Unlocked front doors and that safe, sheltered feeling. The insomnia of the city. Coming back home at 3 in the morning without a turn over your shoulder. Interminable, suffocating traffic. Global village in "Winter". The status quo. That Dubai-an mix of an accent. Gigantic shopping malls. Neat, spotless streets and bins decorated with flowers. Calling Rafeeg for anything you want, anytime, delivered right to your doorstep. Seeing mini-colonies of every country under the sun. Witty, friendly, green police. Etisalat and Du and their hate clubs. Pretty mosques at every corner. Ignored speed radars. The high-heels, and the Ray-bans that stay put in-doors. Street-side Chai karak. Pink taxis. People walking around town with their noses in their BBs. Streets that change everyday and out-dated GPSes. Gamboo3as. Having your petrol filled for you. All the restaurants you can think of. Cooled air, all around. Twenty-somethings and their independent cake and abaya businesses. Niqabs and skimpy clothes. The undercover universes of Karama and Bur Dubai. The other under-cover universes of public transport. The categorization of people. The locals and the almost locals and the expat Arabs and the Desis and the Filipinos. And the white house-wives with their gym and spa subscriptions. The uninterrupted weather rants. The Salik dodgeball. Everyday fireworks.
After you've lived somewhere for a while, the good and the ugly start to infuse and eventually become- the familiar. It's not that the pros and cons stop being what they are. It's just that they sink into you- or you sink into them. Like how the initial pleasure and shock of owning a fancy car and having to wear ugly uniform for school stop having that effect on you.
The Dubai-ans here are mostly not really Dubai-ans. They have their own homes to pine for somewhere else. Circumstance got them here, and Comfort kept them. Gripped them in not so reluctantly. I don't know about anyone else but I can speak for myself. The damage has been done- I have been enchanted by my temporary home.
