Guess who has his very own Dubai driver's license now?!?
That's right, Josh does!!
We got it yesterday, although it actually was a several day process.
Step one is getting the application filled out. In Arabic.
As neither my wife or myself speak / write Arabic, we went to a "typing shop". There's a part of town that has tons of little shops that sell cheap electronics, cloth, knockoff merchandise and other random shops. It's tough to explain. There's really nothing like it in Boston. Maybe in LA, but I can't think what. I'm sure there's a part of NYC that it's similar to, since New York has everything, I'm just not as familiar with it as Boston or LA.
Anyway, the typing shop is just that - a few dudes at computers, you tell them what you want, give them your passport or whatever ID you have, and they type it up in Arabic for DHS 10 - like three bucks.
Then you need to get your eyes tested. At first we went to Pearl Vision at the mall. But the guy there wasn't very nice to us, he said that I couldn't wear my glasses or contacts, and since I had my contacts in I'd have to take them out and come back in two hours, for my eyes to settle. That seems like bull to me, I mean, I know I need my contacts or glasses to drive, and isn't the eye test to prove that I have adequate vision with my glasses or contacts?!
The next day we were going to go back to Pearl Vision, but instead went to another optometry shop in the mall. Had a really nice guy look at my sideways when I asked if I should take my glasses off for the test. "No, we want to make prove that you have adequate vision with your glasses."
Makes sense to me.
Three minutes of reading the eye charts (I even called "Z" "Zed" for him), and the color-blind tests and I was done. Perfect 6/6 vision. (Metrics, my friend, metrics).
So yesterday Liz had the morning off from class and we drove over to the Dubai Police Traffic Department. It's next to the Mall of the Emirates, but it's on this weird side road. You can actually see the building from Sheikh Zayed Road, but getting there is no easy task. We eventually drove around the back way (Liz is always a fan of the "Ninja moves").
We got inside, and a very nice Emirati man walked up to us to help us. It was actually kind of weird - we were in the hallway, looking around, and he approached us. He seemed kind of amazed that we had the eye test as well as the Arabic application form - I can only assume lots of people get confused by the different hoops you have to jump through.
As we were walking, he asked if we were Australian. We said, no, we were American. He nodded. It's funny, to us the differences between Americans and Australians are pretty huge. I mean, the accent alone. But then we asked him if he was from the UAE, or Saudi ... which I'm sure for him is a fairly large difference, but to us, it's more difficult.
Anyway, he told us that there were already many people waiting, and not enough clerks to assist us, we'd be waiting for a long time. He suggested another branch to go to, down on Beach Road. It seemed like a good idea, and a Ninja move, so we took off.
The building we went to is sort of like a tiny indoor shopping mall. Picture the smallest mall you've been to, for those of you in Maine, I'm thinking the Windham Mall. Now, make all of the shops 50% as small, the walkways 75% as narrow, and then make it two or three stories tall instead of all spread out. That's the plaza we went to.
But the best part? The Dubai Police Traffic Department there was empty, save for the two employees. We gave the woman the paperwork, and not even seven minutes later I got my license.
It was frightenly easy. I mean, the hoop-jumping of the typing shop and the two trips to the optometrist aside, of course.
