A cultural obstacle course

Earlier this week I went to get a blood test for the renewal of my residence visa. Little did I know that it would be an entire morning of adventure.

First I went to a hospital called al Wasl Hospital. It’s not on al Wasl road, in case you were wondering. In fact, in a freaky metaphysical way, it’s barely on the road it is on. As one drives toward it, you pass it from several directions, each time following the convenient brown road signs which indicate what turn to take next. One such sign actually described a serious of upcoming turns in the shape of an ampersand (&). Such are the highways of Dubai.

When you get to al Wasl Hospital, you will be surprised to discover that the parking lot is a tropical garden. Lush and full of delightful planty smells! Unfortunately, the delights do not extend past the parking lot for the average visa renewer. Once you enter the “Blood Center,” you quickly discover that, although all government hospitals do blood tests for visa renewal and this is a government hospital, there are no blood tests here. “Go to Maktoum Hospital in Deira,” they said. Oh boy.

For my non-Dubai-based readers, let me pause here to explain that the concept of driving into Deira should fill you with dread and panic. Dirty Deira is a wonderful place, full of people and sidewalks and cheap food, but the roads are a tangled gridlocked mess, full of detours and horns at all hours of the day. An unlucky turn can leave you mired in traffic for the rest of the afternoon.

But I was in an adventurous mood so I picked a nice long NPR podcast to keep my brain occupied and off we went… and I got there, by some miracle or another. I even managed to park directly in front of the hospital. And that was the last normal thing to happen to me for the next 3 hours.

As I walked to the parking meter, rummaging for coins, I realized that I suddenly had a shadow. He was a middle-aged dark-skinned Indian man. He told me later that his name was Mhmd (no vowels the way he pronounced it). He explained that this part of the hospital was closed and “visa you need visa?” was done in another building. He also seemed keen to help me find change for my 5 AED bill to feed the meter. This is not normal; he clearly wanted to sell me something. But I was only in the market for a blood test that day and I surely wasn’t going to buy that from him, so it was a little confusing. Before I knew it, he whisked me down the street, around the corner, and up the block into his brother’s friend’s cousin’s grocery shop to break the 5 AED, back to my car, then to the visa-you-need-visa reception building, whose attendant informed me that I needed to go to a typist to get a picture, laminated healthcare ID care and some mysterious paperwork in Arabic and English. So my shadow then whisked me down the street, around the corner, and up the block into a different brother’s friend’s cousin’s
T
Y
P
I
S
T
shop. I have to spell it for you vertically because of the several dozen “Typist” shops clustered around the clinic like anemones on a reef, every single one of them displayed the word “Typist” vertically on the storefront glass. It was a little strange.

It was also a little strange to have a shadow. It was partly protective, partly helpful, and partly annoying. Nevertheless, oblivious to my emotional interpretation of it, Mhmd Shadow led me into the brother’s friend’s cousin’s Typist shop, a tiny linoleum-lined room with a high desk on one side and some plastic chairs on the other. I was plonked down into a plastic chair. A different Indian guy pulled down a plastic window shade behind me, switched on a fluorescent light and came veeeeeeeery close with a small digital camera to take my new ID picture. Then I sat and sat and sat until finally all my mysterious papers were ready. I paid the bill, which included an intriguing 10 AED charge for “Knowledge Dirham,” and then Mhmd Shadow took me back to the visa-you-need-visa reception room.

From here I entered into a series of rooms. In each room, I got in a queue or took a number, waited, then sat opposite a person who looked over my mysterious papers, added a new one to the stack, and sent me to the next room. This went on for quite a while, with no one demonstrating any particular interest in my blood. Then suddenly I get to the final gate. And the room is full of a million people, some of them accumulating dust with the length of their wait. Oh boy.

Fortunately for me, there seems to be a dedicated room for western ladies only and since I am definitely the only western lady I had seen all day, needless to say the wait is short. I’m in the chair, stab in the arm, here’s your band-aid, bye bye.

I made my way back to my car, dodging a few lost rain drops, and thought to myself, this is the first time in a long time that I’ve felt like I live in a foreign country and, as baffling as it was, it was kind of fun.