Expat Travel Mom

It's been four weeks since we said goodbye to the United Arab Emirates, and that distance has given me time to reflect on what I'll actually miss most about living there, some of it obvious, some of it you probably won't understand until you've lived there yourself. I've come to believe you can take a valuable lesson away from anywhere you live, even if you can't quite see it while you're in the thick of it. Here's what stuck with me.

The Honor System

When we first arrived, we decided to take a drive into Dubai. Little did we know, the gas station on the way didn't accept credit cards, and we didn't have cash on us. The attendant let us go ahead and spend our day in Dubai anyway, on the promise that we'd stop and pay him on our way home. All he took down was our ID information and license plate number. Things like this happened constantly. A word-of-mouth promise goes a long way in that community.

Camels

This one's a no-brainer. I'll probably never again live somewhere camels wander along the road I'm driving on, and that's genuinely a little sad. There's nothing quite like seeing them scattered across the dunes on an ordinary afternoon.

Driving

I didn't drive for the first six months of living in the UAE. My husband took me to and from work every day, since I was fairly terrified of the erratic driving and the roundabouts. But once I got comfortable enough to give it a try myself, it turned out to be genuinely fun being behind the wheel. You learn to stay alert, paying attention to everything around you at all times. I think it actually made me a better driver.

Conservative Dress, and a Sea of Kanduras and Abayas

For my daughters' sake, I loved living somewhere everyone covered up. I didn't have to worry about what they were absorbing about "beauty" from ads or from people on the street. And I loved going to the mall at night, when most locals are out, and getting a little lost in a sea of white and black.

The white robe Emirati men wear is called a kandura in the UAE (you'll also hear it called a dishdasha in other regional countries), and the details are more thoughtful than they first appear: it's collarless, often has subtle embroidery along the sleeves, and has a small braided tassel at the neckline that's traditionally scented with oud or musk, so the wearer smells wonderful all day. Women traditionally wear the abaya, a flowing black cloak worn over their regular clothes. The black isn't about restriction so much as privacy, it lets women wear whatever bright colors they like underneath without anyone on the street knowing.

Kids Everywhere

The UAE is a genuinely happy, family-friendly place. Kids are everywhere, and always welcomed. I'd often find myself telling my own kids to quiet down or stop playing around, only to be told by both locals and expats alike that they were children, and it was fine. Almost everywhere caters to kids there, they're meant to be seen and heard.

Palm Trees and Dates

Street after street is lined with palm trees, most of them date-producing, and I'll probably never get dates as cheap or as fresh again as I did living there. It turns out that's not just a coincidence, the date palm is deeply woven into Emirati identity. The oldest date seeds ever found in the region, discovered on Delma Island in Abu Dhabi, date back to roughly 5110 BC. Today there are more than 40 million date palms across the UAE, and the country's founding father, Sheikh Zayed, famously called the palm "the tree of life." In 2022, the whole tradition surrounding it was added to UNESCO's list of Intangible Cultural Heritage. That's a lot of history behind something I used to just casually pick up at the local market.

The Call to Prayer

I knew I'd love, and eventually miss, the call to prayer from the very first time I heard it. Whether drifting through the mall or coming in through my bedroom window at sunrise, it became one of the most beautiful, grounding parts of every single day. The adhan, as it's properly called, means "announcement" in Arabic, and it's been recited five times a day, every day, for over 1,400 years, ever since the Prophet Muhammad appointed a man named Bilal ibn Rabah as the very first muezzin to call it. Once you've lived somewhere that pauses five times a day like that, its absence is something you actually notice.

How Cheap Some Things Were

You could get excellent quality steak, cut fresh in front of you, for next to nothing. Fruits and vegetables at the local markets were similarly cheap. Possibly our best bargain of all: getting all eight of our dining table chairs completely recovered and rebuilt to match the original design, for 50 AED each, which worked out to about $13.61 per chair, labor and material included.

Our Villa

Even just the fact that our house was officially called a "villa" made it sound cooler than it probably needed to. We loved our neighborhood, the layout of our home, and the massive yard. Homes there tend to be big, and almost every bedroom has its own ensuite bathroom, which honestly still feels like a small luxury I took for granted at the time.