From snow chaos to balmy summer

It’s Saturday. Motivated by the fact that the Middle East Roadshow is finally getting underway, I make my way to Vienna Airport, from where I’m heading to Dubai with a stopover in Istanbul. Despite Vienna’s excellent public transport infrastructure, I decide to take an Uber, as it has been snowing so much since the night before that it would be no fun to carry all my luggage – around 35 kg – for my next three weeks in the Emirates – over snow-covered pavements to any underground or suburban trains in sub-zero temperatures. It’s reassuring that there are flights at all, which is not the case everywhere due to the weather. Munich Airport, for example, has to cancel all flights.

Traffic in the city itself flows slowly, but after a short time I am on the expressway and later at the terminal of my Turkish Airlines flight. At the gate, it turns out that my flight is delayed by over an hour – not good, because that would be relatively close to my connecting flight. The pilots do make up some time. However, the 30-minute taxi to the terminal actually means that I miss my connection to Dubai by minutes, despite a mile-long sprint on my part, because the connection left from the exact opposite end of Istanbul Airport. Murphy’s Law! Just the start I need, I think to myself. At the help desk, I immediately get a ticket for an alternative flight, but it is delayed by around four hours. Oh well.

As the morning sun rises on Sunday, I finally reach Dubai and sit in a cab on the way to my apartment in the Business Bay district. Once there, I first have to make sure that the accommodation, an Airbnb apartment, is properly cleaned by informing the owner. I’m not sure if the whole thing has ever been cleaned properly. I’ll spare the details at this point and ask myself why I didn’t choose a regular hotel instead. At least they promise to remedy the situation immediately and while I make a quick detour to the beautifully landscaped Burj Khalifa Park, the cleaning crew actually arrives and does an intensive deep clean that makes the apartment almost unrecognisable afterwards. Back at the apartment, I settle in and take care of the organisational matters. Tomorrow I will be handed my tour vehicle, a van, and I have to get a lot of cash for it (for some reason only cash works), which is not so trivial with all the daily ATM withdrawal limits here. But with one last withdrawal tomorrow, Monday, it should work out.

I get my van on Monday morning. Everything goes quickly and smoothly. Unfortunately, however, the parking space belonging to the apartment is occupied by an unknown SUV, so I have to park my vehicle, which is also quite large, in someone else’s parking lot until I have new information. Hopefully that will go well.
So I decided to have a drive round and take a quick look at the local traffic. Due to my apparently very defensive driving, I am occasionally honked at by one or two Rolls Royces or Lamborghinis that pass me at crazy speeds in the 60 km/h zone. This is despite the fact that the COP28 UN climate conference is currently taking place in Dubai.

Tomorrow, I’ll be driving just as defensively, that’s for sure, to my appointment at Dubai Refreshments, PepsiCo..

Yours,
Kay Barton