This is a review of the book One Year In Wonderland: A True Tale of Expat Life in Dubai
The book is based on a popular blog the author maintained during his time in Dubai between the summers of 2006 and 2007.
This is an interesting read. The author gives a detailed account of his experiences of moving, settling down, and living in Dubai. He freely expresses his frustrations, annoyances, peculiarities and contrasts associated with dealing with various departments and personnel that you come across while in Dubai. His writing style will keep you glued, subtly funny at times, and direct at others. Even though his stay in Dubai was short (only a year or so), he did a good job of exploring UAE and document the experiences in detail.
But what’s more important than writing style and humorous moments is how he saw Dubai and interpreted different experiences. During the time when he lived in Dubai, the city was at its peak. It had been growing rapidly over the last decade or so, to the point where the rate of growth was not sustainable. This is resulted in a number of issues that residents of Dubai faced at that time. Due to these large number of issues, the general impression of the author about Dubai is rather negative, which is understandable as he is coming from UK where most people don’t face any obstacles related to trivial things like they do in Dubai. So if you read this book from an Englishman’s perspective it will make sense to you. Like I said the author did a good job of honestly expressing himself.
But one consideration is that the events in the book took place almost five years ago, and Dubai has changed a lot during last five years.
Dubai is no longer growing at a rapid pace. So the infrastructure and utilities have been able to catch up. Organizations have learned the meaning of customer service (it’s not there yet, but much better than how it was 5 years ago), the traffic on the road is saner (though SZR is still choker blocked during rush hours, but not as bad as it was in 2007), and renting an apartment has become much more cheaper. Most of the construction work is complete so you don’t see the construction cranes like it used to be few years ago. All in all Dubai is a much better place to live right now. I’m not saying its perfect (no place is perfect for that matter), but it is a damn good place if you compare it with other cities in the region. I know a number of European expats living happily in Dubai for many years with absolutely no plans or intentions of moving back to their home countries. Obviously Dubai is offering something that they cannot get back there, despite all its shortcomings.
So this book, read it to know how it was like to live in Dubai in mid 2000s in the middle of all the hustle and bustle and rapid construction, but don’t make any judgment about Dubai based on this book as the place has changed a lot since then.
