Penelope Walsh on succumbing to the many abundant pleasures and habits the capital offers.
We’ve all done it, entered the realms of a new community and sworn we’d never assimilate to certain stereotypes. Eventually, it happens, and never more so than in a place like Abu Dhabi, where so many of us are new to the scene at some point and arrive with all our chosen, learned and vastly different ideas. It’s inevitable: you become ‘Abu Dhabi’ and adopt many of its habits.
Abu Dhabi’s favourite weakness, I like to believe, is sloth: glorious, expensive sloth. Coming from London, which has no common cab culture, despite the iconic black variety (accessible to the moneyed few), when I first arrived here, I swore blind I’d be on the bus each morning. I was even vaguely disgusted when, in my first week, a colleague who’d been in Abu Dhabi for years asked me how much a single fare was.
Firstly, it was the confusion over where exactly I was going that ushered me into the comfort of cabs, then it was the crazy summer heat that saw me holding my hand up to hail taxis with reckless abandon. Winter came and I knew my way around, but by that time I was sold. No more walking to the tube in the rain, or waiting hours for the night bus with the city’s craziest weirdos as I did in London, because life in Abu Dhabi could be so much easier if I let it. So I did.
Take grocery deliveries for example. At home, I’d have carried my shopping bags in my teeth if I had to, but here, I’m not above ordering a six-pack of water and even mobile credit. You can stop judging me now.
Gluttony, however, is my favourite Abu Dhabi pleasure. The concept of brunch and the city’s love of ‘all-you-can-anything’ still confuses and delights me. The ostentation, the extravagance, the indulgence! Yet, now, if you invite me for a birthday brunch, come 3.45pm, I’ll be eagerly wondering whether my last plate should be dessert or cheese with the best of them. And if I go for thali, the sort where they just keep piling your plate up until you want to shout that you’re over it and done, thoughts of my overeating will be on my mind, but only for a moment and deep, deep, deep down, beneath the self-induced curry coma.
There’s Abu Dhabi’s version of pride and envy too, and most of it involves accessories. While once you may have been happy with high-street ‘pleather’, when faced with the clatter of Louboutin-clad feet and Birkin-burdened arms everywhere you look, it’s hard not to decide you want, no actually need, something Gucci soon.
