A Camel.

A short story about Visa’s, bankers…and something that rhymes with that!

This week has been hugely frustrating. Like walking through knee-deep wet sand while carrying a sick Camel. Ok, so that wouldn’t be frustrating it would be near impossible, but impossible might have been a better choice of word in the first place so we will stick with the Camel. The Camel’s name is Erik and he is an Estate Agent, or he might be somewhere in some parallel universe because in this one he is just plain useless.

Late last week my man and I found an apartment that we liked, we paid the security deposit and started looking at fridges.

All seemed calm in the desert until the Camel stood on a thorn…

Erik went to the landlord to get the ‘government approved’ tenancy agreement signed and was presented with a totally different piece of paper, still with the same agreements on just not on the original page. To cut a long story short, Erik argued with the Landlord that their version was illegal and as they didn’t back down... he called the Police.

Having told S and I “the Landlord is refusing to sign the tenancy agreement and refusing to give you your deposit back” we were understandably distressed. The deposit is not a small amount of money, and on top of that we really liked the apartment and couldn’t wait to get out of our temporary place. S spent 3 days going between various Government departments at Erik’s insistence until finally the truth came out. The ‘Landlord’ is a multi-national company owned by the Sheik and the agreement they offered is perfectly legal and supported. The thorn was nothing but a splinter.

We, of course, wanted to continue but unbeknown to us, Erik had written the Landlord a letter FROM MY HUSBAND stating that we wanted our deposit returned and if we didn’t get it within 10 days we would raise a dispute with the rents department. We knew NOTHING about this letter; S was not consulted and hadn’t even known about the “problem” when it was sent. As a consequence of this, the Landlord no longer wanted to rent us the apartment.

Luckily with an explanation from the Manager of the Agency and the terms readily agreed to we were able to salvage the situation. The problem now is that because of the 3 days spent time wasting; S didn’t have a chance to request a checkbook from the bank. A process which should only take 6 days, 3 days to convert the account to a checking account and 3 days to deliver the checkbook. Here we reach the wet sand, otherwise known as UAE banks. They are ridiculously slow, unhelpful and dis-organised. We told Erik on Tuesday that we had put the request in and advised him that we could pay the first rent in cash and then submit 3 checks for the final payment once the book had arrived. He went to the landlord and asked if this would be ok. We said we should have the checkbook by Thursday next week (which gave us plenty of time should the banks be slow) and despite all the grief he had already caused us, he told the Landlord we would have the checks by Monday!! This would be fine, if on Wednesday when we checked the status of S’s bank they had been able to find the paperwork or any record of the request at all. Numerous visits to the bank later and they have finally found the paperwork, it is still being processed 6 days into the ordeal and there is no sign of when it might be completed.

So this week has been hours of sitting in waiting rooms, running from one bank to another, government visits, idiotic Camels and all we can do now is wait. The Landlord will not give us another chance, and due to the Camel and endless wet sand we may not make it to water in time. I now have my visa and have put the same request into my bank. Now all we can do is hope that it rains checkbooks by Monday.

On the up side, we both have our residents’ visas and are now officially accepted as Expats in Dubai! Hurrah! It is very exciting and just what we wanted, but it would be nice to share it with more people.

Home feels a very long way away right now and friends and family are living their lives, carrying on as normal with their own stresses and triumphs and Skype just doesn’t seem to bring that world any closer to ours. Home is not here yet but neither is it there, we have no place to call our own and still live out of suitcases. We are resident visitors in a foreign land and we are carrying a Camel….