Week two has come and gone very quickly here in Dubai. Shereen and I had the pleasure of witnessing a Ladies Wedding on Thursday. Arabic Weddings are like nothing you have ever seen before. As far as I understand they last for four days, one of which is the ‘ladies wedding’ which is basically a big dinner and reception for only women. The guests and workers must only be female and if a man were to enter the room at all he would be sent to prison and then deported! The room is set up with a big catwalk in the middle with a couch at the end of the stage where the bride enters towards the end of the night and sits while her guests enjoy the meal. Everyone is dressed to impress in the most sparkly and dazzling dresses I have ever seen. Of course we didn’t take any pictures as it would be very unprofessional but to give you an idea of the extravagance the average Ladies Wedding costs about AED 300,000 (£52,000) just for this one night of the wedding celebration!
Today we all split up and went to different departments. I was in HR whith the HR Manager, Sean Royal. I have to say it has definitely been the most beneficial day of the internship so far. Sean answered an abundance of questions while I scribbled down pages and pages of notes. It was really interesting learning about how the very different labour laws of Dubai affect the a Human Resources team. Another aspect of a Dubai based hotel is that it is very much a city where people come for a few year and then leave, the staff turnover is a lot higher than most places. Sean discussed with me the various retention strategies they have to try and keep the employees for longer and make sure staff feel appreciated and well looked after. Many of the employees have come over from countries such as India and are sending their pay home to their families every month - it’s reassuring to know that there is someone like Sean there to make sure they are taken care of, as there are virtually no laws in Dubai to protect employees. I do know now that I could never work in HR - it would break my heart. Every time I heard a story about how someone couldn’t afford a flight home or needed time off to visit their sister in hospital, I would crumble! So probably not the job for me! Very interesting to observe though. I also spent some time today going through the exit interview data of everyone who left Grand Hyatt Dubai within the last eighteen months to identify their main reasons for leaving. I can’t specify the reasons but it was a fascinating project and I hope the team will use my findings to review some things!
Outside of work we have all been galavanting around Dubai doing all the touristy stuff! (See video below). At the beginning of the week Shereen met up with some family that live out here. We went to an Iranian restaurant in Jumeirah - the food was beautiful... for the first two minutes until I bit into what I thought was a green bean but actually turned out to be some crazy chili. Now I love spicy food, but this was something else. Luckily, Iranians apparently like to drink what I can only describe as Salad Dressing with their meal, so I had a quick gulp of that to stop myself from yelping at the table. Once the intense burning subsided, all I had was a sort of numbness similar to that you get when you go to the dentist and they anaesthetise your mouth. So, sadly, I tasted nothing for the rest of the meal.
I share this story only to warn you all to beware of the green beans! In fact - be suspicious of long green vegetables, it’s not worth it!
Claire asked that this blog mention our goals for the summer. I am going to upload these in a separate blog in the next few days as this is already essay length and I want the goals to be the focus of the blog they are in. So watch out for that very soon!
I will however share with you the two dark evils of Dubai that I have experienced in the last two weeks. First of all, I should mention that shopping here is a part of daily routine, like eating and sleeping. There is every kind of shop you can imagine inviting you in - it doesn’t help that I still seem to think the currency is monopoly money and therefore much easier to part with than ‘real’ money... so I have been buying a lot of clothes. The other problem is that the local cuisine here is like having a takeout for breakfast lunch and dinner. The staff canteen serves curry at every meal with fatty croissants for dessert. It’s delicious but extremely oily (factoid: Dubai has the highest concentration of people with type 2 diabetes!) and I will probably never eat another curry again once I go home. Anyway, by the end of this trip it looks like I will be broke from buying a whole load of clothes that I can no longer fit into because of all the curry - it’s not a great outcome really is it? So clearly the obvious solution is to make sure I preemptively spend all my money on BIGGER clothes ;) y’see, always one step ahead of the game!
Enjoy the video!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wANivKpfup8&feature=player_embedded
