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!

Power Parking Bills

Nobody seems to believe me but I still can't get the power account

for my villa put into my name. It has been three years now and I still

have to pay for someone else!  You might think, "Why worry!"

Well, there are two issues that have made me get onto this again. 

I confess I gave up after the first 6 months and just phoned up ADDC on their helpful 800 number, punched in the account number, heard the amount due and paid over the phone with the credit card. The real estate agent and I had tried to deal with ADDC directly but there was nothing we could do.  (See earlier post Electrickery for details.) It had to be the owner who needed to go to ADDC in person to sort it out because the previous tenant had left the country without getting a clearance. 

Six months ago two things caught my attention. One, they started painting residents' parking marking on the curbing in the neighbourhood and Two an article appeared in the paper that landline phone and power bills were going to be needed for Visa renewal procedures. My visas were recently done so that is a few years off but I knew that power bills were also needed for Mawaqif parking permits. So I began the arduous task of initiating action on the power account together with getting the documentation  together that I would need to apply for a parking permit. I will talk about my tribulations with Mawaqif in a separate blog... Let's stick here to the power bill. So I had our housing officer call the company dealing with  the villa. Now this is a different company from the real estate agent who put me into the place. This 'company' is the signatory on the tenancy contract but they are not the owners! With much to'ing and fro'ing (read 5 months) it seems that the company now has clearance paperwork to submit. BUT still nothing has happened. Now we are at crisis point. Cars are beginning to be ticketed on my street. The lease is up for the villa and the housing officer has threatened not to renew if the landlord/company doesn't sort it out. We don't want to move, don't want to get expensive parking tickets and are stuck in the middle. The company claims they have to have an attested copy of a lease contract to change the power bill (another new feature) but does that mean the old one or the new one? The clock is ticking. 10 days until the lease expires, and parking wardens are roaming the streets. My solution is to write into the new contract that the company should cover any parking tickets I get until they sort out the issue. What chance do you think I have of swinging that one?

The really painful thing about all this is also that most likely if they do succeed in letting me get the account in my name so that I can apply for parking permit, it will probably involve them coming around and physically cutting off the power for a day or two, before coming back to switch it back on again for the "new" tenant... Won't that make it fun living in this house!

No longer financially attractive...

The idea that Abu Dhabi is a lucrative working environment has taken a few major body blows over the last few years. Housing of course went through the roof in 2008 and is now only just beginning to roll back to acceptable levels. Inflation has been a constant factor especially in the Education sector where school fees have risen at an approved rate of 5% per year annually. This has stretched family budgets considerably. Food and Petrol have crept up steadily.

But the biggest threat is coming from a Government Decree to freeze salaries, bonuses, and annual increments for public sector workers. Decree No. (2) for 2012 from the President of the Executive Council. In the matter of payroll, increments and Bonuses that applied in the governmental entities and the company’s owned entirely by the government. This is indicative of fundamental financial malaise infecting the economies of Dubai and Abu Dhabi. At a time when the UAE is earning more from oil than ever before it is still strapped for cash, such has been the effect the bailing out of local failures and the massive hit from investments decimated in the American and European financial crises.

It is not permissible to top up salaries with extra part-time work,even the local neighbourhood car wash labour force are regularly chased to stop their supplementary income (only official car wash companies are allowed to wash cars!).  Taxes are not far away. Apart from the 10% + 6% you get stung with in hotels and hotel restaurants, there are many other hidden taxes. Resident’s parking permits, liquor licenses, emirates’ ID cards, visa medical checks, visa renewals, and there is talk of a VAT in the not too distant future.  So what you've got now is all that it will be, and maybe less than what you thought... Can you live with it?

Burj Khalifa - well its part of Abu Dhabi now...

Obligatory side trip to Dubai to take visitors sightseeing. 

N.B. Untouched Cellphone pix

Photosynth of Sh. Zayed Mosque

Use your mouse wheel to zoom in... Was thinking of making one myself then checked and found it had been done already.

A knotty problem

As I was pulling into the company car park this morning a taxi was leaving from the other end coming towards me. They often use the car park for overnight parking and are mostly gone by the time I arrive. Anyway just after backing into a park, the taxi pulled up beside the car and the driver got out.  I confess I thought for a moment that I might be in for something until he brandished a nice new tie and said please!

He wanted me to tie his tie for him. 

So there I was at 7:30 in the morning in the middle of a car park tying up a tall taxi driver's new tie.

There is a first for everything I suppose. 

Noticing the unnoticeable...

I’m out of my depth here. But I have noticed a bit of a change in the abayas that I am surrounded by here. I know the intention of the abaya is to cover and provide for modesty. I appreciate that there  are both cultural (ethnic), family and religious factors working together in the UAE to have generated the clothing situation here.  The reasons women and girls wear abaya are many and varied.  What I have noticed though is that the cut of the abaya has changed over my last 4 years in Abu Dhabi. I deal with a lot of women in abayas. I see them in close proximity almost everyday. I also seem them in malls and other social environments. What I have seen is that the fashion abaya has made a significant inroad into everyday wear. Lace and brocade has flourished. Colours, especially gold and white have appeared both in trim and also in vast slashes of vibrant decoration. The form has become more generally tapered.  The abaya seems to be coming of age in terms of an outright fashion statement. It is no longer hiding clothing beneath or hiding physical shape. It is no longer an amorphous blob, or BMO (black moving object) as affectionately coined in KSA, instead it has become a catwalk creature. At a mall the other day I was conscious of noticing a mother and daughter in their respective abayas. One was certainly rather plain but nowhere near BMO status, the other was stunning. From mid shin to knee was see through black net lace revealing black ankle length tights. Similarly the arm bands hung transparently over a simple top. The result was a very attractive shapely garment that was a clear fashion statement – the abaya is no longer a bolt of cloth or a sack. I know I’m not supposed to look, but that is what catwalks are for ...

Selling a car

First of all, let it be known that website information is not what it is cracked up to be. Abu Dhabi police have a helpful website with information about documents needed to buy, sell and register a car. Unfortunately it is not accurate! We decided to buy a second hand 4WD the other day. We’ve been looking for a while and I noticed that when I found one that seemed interesting it was often sold before I got to contact the owner. So when I finally found one that my spouse and I agreed upon we committed to it quickly. Actually at this writing we have not completed that transaction, but this is not the story of that purchase but instead the sale of our 3 year old small sedan car. Having decided to buy a car, we needed to sell the sedan to help pay for the 4WD. I looked up the website to find out what is needed to buy and sell a car. I was soon to discover just how fast the car market is here in Abu Dhabi.

Since we were going to get this other car we needed to get rid of the sedan. So at 6pm on a Tuesday evening, two hours after deciding to buy the 4WD, while waiting for one of my daughters to finish a dance class, I logged into Dubizzle.com, created an account and created an ad from memory.  When I got home an hour later I got a call from a prospective buyer asking me about the car. I walked out to the sedan to check the odometer because I hadn’t known the exact reading (my spouse drives it) and found it was 6,000 more than I’d put on the website. . He wasn’t particularly concerned but wanted to know what my “last price” was. I said that as the car had been on the market for less than an hour I wasn’t going to negotiate just yet!  I went back on the website, corrected the mileage and uploaded two photos of the car. One a standard long shot that was actually a little old but still quite representative of the model and colour. The second was a close up of a self inflicted scrape on the rear fender where I had inadvertently backed into the edge of a wall. During the remaining part of the evening I received a number of calls and texts. I had offers made that were 3~5000 less than the listed price and a couple of people who seemed genuinely interested in coming to see the car the next day. I turned the phone off at 11pm to put an end to the evening.  As far as I was concerned I wasn’t interested in offers from people who hadn’t even seen the car and certainly not with a chance to test the market at my stated price. My ad said to text during the day and call during the evenings.  I got a couple of texts during the next morning, and few calls that I couldn’t take, and a couple that I did. I had people calling from Sharjah, and Dubai which I thought was a little odd since it would be a long journey for them to come and survey the car from there and the Dubai market seemed much more dynamic. My earliest opportunity to show the car was at 4pm so I offered that time to some of the texters. When I returned home from work I picked up the car and drove around the corner to my nearby easy meeting point and found my interested party already there. He walked around the car and talked to me a bit and wanted to know my "last price". I said it was still very early days but I’d consider dropping by about a 1,000 since it was due for a 50k service. He said he wanted it. I practically forced him to take it for a test drive around the block first. He said he trusted me because I have been up front and posted the pictures of the damage, and he felt that this meant I’d be honest about other problems if there were any. Actually he is correct but I wouldn’t suggest anyone to rely on that logic too much in this market!  Result, a commitment to buy less than 24hours since I’d placed the ad online. I took the ad offline at 5pm.
 Next came the difficult part. My schedule is pretty tight and we soon discovered that there was no mutually possible time to do the ownership the next day, which was his only day off. That left doing it the same day. He would go home and get the cash, I would take a different progeny to a music lesson and we would meet up again at 7pm to do the deed. I warned him that according to the website he would need his passport, and perhaps employment certificate and that he would have to arrange insurance at the time. The car registration was only 4 months old so a new vehicle test would not be needed according to the website. At 7pm we began the process. First getting the insurance.  None of the companies who have offices on site were particularly known to us but he chose one and accepted their quote. They took his money and wrote up the paperwork. Into the main hall, we found the line for collecting queue tickets was rather large as the ticket issuer was on a break... Once we got that and eventually our turn came to register the transaction we discovered that the car actually did need to be retested. No amount of pointing to the website page which I had printed out would counteract that her computer said to do it again. So, we had to pay more money (120aed), and line up outside for the car to go through an inspection (exhaust, brakes, lights and undercarriage). It was getting quite late by this time so the line to do that was mercifully short. Then back inside again, pick up the new certificate and back into line for processing. Now the car had been bought under hire purchase (or mortgage as they like to refer to it here) and I was appropriately armed with the certificate of clearance from the bank to say it was paid off. At the time that I had received the document I had been annoyed that it had cost a large amount to have it couriered to me but I was glad to have it now. However, I was shocked to be asked to pay 200aed to have the document accepted by the system to register the release of the mortgage. More gouging was my inner thought! Still it was done, a text arrived instantaneously on my phone to say the car was no longer mine. Outside, in the car, he offered to drop me back home, but made me drive! 9pm I was back at my house minus one car.
Next task was to de-register the Salk tag, and get a refund on the insurance. I had removed the Salik tag from the windscreen and I phoned the call centre to get them to deal with it. However, they told me I had to email them all the details because I was from Abu Dhabi! Two days later I got a text to confirm the de-registration was complete.  At the time of the change of ownership I was given an insurance release certificate so that I could get my remaining insurance refunded. Actually that will end up being credited to our next policy as we want to stay with them to ensure easy receipt of the no claims  status.

In the end the documents required were

• Seller’s drivers license
• Buyer’s drivers license
• Car registration certificate
• Fresh vehicle certificate
• Buyer’s vehicle insurance policy
• & Mortgage clearance certificate if been on hire-purchase

Documents that were suggested as necessary but not actually needed were

• Employment certificate
• Passport

In the past a No Objection certificate has also been required but that seems to have faded completely.
Now, all of that happened quickly but purchase of the new car is taking longer. But that is another story entirely :-)