Fireworks

Fireworks have become a tradition now in the UAE and vast sums of money are being spent on a regular basis to entertain us in the sky. With little chance of rain cancellations the shows are becoming ever more impressive, as are the traffic jams caused by those attempting to get to see them. Unfortunately many people only every get to see them fleetingly from a car stuck on the way to the Corniche. One day I'll get down beneath them myself and watch the sky turn multi-coloured and listen to the thundering, up close and personal.
 

New names to confuse old timers

The move to re-label the city has begun with nice new street signs.

Unfortunately some of these names are not going to be so easy to work with and since the deployment of the new signposts, the old numbers are disappearing. Here is your current guide to the new names that I have discovered so far. This will need updating as the process proceeds. Where there is no new name listed it could be that the old one will continue, but I have yet to see a new sign to confirm it.  However, the familiar forms are likely to be under threat quite soon. It will be interesting to see how long the GPS maps take to update and also what changes we see with google maps, etc. Will they opt for multiple versions or will they just adopt the new names?

New name	No.	Old name	Familiar name	aka
Corniche	1	Corniche Road	The Corniche
Rashid Bin Saeed al Maktoum	2	Shaikh Rashid Bin Saeed Al Maktoum	Airport Rd	Old Airport Road
Khalifa Bin Zayed St	3	Khalifa St	Khalifa St
Sultan Bin Zayed First St	4	Muroor	Muroor	New Airport Road
Hamdan Bin Zayed	5	Hamdan Bin Zayed	Hamdan
Fatima Bint Mubarak St	6	BaniYas Najda St	Najda
Zayed the First St	7	Zayed the First	Electra	Khalidiya St
Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan St	8	Al Salaam St	Salaam St	Eastern Ring road
Al Falah St	9	Al Falah	Passport Rd
	10	Al Firdous St	10th
Hazza Bin Zayed the 1st	11	Hazza Bin Zayed the 1st	Defense St
Delma St	13	Delma St	13th
	15	Mohamed Bin Khalifa St	15th
Shakhbout Bin Sultan St	19	Al Saada St	19th
Dihan St	21		21st
Salama Bint Butti St	23		23rd
	24	Al Karama St	Karama
Al Dhafra St	25		25th
Mubarak Bin Mohammed St	26	King Khalid Bin Abdul Aziz St	26th
Mawgab St	27		27th
	28	Khalifa Bin Shakbout st	28th
Rabdan St	29		29th
	30	Al Khaleeja al Arabi	Khalija al Arabi
Dhafeer St	31		31st
Al Bateen St	32		32nd

Important sites you should know.

Drinks - If you want to keep yourself legal when you imbibe in Abu Dhabi you should have a license. It is easier to get now than in the past and can be done online at www.auhsl.ae.   You can also apply through most liquor stores who will assist you, however the online site is straight forward once you collect your documentation. By the way you need that license even if you are drinking in a hotel, because as soon as you step outside to head home you become subject to the legal provisions. There is little concern here with the institution selling alcohol here - it is buyer beware!

Buses - The transport routes keep changing so you need to keep refering back to the source to get the latest routes and information. Go to dot.abudhabi.ae/en/info/Bus_Maps

Police - Just about anything can go through the 999 phone number but if you really have a none emergency traffic issue  the number to try is 02 4462462.

Parking - if you have someone blocking you in your garage or driveway then call the police with the plate number and they will contact the owner. This usually gets a pretty quick response. Other parking issues go through Mawaqif which you contact on 8003009   . their website http://mawaqif.ae/content/home?l=en lets you set up mobile parking where you can register your car with your mobile and pay for parking direct from your phone. This is convenient and also surprisingly reliable.

Power and Water problems go to 8002332 then option 2 for English. You can report outages in your area. ADDC also has a useful website at http://www.addc.ae/enindex.html

Finally for this potted round up www.abudhabi.ae is a good general site to launch you into other services.

In the land of diabetes

Recently we bought a dinner voucher at one of the hotels. It included a couple of courses and soft drinks. Well that is nice and it was a pretty good price. But the surprise was when we tried to order water instead of soda. Nope, no good, soft drinks means fizzy sugary things with unmentionable commercial affiliations. We would have to pay for water if we wanted to forgo the additives.

Strangely enough the bottle of water, when it arrived was made by one of the self same soda companies as well. And it wasn't as if they had an array of choices for us to turn down. Actually the only fizzy drink that I do bother with (besides beer) is tonic water. But of course their idea of soft drinks wasn't quite that diversified.  It is the same when you delve into the food courts and fast food joints. It is a rare institution that lets you swap their dedicated fries and soda for something less self-destructive. That coupled with lack of exercise, and the propensity to smorgasbord and you really can see why the UAE has a waist/waste problem. Please, please, please let’s put water into those meal deals.

Walking in Abu Dhabi.

The weather has become much nicer in the evenings. The obligatory walk with the dog is now a much more pleasant stroll. Now that we have relocated back into the centre of Abu Dhabi I find myself within walking distance of some shops. Rather than driving for miles I can walk to a nearby supermarket, and as long as I haven’t overloaded myself with purchases I can comfortable tote them home again. Interestingly as I walk home I pass by a little refurbished Baqala corner store.

 I see SUV’s pull up and honk the horn. Too lazy to even get out of their car! The attendant comes out and takes an order for chippies or soft drinks and retrieves the items for the driver. One day while I walked past and watched this reoccurring behaviour the passenger opened his window and dropped an empty can onto the street. The car was on the wrong side of the road so this wasn't the curb. Of course there was a rubbish bin beside the shop but that would have involved walking.

So while I am getting into the season and enjoying myself with the clement weather, I get to witness another class of people who have forgotten their civic responsibility and who have lost the ability to put one foot in front of the other. They can only move their feet from side to side to step on a pedal.

It is a shame because there is not that much of a chance to exercise in Abu Dhabi. We need to make opportunities. I work in a two story building with two slow and tired lifts. There are wide and welcoming stairs beside the lifts but very few people take the opportunity to stretch their legs. I relish the chance to get off my butt and get the blood circulating, and those stairs hardly count for anything, but the sheep crowd around the elevators and cram themselves in only to reach the next floor after me, no matter what direction we are going.

I like the new Baqala corner stores, the prices are on all goods now and the ability to actually be able to move amongst the shelves is convenient. The requirement to upgrade these groceries has been a good project. Since they are neighbourhood stores it just seems such a shame that more people don’t walk to them.

Chicken Little and the Ceiling has fallen down. aka Call the Cops.

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What to do when your house starts to collapse. I have learned a lesson that hopefully you won’t need yourself. We lived in an old building very near to my children’s school so that they had the unusual experience of being able to walk to school (summer and winter) in Abu Dhabi. While the building was old we didn't really expect the structural problem that arose 3 years into our tenancy there. The ceiling collapsed in one bedroom. 

Fortunately nobody was under it at the time as it could have been serious or even fatal. At first the false ceiling sagged. This was a wooden frame ceiling, not the suspended ceiling tile type. We didn't realise, and couldn't see, that what was happening was that all of the concrete beneath the steel reinforcing of the concrete roof was falling off the ceiling and weighing down the false ceiling. Once the weight became great enough the whole lot just caved in. There had been an earthquake a week or so before in Iran, and the neighbours (adjoining wall) had been doing some renovations so either could have nudged the rotting concrete collapse to start. Who knows? Anyway down it came.

Now the lesson here is what you should do about it. As the lease is in my work’s name, I contacted them and the maintenance company that looks after the house. The maintenance company came promptly, took about a week to knock out all the remaining concrete under the bars, then proceeded to board it up again with another false ceiling! That was there fix, and they glibly told me that it happened all the time.  Now of course I wondered why that room had a false ceiling in it in the first place as not all rooms  upstairs did, so I automatically assumed that it meant that there had been a previous lesser issue which they had covered up. There were other rooms downstairs that had some false ceilings too, which immediately came under suspicion. We didn't feel safe with the repair (now only half thickness of roof) and with the suspicion about other rooms. In the end we got to move out to temporary accommodation and eventually to get a new house. The issue became the getting out of the existing lease, and getting a refund for the remainder of the lease.  The details of that are not worth mentioning here, but the significant factor is that it turns out that I “should have called the Civil Defence force” to show them the damage at the time. In other words instead of calling the maintenance company I needed to call the cops!

The pictures and everything else were irrelevant. I needed an official report. Just like a ding in your car, or a stone chip on your windscreen. And of course it was my fault because I didn't know to do it. The maintenance company, and the housing section of my work didn't know to do it, but I was expected to know! And getting it checked out months later when we are fighting over the refund is too late.

The lesson – if something goes wrong with your house, and you don’t want to be held responsible – call the cops. They will determine which service is needed. Get that official piece of paper that says someone has looked at it.

Fog

I love the fog in Abu Dhabi. It is so nice to see some variety in the weather. I love the way the traffic is largely more cautious. Strangely with the traffic going slower (at the speed limit) we actually get to destinations faster!

I have also been impressed by the way the number of people erroneously using hazard lights while driving has reduced markedly over the years. In a twenty minute drive in the morning rush hour along Airport road I only saw two cars using them. Looks like the message is actually getting through. I wish that was also so for the drivers with their trailers who seem to think hazard lights are useful when driving at 100kph+ along the highway and weaving in and out of lanes. Oh well, small steps. Anyway, for the moment I’m just happy to enjoy the fog.

Tunnel

Sheikh Zayed Tunnel (fka Salaam St. tunnel) is making me very happy. From the middle of the island I can get over to Mina (The Club) in half the time I used to take. The ride back is even quicker. Apart from one or two stressful merges, and unfinished roadworks the tunnel is a huge and welcome addition to Abu Dhabi. (Pictures from GN) It is not just the time, but also the tendency for traffic to stay in lanes without weaving (as much). Surprisingly, the speed limit seems to be being adhered to as well! :-)
Now we just have to wait for the GPS's to get back up to date!