if there is a lot of mail it may not all get put into the post box, so it is delayed even more. Or the pickup guy has too much to carry and leaves some behind. Sounds like a rubbish system? Well, it is.

Karama Post Office - outside and inside post boxes

The result of this haphazard system is that most people have their mail sent to their office address, since someone is guaranteed to pick up from the post box at least once a day there, and it is pretty much guaranteed that the mail gets to you since presumably your employer knows who you are.

The Dubai post office is actually thinking about starting deliveries, having realised that this is an impossible state of affairs. But when this will happen we don't know. In the meantime, if you want to send snail mail, you will need to send it to Stuart's work address and if it comes from Europe, expect it to take anything from 2 to 6 weeks.