Have the giant Sheikh Mo images aged at all now that he’s heading for eighty? He’s hovered around 55 in photos for decades.
Do you wash your hair in bottled water? (When I lived there a lot of people had hair loss issues from showering in only partially desalinated water.)
Are the ‘Barracuda bandits’ still going strong (extortion racket that involved following cars with Dubai plates whose drivers had purchased alcohol in Umm Al Quwain until they had crossed into Sharjah, which is a dry emirate, orchestrating a minor traffic incident and extorting money by threatening to report to the authorities)?
Are prostitutes still as much a feature of hotel ‘Ladies Nights’? Mostly Chinese and Russian in my day, but that may have changed.
Does the local rag (whose name escapes me — not The International, maybe Gulf News or the other one?) still publish photos of the dead bodies of unidentified construction workers in order to identify them? The frequency of it absolutely horrified me when we lived there. There was a spate of suicides, apparently because so many companies withheld wages for months years, that some workers felt the only way to get money home to their families was to step in front of a car, so that compensation would be paid.
I mean, you’d hope that the much-talked-of improvements would mean this no longer happens, but it was one of my first memories.
Any rumours doing the rounds? What strikes me now, looking back, is how many of what we heard as rumours or urban legends when we lived there later turned out to be true, like the kidnap and detention of Sheikha Shamsa and Sheikha Latifa, because the press is so heavily censored (and self-censored) that nothing at all critical of Sheikh Mo can be published.