Insha'Allah

Even before I moved over here, I was introduced to the phrase "Insha'Allah."  Insha'Allah means "God willing" in Arabic and is used quite often over here.  It's really a good indicator of what life is like in the UAE.  For example, I was talking with a colleague yesterday and we were planning to meet up today so that he could help me with figuring out our apartment contract (since he speaks arabic) and at the end of the conversation I said "Ok, well I'll talk to you tomorrow" and he said "Insha'Allah."  Here nothing is for sure, you just kind of hope that things will work out as planned.

Insha'Allah describes exactly how I feel right now with our housing situation.

Here's a little history on our my apartment hunt.  As a warning, it's a bit of a rant/venting blog, so it's not exactly the most positive, but it does depict how I was/am feeling.

So my company gives you 30 days in a hotel during which time you are supposed to find housing.  This isn't as big of a deal if you're going to live in Dubai as there are just a ton of places that are nice, new and reasonably priced--not so in Abu Dhabi.  But even still, I guess I did not really think about how long it can take to find housing.  But I did finally settle on a nice, new 2 br apartment in Khalifa A.  I got the rent negotiated down to a pretty good deal, and I was excited about having a normal sized kitchen (which can be near impossible to find in a 1 or 2 br apartment).  Now it took me 3.5 weeks to find the apartment.  Then when I gave the paperwork to my HR department to get the process of getting the check cut started, they told me it would be at least 2 weeks before they could have the payment processed, but actually closer to 3 weeks since it's Ramadan (everything takes longer during Ramadan).  I wanted to say "Seriously?  That means that you expected me to land here on a Friday night, recover from jet lag on Saturday, work Sunday through Thursday, and then spend 2 days looking for an apartment in a city that I do not know at all and decide where I wanted to live for the next year?"  Of course if you know me very well, you'd know that I probably wouldn't ever say that, but I did seriously consider it.  Luckily, with Paul getting 30 days as well, we're living in the hotel on his days now, but if we didn't have that, I really don't know how they could expect us to move out of the hotel so quickly.

Anyways, so I gave HR the papers, but apparently I didn't have all the documentation I needed.  So I went back to the agent for more information.  Now, the agent is from Bahrain and does not speak very good english.  Luckily, the colleague I mentioned above (Ibrahim) has been helping me out.  But that also meant that I had to call Ibrahim, who would call the agent, then call me back, then I would go to HR or send a driver to pick up the info.  Some things got a little lost and distorted like the "telephone" game, but things were moving along.  But after about a week of getting together the documentation, I was told for the first time of 2 more pieces of info that I needed.  I tried going directly to the agent, who by this time was a bit agitated that I was asking for so much information, and he refused to give to tell me the basic info that I needed.  I called Ibrahim and he got the same response.  I told HR and they said they'd try to figure that out.  Apparently the way they wanted to "figure it out" was by going to the agent's office and asking for it.  That turned out to be a bad idea.  The agent got very angry and demanded that if I didn't pay all of the money (~$23,000) the very next day, he was going to give the apartment to someone else.

When HR called to give me the news, I about fell apart.  As I've ranted before, finding housing here is not easy, and I'll leave it at that.  They also told me that the "real estate agency" was actually just this one man and actually sounded a little sketchy.  And, since the agent was being so difficult, it's hard to say how he would've been as a landlord--so I tried to repeatedly tell myself, that this is probably a good thing and in the end, hopefully the new housing I find will be even better.

So with that, we started another search.  At least this time I had Paul with me, I knew what area we wanted to live in, and I knew the questions to ask on the phone so we didn't waste hours seeing old, sub-standard quality buildings.  Our first outing was after work on Thursday.  We had a driver take us to a few places with one agent which were ok.  Then we had the driver drop us off at the only market in Khalifa A which is where we planned to meet another agent who had been really helpful before.  The problem was that it was only 4:30 when the driver dropped us off and we were tired, hungry and thirsty.  But it wasn't sundown yet (about 6:45).  So we were torturing ourselves by walking around this grocery store because it had a/c but we couldn't eat or drink anything!  I think Paul got a little dehydrated.  Eventually I convinced Paul to ask the cashier if we could buy a drink and drink it in the store.  He got denied.  But after about 3 mins another worker came by and told us we could as long as we hid back in a corner of the store.  We took him up on the offer and enjoyed a nice cold pink lemonade gatorade.  It tasted so good.  About 5:30 the other agent picked us up and took us around to a few places, none of which were really what we wanted.

On Friday, our friends N & T were so kind and drove us out to KCA to see some more places.  The first guy I called didn't answer his phone for 45 mins, even though I confirmed with him the night before when we were meeting.  Typical.  So I called the next person and she met up with us.  She took us to 3 places...all of which we'd been to before (2 just the previous day).  Also typical since there's no addresses, there's no way to know if they're going to take you to the same place until you're there.  One of the places she took us was our favorite place from the night before which we were hoping to be our back-up option.  She informed us that she was signing a contract on it with someone else the next day, so there went the only one we liked.

Finally, we met up with an agent that showed us 3, yes three, nice, reasonably priced places.  It was ridiculous.  The ironic thing is that he worked for the same company as the first real estate agent that I ever met.  But the first guy only showed me 2 tiny places and then didn't show me anything else (I don't think he was in the mood to work that day).

So we decided on one.  It is a 1br with a big living room, and a relatively big kitchen that even has a counter that we can sit at with bar stools.  And the kitchen has room for an oven (or a "cooker" as they call it here).  And my favorite part is that we have our own private backyard.  It's probably about 20'x10' with real grass (although it's a little brown now) and 4 trees!  I am so excited about this.  It will be so nice come winter when the weather is gorgeous and we can grill out, and sit on the porch and just hang out.  Plus, this apartment came with wardrobes, a bed frame, dresser, and night stand which will help our furniture purchasing allowance stretch a little farther (here you have to buy all of your appliances yourself like your stove, fridge, oven, microwave).

Insha'Allah, this will be our new kitchen

So we paid our deposit on the spot and were supposed to go back on Saturday to finalize the contract, but my colleague was out of town and couldn't make it back in time.  So we went today after work and got the paperwork sorted out....or at least most of it.  Hopefully I have enough to get the payment process started.

Our new backyard, it definitely needs some TLC and trashing
of the astroturf, but I'm excited.  Once we move in, I'll try to
get some before and after photos.

The contract is dated for 1 Sept which is the latest the agency would let me have, so we'll see.  I'm hoping that we'll start moving in around Sep 8th and be fully moved in by the end of that weekend.  And if everything went perfectly, our stuff we shipped from the US will arrive sometime between when we get the check and that weekend.  It's sounding possible since it was supposed to have arrived last Monday, but we still haven't received notification that it's here.  Plus, once it's here it has to go through customs which who knows how long that will take since it's Ramadan.  So I think there's a chance we won't have to pay to store it until we're ready to move.

Insha'Allah.