Shifting and Fixing

A couple of weeks ago my time as a Dubai Marina resident came to an end as my lease expired and it was time to the move into Casa Jumeriah. Packing up and moving house is something that has to be at the top of my “least favorite activities”. I think it has something to do with this amount I had to do as a student, where moving all your gear out at the end of each term was standard.

However Dubai has man power a plenty the pain of this can be eased considerably. A lot of my friends swear by the services of the chaps who hang out in Kuwait Street and for as little has 250AED they can “shift” virtually any amount of possessions.

As I needed to put a lot of my furniture into storage but still have things for moving to Casa Jumeriah this led to a rather more challenging “shift” than usual and required the labelling of everything to either “local” or “storage”. I ended using a recommended firm called Total Moving Solutions (TMS), the chaps from TMS managed to do two things

1.Turn up in force (there was eight of them)
2.Work like demons for 12 hours

Here they are packing the lounge:


And they certainly had no shortage of packaging materials:

Still I managed to end up with ten boxes too many boxes at the villa and for some inexplicable reason I have ever pair of shoes with me other than my favorite snake skin ones. I guess I will have to live without them for the next six months.

The whole day was quite fascinating. The team of movers had a very obvious foreman who directed the other guys with a healthy does of assertiveness and certainly had the best command of the English language. Later that day Ganesh (the sales guy) came over to see how everything was going and issued a few commands of his own to the foreman which were then relayed to the rest of the guys doing the packing. I caught a glimpse of a very interesting hierarchy that I was hither to never exposed. Though this all seemed to disappear when I found all of them sat in one of the empty bedroom floors enjoying a very delicious smelling lunch of curry and chapatis. I would like to extend a big thanks to TMS for making the whole process easy.

Moving into Jumeriah has all ready shown me a different much more residential and dare I say “homely” side of Dubai. In six months when my apartment in Dubai Marina is complete I will have a tough choice to make. In the meantime I will enjoy living with my friends.