Is the Emirates the Safest Place on Earth?

Seen in Mirdif City Centre...

Now, I'm the first to admit that I've drunk the Kool Aid. I reckon that most expats in their first couple of years are ambivalent about this place, those that make it to five years are generally going to be pretty much in favour of it all. Get to ten years, buy a villa in the Ranches or whatever expat ghetto suits you best, and you're probably raving about how marvellous it all is - despite your Shiny perhaps being a tiny little bit less sparkly than you were promised. It's a Shiny, after all, and that's shiny enough for most people.

We perhaps tend to forget sometimes how, far from Shiny, home was grimy. Rain, tax, tea, in that order. That's why we're here, no?

I admire those that came out here with a game plan. Two years, five years, once you've got that deposit on a flat in Richmond or a sixteen bedroom mansion in Leicester or whatever it was that you wanted to get done, you've done it and gone back. That's great, but it was never for us. We just liked the place and we meandered - we never had an objective, as such. A vague idea that we'd go home one day, perhaps, but that was as concrete as anything got.

I remember saying to Sarah just after we arrived that we'd been £1,000 in debt every month in the UK and now that we'd been in the Emirates a while, we'd bought the household things we needed (and could never afford back home) and had a thousand quid in hand. If we did a year here and went home a thousand quid better off, we'd have done a year in the sun and have £2,000 more than when we arrived. That, I said, would be just as true if we did 25 years and went home two thousand quid better off. And it is, at that.

I'm very well aware that there are those who don't - for whom the Emirates hasn't been as kind or who have just found themselves out of step with the whole place. There are people who have found themselves trapped in a job they've hated, been bilked by a dodgy employer or who have just generally hated it and everything it stands for. There are those who have left here and re-cast their old home in the sun as a horrible, empty place (funnily enough, many who have done that seemed happy enough when they were here).

But, clearly, over 25 years later something's keeping us here - we like it, very much so in fact. Is that a bad thing?

One of the very many things I like about here is the sense of personal security. I've got used to keeping my wallet in my back pocket, to leaving the car open as I nip into the shop - to having loose change in the little pot thing by the handbrake (I'm reliably informed I wouldn't have a side window if I did that in the UK - I still find that hard to believe, but you tend to listen to the locals).

Walking past charity collection boxes in the malls stuffed with notes and noticing that a) they're not chained down and b) they're still there two seconds later, one is occasionally reminded that the crime rate here is so low as to be almost negligible. Sarah's safe out walking alone or with a friend, day or night. You forget that until you have to wise up when you're on holiday back in Europe. Until you hear the horror stories.

The photo above was taken in a jewellery shop in Mirdif City Centre. Even being as used as we are to the safety and security of here, we found it was an amusing 'where else in the world?' moment...

Back

See you, pal? See you?

It's been nigh on a year, don't yer know. Have I missed y'all? Truth is, not so much. I've spent some time doing face to face chatting with some of the people I've known online, which has been lovely. I've been busy with one thing and another and have rarely had the time to think about blogs and suchlike. I've even been taking Twitter very lightly.

One issue with my little online Tamagochi was feeding it. What do I have to say every day? When I started this here thing up in 2007, there was loads to say and I was happy to devote half an hour or so each day to saying it. A whinge here, a snark there, a giggle every now and then - it was all such fun, Pip. But with the passage of time, it started to feel like an obligation - and that, as I wrote in the last post almost a year ago, was when I decided to leave things lie a while.

But the other day, I had cause to post a bunch of tweets about what's around us, here in the UAE. And an awful lot of people perked up and said things along the lines of 'Really? I didn't know about that!'.

And, for reasons which shall become clear in the weeks and months to come, I have had reason to explore many of these things and places myself, often with a depth you'd not normally, reasonably, afford 'em. Added to that, one of my favourite things is taking friends and family around the place - I confess to greatly enjoying the role of tour guide.

So I think I might take to posting about the UAE that's around us, often hidden in plain sight. Let's see where that takes us...

A Little Bit Of Gas A Little Bit Of VAT

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We got back off leave to the much-awaited introduction of Value Added Tax in the UAE. VAT is very much a fact of life in the UK, where it is charged at a charming 20%. The UAE's 5% pales in comparison but it remains that most unwelcome of innovations - a tax.

Living for 25 years in a 'tax free' environment has been something of a privilege, I know. It has long amazed me that here we have an economy capable of functioning (and no, it's not about oil) without gouging its citizens for 25 or even 40% of their earnings. When you look at how little you get back from the UK government for all the taxes, fees and levies we pay, the UAE model is pretty compelling stuff.

But last year we saw the soda and fag tax (no bad thing, mind, although it does rather tend to hit one hard in the Fevertrees) as well as a rise in the property registration 'fee' in Sharjah from 2 to 4 per cent (because a payment to government leveraged as a percentage of a transaction is a fee and not a tax, you understand) and now the dreaded VAT is here. The background noise of expats moaning has increased as a consequence, but there's no doubt that it has sneaked a lot of cost overnight into a life already become more expensive.

VAT was the last thing on my mind the other night as I was cooking dinner, especially as the gas started to gutter. Having refused Sharjah Electricity and Water's cunningly worded invitation to give them Dhs 1,000 and the blood of our firstborn each month thereafter, we still rely on Fast, Faster and Faster Than Fastest gas and they duly rocked up soon after my call. Dhs130 for the gas and Dhs7 VAT, the chap informed me as he rolled the cylinder around to the back of the house. Tired and frustrated by the derailing of my sumptuous gastronomical event, I paid without demur. Only later did I stop to reflect that the wee swine had a) rounded it up to the nearest dirham b) taken VAT in cash without offering a VAT receipt. Guess where that Dhs7 is going (and I'm betting it's not the MoF!)?

I must confess I'd expected the introduction of the new tax to be an Emirates ID style disaster and I appear to have been wrong in that - things seem pretty fluid in comparison. The overhead for businesses, mind, is significant. Not only is there the additional cost on 'value added', but the auditing and compliance costs are significant. One aspect I hadn't considered was outlined to me by a pal the other day - cashflow. Her business tends to run on big ticket contracts and payments rarely take place within 90 days. Paying VAT on each quarter's invoices means she's going to take a huge hit up front.

That's not going to worry the lads over at Faster Than Fast, of course. Firmly embedded in the cash economy, they're likely laughing all the way to Al Ansari to send all that lovely VAT back to Swat to fund the construction of legion sprawling mansions...

Oh noes! Here Comes COMPLIANCE!

The cold weather's here alright, but this is just silly...
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was ranting on Medium the other day about the Evils of Conformity but there is a much darker, brooding evil stalking my life right now. Compliance.

As an Ancient Expat, I deal with a number of financial institutions. Some look after my company's money, some my own money. Some act in a number of ways to impair my access to my money (not that I'm giving HSBC a long, hard stare at this point, you understand) while others are entrusted with our plans for jam tomorrow.

The times they have been a-changin' for some time now. I remember walking into the Bank of Ireland in Thurles waving a wad of UAE Dirhams and asking the teller if I could please change them into Irish Punts.
'Of course,' came the answer. 'What are they?'
'They're UAE Dirhams.'
'Is that right? Is that what they look like? Well, I never!'
And they were then duly changed at the prevailing rate.
I swear it's true. Nowadays they'd have to take all my biometrics, my DNA and a snapshot of my current mind-state before they'd even talk to me.

Try telling a British financial institution - one that's happy enough to take money from overseas but clearly make no concessions to an environment that's different to the UK - that you only have a PO Box number. That even though they put up street signs on your sand road a few years ago, nobody uses them. Particularly since a lorry knocked down the sign on the corner a couple of years back and nobody's replaced it.

We need two utility bills, they trill, addressed to your home address. Except they aren't, here. They're all addressed to our PO Box. All our statements and other financial institution correspondence comes to our PO Box. Nobody uses our physical address, nobody. If you HAVE to find us, for instance to deliver Lebanese food, you get talked in from the Sheraton Sharjah.

Since my first visit to the wonders of the Gulf in 1986, I have found my way to innumerable meetings 'Past the second water tank after the Herfy on Sitteen Street, turn left and we're below the ALICO sign' although I must pause to point out that all directions given to locations in Abu Dhabi are followed by 'it's really easy', words which strike a chill of fear into my heart because they invariably mean 'You're going to die trying to find us.'

The British Embassy doesn't certify documents anymore. The Irish Office in Dubai will, for Dhs60, certify a copy of a passport but really wants an Irish connection and isn't too happy about doing my Brit passport. Getting two hours away from work to trot off getting documents legally translated and certified is, oddly enough, not very easy. I'm actually busy. And that certification of identity doesn't help with the old physical address thing, either.

It's been plaguing me. Everything I try isn't quite good enough. The electricity bill gives my area as a different area to the other document. Try as I might, I can't get 'em to understand that Muntaza and Rifa'a are the same thing. They might even be Fisht or Heera, depending on your mood and desire for geographical granularity. Any physical address given simply doesn't matter anyway. There is no standard, there is no infrastructure that relies on or requires physical addressing. And when a utility goes askew, we have to go to their office and bring the chap back to our house because they'd never find it otherwise. Oh, unless they want to cut off the supply when they suddenly and miraculously know precisely where we are. Quick aside - the other week SEWA cut us off for non-payment when we'd paid. 'Why didn't you knock first?' we asked, getting the immortal response, 'Because people hit us.'

We have an Etisalat location ID, but as far as I can tell even Etisalat doesn't use that. The wee plaque affixed to our villa displaying it is actually most used by local gas companies and AC repair men to wedge their stickers and business cards. Even the tenancy contract (legally translated and certified, natch) is no good as it only refers to me because it's in my name rather than joint names because we're in the UAE and that's just how it is here, right?

Nope.

In impotent fury, I point out our money was good enough to take in the first place. They opened the account. Why now, with each new shift in pottiness, am I faced with fresh swathes of idiocy dressed up as 'compliance'?

'Yes, yes. We understand. Nevertheless, we need two immutable and incorrigible proofs of your residence address signed in wet ink by a bearded ocelot. And then stamped, signed, sealed, translated, attested, fumigated and duly immolated.'

Bastards.