Ex-pats, sizzling hot material hunting, mosque mayhem, and the Australian Cricket team. That is a quirky, however pretty accurate snapshot of my first 3 days in Dubai.
I was a part of the ‘first wave’ of Team UOW to touch down in Dubai to commence preparation for the 2018 Solar Decathlon which kicks off on Monday the 29th. The early arrivals where tasked with gathering the final materials for the build and we have been running all over Dubai in the past few days to find these items. After our 14.5 hr flight from Sydney (and a very brief shower!) we hit the streets in search for a few extra supplies. It’s currently Dubai’s cooler period of the year and temperatures are hovering around the mid 30’s and there is not a great reprieve at night time either, so this made for hot work even before we have started building! Some items where harder to locate than others, following new lead after new lead, which left us chasing our own scorched tails around the arid industrial areas of the city. At one stage in our search we pulled into a road that was in absolute gridlock, it was prayer time at a local mosque.
Dubai culture has been a surprise since I touched down. Generally, when I arrive in a foreign country I like to acquire a few general phrases. I find that when a blatantly obvious foreigner knows know the local tongue for ‘hello, goodbye and thank you’ it can quite easily grab some immediate rapport with a savy local. After my first taxi ride in Dubai I thanked the driver with ‘shukraan’ (Arabic for thank you) and was told by the slight indignant cabbie himself that he was an Indian national and not indeed Arabic. As is turns out, foreigners constitute a staggering 90% of Dubai’s population and I thought Australia was a diverse nation of people! However, there are still parts of Dubai that have the local culture heavily intact and I’m looking forward to getting the chance after the Desert Rose is assembled to visit the ‘old city’ where spice markets and traditional Emirati culture lives on.
Yesterday a few of us got chatting to an excited hotel worker who proceeded to proclaim that he would be heading to watch his home nation of Pakistan beat Australia in a T20 game of cricket. The game was to be held at the Dubai International Cricket Stadium which is the in area known as Sports City. Obviously, this bold claim resulted in us jumping to arms, sporting our Team UOW uniform which proudly displays the Australian flag and heading to the game with the intention of supporting our side to victor….ahhhh why even bother, Pakistan took the game out convincingly, but the atmosphere was electric and Brendan and myself said yes to one selfie with a Pakistani and opened the flood gates to 20 more – ‘closest I’ll ever be to being famous’ – quote Brendan.
Today we had approximately 25 more of the team arrive at Desert Rose HQ (and there is still more to come!). Tomorrow we head out to the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park which is where the competition will be held, for an induction day. We are now all too aware of how tough the next 15 days will be. Building a cutting edge sustainable house in the desert, an hours drive away from the city, battling sand, wind and 35 deg temperatures will stretch the team to breaking point. But hey, she’ll be right, and we think we are in with a great chance of bringing home the gold.

Yours in sustainable buildings,
Dan