So, what's the food like?

A quick look on the internet and you will find that yes there is local cuisine but mainly the internet likes to shout that you can get anything that you can think of. Our nearest restaurant is Lebanese and the take away about 10 yards further on is an Indian. How can I tell from quarantine? The signs are neon, you can read them from space.

When we first arrived some kind person had been out and purchased some basic groceries for us. The thought was very much appreciated. The execution was equal parts hiliarious and disappointing. Firstly why does anyone need six cucumbers? Secondly with a distinct lack of gin what are we going to do with 7 lemons? Finally how badly thought of are the British as consumers of food that we might actually want these frozen burgers. Frozen burgers doesn't sound that bad but these are the ones from Iceland that come in the party sized bag of miscellaneous meat products. However, I cannot stress this enough, without those burgers we would have been eating very little our first night here so thank you whoever went and got them.

The next day though a job of the highest priority was to figure out how to get some groceries of our own. Enter the Bavisters. Richard and I know each other from a former school and from ripping around the south Devon countryside on bikes. As luck would have it, he now lives across the hall and kindly offered to collect our first grocery order. We could have arranged home delivery but when the welcome pack from the school suggests you get things delivered to the school as delivery drivers often require you to draw them a map, you're not filled with confidence. Anyway we wrote a list and with some tweaks on his part we got our first weeks shopping. There are, however, some differences. For example orange squash. Anyone British that has tried to buy orange squash outside of blighty might have found it difficult to come by but not impossible to substitue. For example in Canada it comes in a frozen can but it is ultimately the same thing. In the UAE it comes in a can but also in powdered form. Follow the instructions and it makes a concoction so strong that even the most surgar crazed six year old might think twice. There was also the prices, some of which were crazy. Admittedly the recipte wasn't all in English but it appeared that a whole chicken was about £3 but some chicken breasts were £17!.

The week pasted though and we didn't starve. Far from it with little else to do we ate, drank and watched netflix. What else would lazy millennial quarantined in a foreign country do? As the stock began to run low and we started to think about pestering our new neighbours for a restock, several emails dropped into our mail boxes. Firstly an email confirming that we would need to do the full 14 days in quarantine. We always thought this would be case but had hoped the rules may get relaxed. The second was an email asking for our grocery list and explaining she would be here in an hour to collect some cash. Wow, ok. Two hours later the door bell rang, we were asked to sign our labour contracts (unrelated to this story, also thought we had already done that) and to hand over some do, re, mi for the shopping. We promptly handed over a crisp 1000AED note (£200ish pounds in one note) which with equal promptness was tucked under the super secure paperclip attached to my unread labour contract and whisked away. A few hours later we were the proud owners of three different kinds of chillies, two different kinds of noodles, about a kilo and a half of ginger and way more chicken than I thought we had put on the list. There were other things as well but these where the ones that caught my eye.

What we have learnt from this is that no matter how much you hate grocery shopping, and I hate it a lot, it's way more difficult than you think asking someone else to do it for you. If the poor person tasked with buying your groceries is conscientious they worry about getting the right thing and being in a different land complicates things further. Things that you do not think twice about at home are either twice the price, or worse in some cases, or they don't even exist. Either way Covid can shove it at this point. On that note I will end with a picture of some water melon.