Tatiana has been living in the UAE for five years. Dubai became her second hometown when she became Wessam’s spouse. Although the issue of citizenship in this eastern country is quite problematic, only a fifth of Emiratis are citizens of their state, Tatiana feels quite comfortable here, which is not difficult to understand from the texts of her blogs.
… My husband and I dream of buying a nice house in Dubai.
It will cost up to a million dollars, a figure that is simply exorbitant, so for now we are looking at simpler housing, a two or three-room flat can be taken twice as cheap.
Property has never hurt anyone, but its purchase does not give the right to get a visa to the UAE for the rest of your life.
To settle here for at least ten years, you need to invest not even one, but ten million dollars in property.
Another option to get a visa is to sponsor your family, but it also needs to be renewed regularly, every three years.
And a very positive thing about Dubai is that there are no taxes on your property, service charges are an absolutely unknown concept here.
Now we live in a rented flat, like the vast majority of residents of this sunny city. This is quite normal and does not cause discomfort for me or my husband.
Many of my acquaintances, not being price-conscious, ask strange questions as to why we haven’t bought a flat yet. If we were talking about the suburbs of some regional centre of Ukraine, the question would be appropriate. There, having ‘got a change’ in the market you can go to a realtor’s office and solve the issue with a flat. In the UAE the question is a bit more complicated…
Accumulation in Dubai is very problematic because of the high cost of everything and everywhere, ‘earned-spent’ – the standard for most. You can deny yourself everything and save pennies for the future, but then it will not be a life, but an existence.
To collect and lay out cash for a house or flat is unrealistic, and loans in Dubai with a huge bandit interest, so, renting is a way out of the situation, at least ours.
There are more complicated ways to get a roof over your head. Having accumulated about one third of the cost of the flat, you can buy it on credit, but without moving in, find suitable tenants, and at the expense of payment under the contract to settle the rest of the amount, but it will take up to ten years, time, you agree, a lot.
So my husband and I are now in a creative search for our housing options.
Perhaps we will come up with something ourselves, or maybe my subscribers will give us an idea…?
I met Wessam by chance. I went to Dubai to visit a friend and met my future husband on the beach. Through mutual acquaintances we were introduced to each other, and so our oriental romance began.
The language barrier didn’t bother us much, and we didn’t pay much attention to the twelve years age difference. Nine months after the wedding, I gave Wessam our heir, David.
… Eastern traditions are incomprehensible to me. For example, the marriage of Wessam’s sister to her brother, albeit a cousin.
They got married when the bride was still at school, now there are three children in the family, the youngest is seriously ill.
Recently Wessam’s brother has done well in business and decided to take another woman as his wife. Polygamy is the norm here, as are family ties with relatives. This applies both to the remote Emirati settlements and to the state capital.
My husband has a negative attitude to this, but he does not intend to go against the family’s decision, so he passively observes what is happening, not interfering in the events.
Why is this happening? Arabs consider it right to marry between relatives, they say that it strengthens the family even more, eliminates unnecessary expenses on ‘outsiders’, thus saving the savings of relatives.
In Qatar, more than a third of families are cousins; in the UAE and Saudi Arabia the figure is lower, up to twenty-five per cent.
I do not understand brother-sister relationships as spouses, but for Arab families it is normal, and cases of brother’s jealousy of his sister are very common, because he already sees her as his wife.
Incest does not bode well for any family, but Arabs do not think much about it, paying tribute to their centuries-old traditions.
Now Tatiana has more than two hundred thousand subscribers. Her blog is very popular and gives a good income, and once the girl earned a living working at unpretentious and low-paid places, so, acquaintance with Wessam had a very favourable effect on her fate.
There is an interesting nuance in the generally accepted polygamy in the East: if the first wife does not give her consent, the man cannot bring another one into the house, so Tatiana has a certain ‘insurance’ against the appearance of other women in her husband’s house, and she is not going to forget it.