Run visa run!

It’s a bit like going to visit your favourite relative, twice-removed on
your great aunt’s side of the family. You arrive and they give you the
warmest welcome this side of the equator. ‘Stay as long as you like!
Mi casa es su casa!’, they beam at you.
Some time passes, and the glossy veneer on their bright smiles
is starting to wear a bit thin. They haven’t replaced the once fresh
sprig of flowers in your room for days.
Then one fine morning, you wake up, stretch out and go down to the
breakfast room, expecting to find the smell of freshly baked scones
wafting towards you. Nothing. The beating heart of the house is
suddenly still and there seems to be a chill in the air.
You pick up the hastily scribbled note on the kitchen table.
‘Such a pleasure having you here for the past few months.
We feelthat it might be good for you to resume your travels now.
Please leave the key under the doormat on your way out,
and feel welcome to come stay again any time now, y’hear?’

And THAT is what a visa run is. It means quite simply that you have
overstayed your welcome in your host country, and to get back on
the good side of the family, you need to leave the country and then
return with a fresh stamp in your passport.

It incidentally does not involve running of any kind, rather a whole lot
of sitting, either on the plane, or car, or waiting for official-looking
people to stamp important-looking papers.

I went to Doha in Qatar for my visa run. I flew there with
Emirates airlines and their perky air hostesses tried to serve me
some tired sandwiches. The flight was so short, that I couldn’t even fit
in a whole episode of Friends. I arrived at Doha airport, disembarked
the plane, walked in a semi-circle through the airport, sat down for
5 minutes and boarded the very same plane again. I was offered
the same tired sandwiches by the same perky air hostesses.
I finished watching the episode of Friends, and clocked up some
frequent flyer miles.
All in all, not bad for a day’s work, huh?
I felt like an international jetsetter of note, well, except for the fact
that there isn’t really that much happening in Doha. Yet.

So I have now entered the UAE on a working visa as opposed to a
visitor’s visa, and this is valid until the18th May, at which time
I should already have my 3 year residency visa. At which time
Doha might be well worth a second visit, don’t you think?

Automatic for the people

It does seem like all my stories about Dubai seem to revolve around
cars and driving in some way. Cars are BIG over here. And I’m starting
to think by the time I leave I might be able to spot, say an
Aston Martin at a 1000 paces, without breaking a sweat.
How about that Hummer, huh? I hear you can order them in
Ocean Shimmer Blue now.
This in itself is a foreign concept for me, since I don’t really
care what I drive as long asit has four wheels and the ability
to get me to point Z eventually.

So as a transitional mode of transport, I am renting a
Mitsubishi Lancer at the moment. To be honest, I didn’t really know
what a Lancer looked like, so I had to Google it on the internet,
so I would know who to wave at when the car rental company came
to drop it off. OK, so I still had to phone them up and ask which colour,
since the guy that had parked in front of office building did not
take kindly to me trying to get into his car.
Which just happened to be a Mitsubishi Lancer.
What are the odds?

But this story is really about the transition from stick shift
to automatic gears. For instance: you put the car in D for Drive
and you do just that. Or R for Reverse, and so on. You get the picture.
Easy peasy.

About two weeks ago, I park the car at work one morning
just before 8 am, and return after 6 pm that evening to drive home.
To my horror, my car is not in its parking space! Instead, I find it had
rolled back and is now standing in the middle of the parking area!
Shock and horror!

So I do what any respectable person would do in this situation,
which is to half-crouch, semi leopard crawl to the driver’s seat
and get out of there, bank-robbery style with screeching tyres!
Oh, the shame!

The story should have ended there.
The next morning as I drive up to park the car, the car-wash-guy
is waiting for me. ‘Why you park so bad?’ he berates me.
I uh, well now, you see, I forgot to put the car into P (for Park)
and well I also forgot to pull up the handbrake. Very sorry,
really it won’t happen again, I say as I find myself backing away
from the car, and from a guy who probably doesn’t even have a
driver’s license!

So now I do take the extra minute in the morning to double check
my car is in P(ark) and make sure the handbrake is pulled up.
If this had happened in South Africa, someone would have pushed the
car back into its parking space, shoved a brick behind the back wheel
and possibly left a rude note on the windscreen. Short and sweet.

Well Dorothy, I guess we’re not in Kansas anymore.