Wednesday, January 18, 2017

We are gold!

Living in a place with the international reputation for excess that Dubai has, you often hear the phrase "Only in Dubai" bandied about the place. There's the police super cars, the gold vending machines, the gold-laced and super expensive foods, and the sometimes but not always unfair reputation for coating everything that will stay still in gold. It won't surprise you to know that the super-glitz hyper-expensive side of life is of little relevance to us ordinary Dubai-residents, but every now and then, something happens to you that you know would never happen to you anywhere else in the world.

I have been debating writing about this as I am worried that you mere mortals may read it and then come and flex to my crib one night and steal all my swag. That's right, the vain usage of out-of-date street slang will give you a clue as to what is occurring here, yes that's right, Him Indoors and I have finally made it in Dubai, we have finally accessed the pot of gold that everyone thinks is going to fall into their lap when they move here. Yes, we have won gold.



Or for those of you with more, ahem, mature tastes:



How did we win gold? You may ask.
Well, first of all, here is a picture of the stupendous riches of which we are now in possession. Don't get too excited. Don't start the begging charity letters just yet, but here you go:



Calm down!

Stop rubbing your hands with glee, Gollum!

Four whole grams of gold! We are surely in the money, that must be worth, millions????? No?...... OK. Thousands.......? ... No, hundre....d????s OK, one hundred, $160USish depending on the gold price. Well, it's better than a slap in the face with a wet fish isn't it?

Let's face it, we would have to be in pretty dire financial straits for the bother of heading down to Dubai's Gold and Diamond Park in order to cash it in.

Goldie, as I have named him, was our reward for buying a massive shiny new fridge-freezer. We have been in Dubai well over six years now, and try as hard as you like, some of the sheer Dubai-ness of it starts to rub off on you and you gravitate towards the big and shiny.  But, it's not that bad. Despite having moved house, oh, I don't know, 11 billion times at the last count, Him Indoors and I have only ever bought two fridges in our time. The first was for our most recent old flat - our first flat ever to have not a stick of furniture, no fitted kitchen, no appliances, no nothing, so, having just dropped a minimum of AED 10,000 (2,200GBP at current exchange rates) for the privilege of moving house, we bought the rubbishest cheapest fridge we could find, which lasted a while, then we stored a large amount of fresh vegetables from Kibsons (don't judge us, we haven't become w***ers, it actually works out cheaper than the supermarket) in it, and it basically wet itself, by which I mean it sprung some kind of leak and set about urinating water all over all of our food and generally stopped being a fridge and became more of a cold swamp.

So, as we have a small child now, who requires about eight litres of fresh milk per day, and we do, *eugh, I really hate this phrase, it's bandied about on mum forums by martyrish witches who suddenly turn into Martha effing Stewart the second they reproduce*, "batch cooking" (vomits) it seemed a good idea to get a massive fridge-freezer. And because it was during the Dubai Shopping Festival, it has been decreed that he/she who spends a large amount of dosh at Carrefour in Mirdif Centre shall receive several scratch cards with which they can win gold if successful. Actual gold. And sure enough, one of them told us that we had won four grams of gold. So, off we went to the Carrefour cash desk to receive our prize, with Him Indoors saying: "They're not actually going to give us gold, that would be silly, they're just going to give us the cash equivalent of what the gold price is to.... Oh. No, they have given us gold, an actual gold coin. Bizarre."

What are we going to do with Goldie? I don't know. One idea is, that we could melt him down and make him into something nice for Desert Baby. Or we could just keep hold of him, chuckle to ourselves occasionally at his existence, and vaguely consider cashing him in if the gold price reaches an all time high, but actually never get round to it. That. That is what will happen to him, I expect.
But now, it is definitely one of our best "Only in Dubai" anecdotes - the time we won gold because we bought a fridge at the supermarket.