A lot have friends have asked me to “put up some pictures of your apartment nuh!” So today I give you all the grand tour.

I really like our apartment; it’s big and clean and quiet, we have a big balcony which, when it cools down, will be a great BBQ location, and we don’t have to see any neighbours since we are facing out over an empty lot. The view of desert and construction may leave a bit to be desired, but I consider the apartment my little comfy oasis. I’ll just ignore all the sand and construction going on outside and instead imagine it is the green lush hills of Maraval.

So first, the living room:

.

We got almost everything second hand from a wonderful website called Dubizzle where people sell second hand stuff. Imagine all that beautiful teak furniture second hand, and for a very cheap price. Seems like a lot of expats come and go quite quickly and end up selling everything they bought when they first arrived. The couch, however, is brand new from Ikea. Second hand couches suck and are usually disgustingly filthy with stuff like six month old potato chips stuck under the sofas, so a new one was definitely in order.

I also thought I should mention that the size of the living room here in Dubai is the size of my entire apartment in Tokyo. No joke!

.

Something weird about the flat is that it has not one, not two, not three, but FOUR toilets. Four! And each has a bidet for washing up. So four people could wash their butts simultaneously, if ever the occasion should arise. And who knows, maybe it might.

Ah, the kitchen. The most important room of any home. And how magnificent to have everything a cook could ever want, especially after a year of being homeless. A nice big oven for baking lasagnas. A rice maker, for making sticky Japanese rice for sushi. A blender, a coffee machine. A toaster. Ahhhh. Domestic kitchen bliss. The kitchen is a huge thing for me (and for my husband) since this is the biggest kitchen we’ve ever had. In the past, the kitchens have been tiny, and in Hong Kong an appliance like an oven is hard to find. I love this kitchen. So many cupboards! So much room! Wonderful.

But, there is something weird about the kitchen. The fridge locks! In fact, all fridges lock here. I got the fridge in a huge department store and was perplexed to see that they all come with locks and keys. Why would people lock up their fridges? Is it because of fridge sharing in offices? People stealing food from communal fridges? Then who gets to keep the key? Weird.

.

Other weird stuff about the building (other than the millions of bidets) — we have a garbage chute!

You just pull down the handle, and drop your bag of trash down the middle. You can hear it going clonking and banging all the way down. Once I heard a bag being dropped from a few floors above me go whooshing by — good thing I did not open the door. Oh, and glass is strictly not allowed. I can’t imagine what a disgusting mess it must be down at the bottom of the chute with all these exploding bags of garbage. Yech.

We are very lucky also that this building has two gyms, and two pools, just upstairs on the rooftops. During the day lots of people lie down and bake in the sun, but I don’t know how they do it. I ain’t burning up my skin in this heat… I go up there around 5 pm when the sun is starting to lay low and the wind is cooling down. Best time of the day.

So, that pretty much concludes the tour of the new apartment. Not too shabby in my opinion. In fact it is the best place I have lived in the past five years!

(And okay, fine… if you REALLY want to see what a desert view looks like, I won’t deny you.)