Kulcha Club

There’s this knock you’re supposed to take on the chin after your first 6 months in Dubai. Expats here talk about it. It’s called Kulcha Shock.

The whole thing is well documented in leading expat literature (of the variety that is humbly minus-the-pith-helmet). Jeremy Williams wrote this handy manual, Don’t They Know It’s Friday: Cross-Cultural Considerations for Business and Life in the Gulf, basically giving practical advice on how to deal with it. A lot of folks hit this psychological wall as they battle to come to terms with living in an alien social matrix with a very different set of codes and understandings than they are used to.

The weird thing is, Dubai is quite like SA in terms of lifestyle. There’s the whole sun, sea and sand vibe (OK, more sand). Supersport and Carte Blanche are on tap: Saffas living here have their satellites hooked up to DSTV via Zambia (oops). Spinneys, the Spar equivalent, is better stocked up with Mrs Balls, boerie, and a myriad of rusk varieties, than Makro. We get on with our lives here as we would at home with almost no interruption: work, gym, beach, and on the weekends, we like to booze-it booze-it.

Same-same, but different. We’re living in a Muslim country, ruled by a Sheikh after all.

I discussed this with Jeanpant. While the majority of your time is a cruise, there can be this uneasy, queasy, inexplicable feeling the other 10% of the time. Which, given the situation here, is hardly surprising. “There are men walking past you in dish dashes and women in abayas everywhere you look fergodsake!”. We’re just not used to it.

Against this back-drop, we become the ‘uncovered’ women. I can’t really say that driving behind a bus bursting at the seams with exploited construction workers is always a comfortable experience.

There’s always the one watcher in the back row, craning his helmeted head for signs of a pair of mammary glands on the roads. With his heat-seeker smut-gaze successfully on lock, his compadres immediately sense it, and within seconds another 27 heads have swiveled. Some get out of their seats and blatantly turn around to face the back. Seriously, uncool.

That said, I’m aware of the risk taken and that in some contexts I may have just sounded like an ignorant, culturally intolerant tosser. Throw me a bone. It happened to me yesterday and so I am still freshly pissed off. Yet it is a reality, that 10% of the time.

My daily interactions with such a diverse spectrum of people is something I wouldn’t swop for anything right now. What is so amazing about Dubai and the UAE is that Arabic culture has fully embraced foreign influences, without losing any of its core beliefs and traditions.

The explosive expansion of the place demands skills and labour from abroad. For the most part, the needs of the imports are not only accommodated, but are of interest to most UAE nationals. Speak to a national and when they hear your accent it’s all about “how do you find Dubai?”

I haven’t hit my official 6-month wobbly yet but if and when it comes, I’m all over it.