public transport

It's my last weekend here, and I have a whole 2 days off. All the other guys are working at least one day, either Friday or Saturday.

So I have taken the opportunity to come back to Dubai, this time overnight.

Since I had nobody to share the taxi with, I decided to brave the bus. AT told me it would be 20AED, but I ended up on a bus that only cost 15. Probably not the first class bus, but it was fine.

The taxi dropped me off at the bus station, and immediately in front of me were a collection of "antique" mini-busses. The drivers were standing around and as soon as I got out of the taxi, they started calling out to me "Lady, the bus to Dubai, it's right here!" Um, no, that's not what I've read about. So I managed to find the actual bus station in the next parking lot.

I wandered around for a while looking for a ticket booth. Inside the terminal building, everything was closed and there was some Arabic chanting being played on the intercom. I assumed it was prayer time and was going to wait until everything opened again. But even finding a seat was difficult because while there weren't a lot of people there, all the people were men. Every one of them. And I had trouble finding a seat that wasn't next to someone staring at me. So I walked back outside, where I found a Chinese looking woman and asked her where to buy the tickets. She asked her boyfriend, who told me that you buy them on the bus.

So I go up to the only bus with a driver in it and ask about going to Dubai. Sure, right here, 15AED. Hmmm, well, it looks okay. The worst case scenario is that it takes 40 stops between AD and Dubai, and then I get to see more, right?

I had been told that women had to sit in the first couple of rows and men had to sit at the back. I was also told that men could sit at the front if it was not occupied by a woman. But if the front was full, women could not sit in the back. So I was a little nervous about not being able to get a seat, or having to wedge into the only 10 seats available to women. The back was definitely full of men. The first half of the bus was women, couples and families. And since it was the first half of the bus for women, there were a lot of empty seats, so I got one to myself.

We made a couple of stops close to Dubai, but we arrived in less than 2 hours. Where we arrived was not where AT told me the bus station was, but it was closer to my hotel, so it worked out fine.

Getting off the bus, though, I was afraid we'd somehow arrived in Mumbai! There were wall to wall people, mostly men of South Asian decent. The neighbourhood wasn't too pretty, but there were taxis, and very few people willing to take them.

So now I am off to find something to do here.