Have car, will travel

It is definitely warm here now, unseasonably warm for this early in the year. Even at midnight, it is still +30 degrees. I’m not dying yet but they tell me it will get worse before it gets better. Most of my time is spent in the air conditioned indoors and I find I miss being outside.

I moved into my apartment last week. After some hard-core cleaning and shopping at IKEA, it is now quite homey and things are settling down. International City is not exactly the posh part of town but it is comfortable and affordable.

The city planners here must have had a warped sense of humour when they laid out IC because it is a maze side streets and round-abouts and round-abouts within round-abouts and NO signage whatsoever. To add to the fun, nothing here is east-west-north-south which has wreaked havoc with my sense of direction (next item on my shopping list is a GPS.) And although each ‘cluster’ has an architectural theme, it is very subtle and all the buildings look virtually the same so navigating this cruel joke kinda freaked me out at first. But with my trusty map in hand (such as it is) I have managed to find my way home and even directed the taxi drivers … go to the Dragonmart (also known as “China mall”), wind yer way through the switch back street behind the mall past China cluster (the real road to IC has not been built yet so all 3 lanes of traffic entering International City must funnel through this one-lane bottle neck with massive speed bumps … very slow!!!); follow the road past England cluster in which all the buildings are tan-colored; first round-about go straight; second round-about left (now you’re in Russia, everything is light grey); round-about straight; round-about straight; when ya see Spain (you can tell because these buildings are sand-coloured), go round-about right (now yer in the centre of Italy); one more round-about left and the second beige building on the right is home! Easy! But there really ought to be some signs.

This week I FINALLY got my UAE drivers license which meant I could FINALLY rent a vehicle so I can FINALLY start to get out and about and explore!!! And just do the mundane things like errands. Life here without wheels is pretty limited, it is not pedestrian friendly, its not really transit friendly, it is not really taxi friendly at times and I don’t have enough friends here to bum rides.

My new car is a 2008 Honda Civic with all of 47 km when they delivered it last night. I’m sure most of that was racked up circling International City trying to find my building. I took it for a spin late last night and drove to work early this morning (before the really heavy traffic).

I got started on my next project at work which is exciting. It is a 35-storey residential tower and eventually (like a few weeks from now) there will be four more towers and a big massive parking structure on the same site. I am still working on the initial project I took over but there is light at the end of the tunnel on that one. The designer of the tower is very excited about it. In 2 short weeks, they designed the site and the tower, produced drawings, 3D computer models, two scale models, sales materials and the whole thing went on sale at Abu Dhabi Cityscape (a big real estate tradeshow) and sold out after 2 days. Things move at warp speed here. http://www.cityscape.ae/index.html

As an aside, it looks like my old bosses are expanding to the middle-east. Cohos Evamy is listed as one of the exhibitors at that trade show.