A Wet Christmas

Dubai is definitely showing the Christmas spirit with lots of decorations in the malls and available to purchase in the stores. But despite the abundance of fake snow (of course!), the only precipitation that one is likely to see here is the wet kind. And rain it has, for the last four days. I was under the mistaken impression that it never rained here!

It started as a gentle refreshing kind of rain, during one of our scuba lessons. It was just enough to stir up the silt in the Gulf so that our open water dive session had to be cancelled due to lack of visibility, so we went back to the pool. Our scuba instructor told us it was likely to rain for days, but I scoffed, still under the impression that it never rained here. Then it was on and off for a while. But today it started to come down pretty heavy. In Dubai, a heavy rain can cause some serious problems, mostly due to lack of drainage, combined with the omnipresent sand and silt. Many of the roads and highway ramps turn unexpectedly into ponds. The dust and silt on the cars makes for very poor visibility when combined with rain. I was driving today, and going through a tunnel I hit a river and suddenly lost all visibility. Since the drivers here can be unpredictable, even driving defensively may not avoid an accident, so I made my way home immediately.

Fortunately we have a parking garage for our building but I now know that it is far from being watertight. In fact, it was raining inside and a nice size river was starting to form on the bottom floor. I hope they will warn us if the river rises high enough to do any damage. So far our apartment seems to be watertight except for one window leaking.

Back to Christmas, you may be wondering if they have Christmas trees here and the answer is yes, they have all that and more. Of course, it's mostly for the expats who celebrate Christmas, but I have also noticed some Arab-looking types with trees and Christmas decorations, no doubt due to some small child demanding same. Some things seem a bit weird, though, such as the Christmasy wolves and squirrels appearing beneath one mall Christmas tree.