I've met many people, and have aggregated a list of misconceptions people have about Dubai. There are many more, but for now this will do:
- You need to know Arabic to survive here- this is not true. For all practical purposes, Malayalam seems to be the national language, but several other Indian dialects are also widely accepted along with Filipino and English, and some taxi drivers may also amaze you with good knowledge of Farsi. Arabic went out of fashion ten years ago and today is confined to signboards and police-cars.
- Internet access is closely watched by the Government and several sites are banned- No, only sites which are "inconsistent with the moral values of the UAE" are blocked, which include free SMS sites that provide competition to the State-owned Telecom provider, Internet telephony sites like Skype for precisely the same reason, and Flickr.com, the photo sharing service, for no apparent reason.
- Locals are friendly- out of the four million people living in Dubai, less than a million are Arabs, and if you do manage to get hold of one before he/she gets into their black-tinted vehicles or their palace like houses, I applaud you. Level of friendliness may differ greatly by area, with people in Karama a little more polite than the ones in the Greens and other middle-of-the-desert developments, who have issues like Home Loans, maintanance fees, flooding, and unfairly closed swimming pools.
- Weather is very bad- well, actually no. We get at least five months of winter, and winter brings wondefully cool weather. Locals usually go to parks and give mall-jumping a rest. It's a nice time to come, between November and February. We also have Dubai Shopping Festival in Jan/Feb.
- There is lots of oil here and plenty of money to be made. Well, if you're a European/Arab, then you're in luck, but for others it's usually 12 hours of work, getting stuck in traffic in the evenings and just enough money to pay your extravagant rent.
I have started an RSS feed for my blog, if you would like to subscribe. You can find it at feeds.feedburner.com/dubaiteen .
6 Comments:
Hello, I came across your blog today. I must say I liked it, because most 13 year olds I have met recently seem to have a vocab of 9 sentences,and the IQ of a garden gnome. So I must say that is was a welcome respite. Well done.
I concur with kaya. Nice blog, you get added to my feedreader.
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LOL :) well etisalat said flickr was a 'dating' site, so i sent them a link to block a dating website (meaning, a site DEDICATED for dating purposes)...they chose to do nothing. wonderful decision-making :)
iirc Etisalat only has ever said flickr was a pornography site, and it is, it has an immense amount of pornography served online; i'm pretty sure they were also antsy about boys and girls interacting, after all we were never meant to do that.
Desert Safari Dubai top nice posting in your blog thank for shering
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