An invitation to Dubai

JournalTravel

Apr 26

Written By Carol G

Well as the #stayhome continues, without being able to go anywhere, I looked back at some of my travel photos. I have a lot of travel stories to share 😆, but I guess the most interesting one on my list goes to my invitation to Dubai. There’s a whole lot of story behind it. As one wouldn’t travel to Dubai during their hottest month, July— deep into their summer, which almost killed me 😱

Here’s a lengthy back-story on how I decided to travel to Dubai for 4 and a half days, or you can just skip to the pictorials 😆

the back story

Moving back to Singapore at the end of 2018, many things had been very unclear for me. Especially in terms of my work scope. I’ve been a freelancer for sometime now. But things can get a little complicated when you move across oceans.
Major questions be like—
1. Supplier contacts
2. Client / Networking

It was like restarting from scratch, but in Singapore I have zero contacts, even till today. I missed having a full-time job, in a beautiful office and meeting people (in an easier way, I’m a part-time awkward potatoe 🤣). So I took quite a bit of time looking up for full-time offers on LinkedIn. There were some interesting offers. I wasn’t exactly sure if Singapore was the right place to be, so I applied to jobs all over the world: London / NYC / China and even Dubai.

But unfortunately, most overseas applications were ignored. I’m pretty sure it’s because visa paperwork are usually too complicated/expensive to handle so companies tend to choose someone from their country unless the candidate is exceptionally good.

A job in Dubai caught my attention

I looked through the company, the job description and details, I started dreaming 😆I told myself “Why not? You’ll never know without trying!”. I sent in my application— which unfortunately didn’t get a reply.

Let’s name this company/employer A.

A week later, I checked my mail, I got a message in my LinkedIn inbox, something which I often forgot about. Turns out employer A wrote to me! 😳Without looking at my application of course 😅

Then it rolled out into Skype interviews, doing design tests, everything went quite well I’d say. Except— I had another offer in Shanghai. I couldn’t really decide, mostly another long story to tell. I stopped dreaming and rejected the offer 😰

Employer A was quite upset to the extent that I think he felt betrayed 😅I’m sorry mister! He came back to me a month later and increased the offer which was really well paid. But I politely rejected it again… Then in another month, he reached out to me again and increased the offer. Originally I was about to accept another offer in Shanghai— but the offer in Dubai was really too good to decline. Seeing how Employer A was so desperate to hire me, I felt quite apologetic, he arranged a meeting in Dubai on a 50% sponsored trip (air ticket / hotel fares). Within 2 weeks, I was off on Emirates to Dubai.

Of course my over-protective parents didn’t really approved it. They thought that it was too dangerous for an asian girl to go alone but I somehow got one of my besties on the flight with me to Dubai ✌🏻

Meeting in person

Meeting employer A in person for the first time was a little nerve-wrecking. I re-introduce myself and presented some of my works. After which I was introduced to the team. The team was really young besides A, who’s also the founder of the company. I had 2 short afternoons with them. Discussing with my potential boss about how it would be like to move to Dubai, how he could help me to settle down, or how the work life is like etc. Overall, it was a nice experience 😊

Until I noticed some weird little details:
• When I presented my projects, A insisted to see one of my projects where what he described didn’t sound like anything I've done before 😳Which made me wonder if he confused my candidature with someone else 😱😰
• Discussion of the work contract and details: While he sounded fully positive on hiring, all of a sudden he wanted me to return to Singapore and take some time to think about it when I clearly mentioned (not once) that I’ve given a lot of thoughts about the position before making my decision to fly over and see him 🤔

then it went downhill

I was so confused then, and I started to analyse everything that I’ve seen / heard / learned / noticed with J. While mentally taking notes of where went wrong, I started noticing a couple of red flags. I flew back to Singapore, took a few days to think about it before giving employer A my final answer.

We communicated through whatsapp, I thanked him for the job offer and told him that I will gladly take up the position. But then, employer A started to ghost on me slowly… ( excuse me good sir, are we on a dating app? 😨) In the beginning, he told me that they had some urgent projects that were due in time. I mean, sure?? Then the waiting became 2 weeks! Anyone would think that some thing was wrong right? It was fishy 🐟🐟🐟

Suddenly I got a message from A that he had a discussion with the team and realized that I lacked critical, judgement and leadership and asked if I would consider a lower position, period(.) 😳 It wasn’t even a question…

I felt offended

At first I was puzzled in a lot of aspects. How was I judged that I lacked judgement and leadership when all I did was chatting about regular stuffs with the team? Isn’t that why things like probation exist? Second, why was I judged by the team when clearly the team besides A are all juniors? 😨Besides I have yet to showcase my abilities right? 😰

Previously, the team showed me some of their projects, honestly I was a little surprised by the quality of the work that were presented. It was completely different from what I had seen in the company’s website. I could say that some of my student’s work at ECV Paris' Master program was better than theirs. But obviously you don’t say things like that the first time you met someone right? Or was I supposed to? To show that I had critical judgemental skills? 😅

Maybe I’m a little too prideful of my work and capabilities, I felt rather offended by that comment. But being in the process of contract negotiation, one has to keep calm 😆So I politely asked for more details, but I only got a single lined text saying that it would be the same as the first offer…

Err— Okay? Again I asked if there’s a possibility for negotiation but A had decided to completely ghost on me (yup, just like how you ghost on people on tinder 😨) with my message blue-ticked on whatsapp no less 😨😳I mean, isn’t it better to keep it professional and outright say “After some consideration, I’m sorry to inform you that you’re not hired?” or “Sorry, we mixed up your profile with someone else?” or sincerely offering another position rather that trying to put me down or something? That was plainly rude 🙁

Whatever 🤷🏻‍♀️I took it as a sign and moved on… I supposed i earned a 40% off my air tickets / hotel fares? On the bright side, I’m glad that I arrived earlier and went out to “play” before business. I can’t imagine the terrible and confused mood that I would have been in if I went quad biking after the interview 😰

getting to
the hotel

The trip was planned super quickly. I decided to arrive one day earlier so that I could explore the city and do some touristy stuffs with my buddy. Holy crap, we fully made use of that first day! It was a red eye flight (which I absolutely hate), we reached way too early, at 4am+ in the morning. We took a taxi to our hotel, Sofitel Downtown Dubai. I chose that hotel because it was “near” the office. But because we arrived too early, they charged us extra $100+ for early check-in 😰I gave in, because I was too tired from the flight. I needed to sleep, real sleep and shower.

As soon as we got to our rooms, we got a little too excited at the gigantic room partly because I decided to splurge a little more on my hotel budget. The room was huge and pretty with a giant tub in the bath room. After laughing happily and video-ing the process we quickly flopped into the bed and napped until 9 before we head out to the tallest building in the world.

Burj Khalifa

If I remembered it correctly, J got our tickets on Klook and there was a specific time range for you to visit the Burj Khalifa. Tickets weren’t cheap either 🤑It was around $50+ (Singapore Dollars) just to be on the tallest building in the world 😅I don’t think there’s anything really extraordinary especially under the crazy hot sun. There are some parts of the building where it’s open-air. However you’d melt immediately ☠️

$50 not exactly well spent 😥

P.S. Beware of “photographers” taking photos for you. It’s a tourist trap!

We took our time on the top before going back to The Mall. Lunch was a quick order at Shake Shack. Compared to the Singapore branch where you had to queue for hours, we got our food within 5mins 😆

Rather than a holiday, I was exploring places with the mindset that I could be potentially living in this city. At the back of my mind, I was constantly making notes like “Oh there’s a supermart here. I should be able to do my groceries here…” (Which didn’t happen in the end) Of course, we also noted the more conservative dressing for local women. That’s why J and I were fully dressed despite being under 47º or else I would have been in tank top and shorts and sandals 😆

Just the morning trip to Burj Khalifa and being at the Mall made us sweat so much. J booked a desert tour and because it was summer time, desert safari tours only start at 4pm. So we went back to rest in our hotel and changed for our next highlight 😬

Desert Safari

Our tour package includes someone coming to our hotel to pick us up. Our car was a worn-down looking 6 seater, shared with other tourists. The driver came to pick us first and picked out another 4 passengers on the way.

Our safari tour includes:

• Round trip transfers from our Hotel
• Dune Bashing
• Photoshoot opportunities
• Camel Riding
• Quad Biking
• Belly dance, Tanoura and Fire show
• BBQ Dinner

Since we were the first passengers, we were seated all the way at the back. Once in the car, I noticed some sort of metal framing that seemed to “hold” the car all together. My first realisation was that, this was the car that we would be taking for the Dune bashing 😰😰😰 I got a little worried because the car looked a little too worn down but I was right!

Before the dune bashing, we were brought to a pit-stop, where all things touristy took place. The pit-stop was like a souvenir store. The sales assistants were all very encouraging all of us to try out the emarati ghutra, which of course was a way to make us buy it. And we bought it 😆

Got back into the car and off we were taken to an extremely bumpy ride…

Brain-fried

Honestly, it was so hot even though the sun was almost setting. Despite the photos which turned out all smiles, I was dying on the insides, ready to strip and jump into an ice cool pool anytime 😱Which I did 🤣🤣🤣 Our drive stopped by what-seemed-like-a-random-spot where there was no one a part from the 6 of us, tourists— I decided to take off my top for a breather ☠️

Being in the heat for too long gave me a terrible headache, I was like this most of the time——

Campsite

After a mini photo shooting session, our driver brought us to a campsite. As I’ve understood, there are a couple of different campsites in the desert. They just belong to different “companies” that organize the same sort of package. The next activity was camel riding. However, J has always been against animal tourism (if that’s the right word) so we opted not go for our camel rides. We just took a couple of photos and moved on to our quad biking session. Quad biking was so so so much fun 😍😍😍

Because the rest of the tourists were off to camel riding, quad biking activity was empty except for the both of us. The person in charge gave us a quick explanation and we were off to our own ring zooming around. The down side was that, we had to keep our bags to ourselves, which made the ride a little bulky, other than that, it was thrilling. After a few short rounds, we got used to it. Initially I was a little worried on how it was going to be. But it turns out really easy, J and I started competing to see who could be faster. Mr-in-Charge stayed by the side watching out for us and helped us took videos, but soon he gave in and joined us. Showed us a couple of tricks which we were too scared to try it out 🤣

Note: There was a couple of youngsters who followed us or any tourists around, snapping photos happily. In fact, it’s business. They ask you to do all sorts of cringe-worthy pose, snap a photo and then print it out on cheap A4 paper (it wasn’t even photo paper 😨) and sell it to you at high prices 😅If it was at least photo paper, I would have considered 🤔

BBQ dinner & Performance

Quad biking session only lasted 20 minutes or something. You can extend your session, but of course at another fee. But we were sweating profusely and my headache was getting way too bad so we decided to stop. My camera and phones were heating up crazily too and took that as a sign to take a break 😅

The sun was setting, the camel riding packs returned to the camp. We were slowly ushered into the camping grounds to watch the performance. The performance were quite interactive and the fire show was impressive. There were other activities such as henna and shisha but we didn’t have enough time for those as we were too pre-occupied chasing the sun set shots 🤣😅

Night fell, the performance ended, our main course opened. Turns out, it was a buffet style arabian food. Unfortunately, it didn’t suit my taste 😅Not sure if it’s because the food is mass-cooked which tasted rather bland and dry or because I sweat so much that day that only iced water was appealing to me.

We finished everything around 9pm and our driver took us back to our hotels. On the way back— which was almost an hour’s journey, J & I were completely knocked out in car. Thankfully, no more dune bashing on the way back 😬

Voila!

What a sweaty experience for day 1 🤗Despite my weird job “interview” experience, Dubai was a fun city! They have everything from the western cultures to the eastern asian cultures. I’d definitely visit again, but surely not in July again. From what I’ve heard, December will be a better time to visit. Temperatures will be around 23º, super comfy degree to be quad biking compared to that boiling 47º. I will most definitely have to try better arabian food and prepare more money 😆The city is quite expensive afterall 🤑

DubaiWork HazardPlaying Tourist

Carol G

Born in Singapore, raised in France. I'm currently an art director living in Paris.
Stay tuned to my experiences and discoveries through my "double" personalities.

An invitation to Dubai