Feels like home…

 

I got into the Emirates flight to Dubai, travelled for three and a half hours and landed here with a question mark all over me. How would this place be?  How can I survive in a dessert? How are the people here? Will I have a major cultural shock? And what not..

 

As I came out of the terminal, I had to take a taxi to the place where I was to stay. There is no postal address in this part of the world; you have to reach a place with landmarks as reference points. It’s a different story if your were posted (as in mailed), you would not have a dozen of numbers, a paragraph of street names, layouts, blocks, phases and area names written all over you, but just a 4-5 digit number (yup, a PO box number) that would take you to the right place.

 

When I was just about to start thinking about the taxi and the efforts I had to put in to make the taxi driver take me to a place that I myself did not know, there came my saviours, were close relatives of a very good friend of mine who stayed in sharjah (my destination) who had come to pick up their folks with whom I had travelled co-incidentally to Dubai in the same flight.

 

I got the most comfortable drop I could imagine to the door step of my best of buddies, class mates, ex-colleagues and a new colleague and my guardian for the rest of my stay here in this Home away from home.

 

Life is so easy here; you really do not have to worry about communicating with people around as Hindi is the second official language here and the first being Malayalam, to such an extent that even the emirates airline have notice board in the plane written in Malayalam. Yup this place is just a colony of Malabar as the people from Kerala proudly call it.

 

Get into a taxi; you speak to the cabbie in Hindi who is listening to Bollywood music on one of the several radio channels that plays only Indian music.

In the work place you shout in Telugu, Tamil or Kannada you will definitely get a response.

Even the saloon here is operated by folks from Udupi..

 

Feels like home…

 

1 Comment(s)

Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI