Last few tasks

Closing the bank accounts was a funny experience as you’re not allowed to have one if you don’t have a visa. The guy at Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank closed it down then and there and chopped up our cards and check books in front of us which was a bit nerve racking! HSBC tried to give me the balance of the account despite the fact that it was needed to pay off the credit card. Amazingly we were waiting in the queue behind a man who appeared to be withdrawing several hundreds of millions of dirhams in cash. I have never seen so many notes in my life. The best moment came when he asked them for a bag to put it in to take it away with him (he obviously hadn’t brought his own or an armed guard!) and was given a branded HSBC carrier bag. I can’t think of another place in the world where you could walk out of a bank, which a huge amount of money in cash actually in an HSBC bag!
Etisalat were true to form right till the last. When we went to cancel our internet, land line and J’s mobile they insisted on us paying all the connection and usage charges that we’d been given free at the beginning because we were cancelling inside the 12 month contract! The reason it was less than 12 months was due to the fact that it took them 3 months to install it in the first place. So their ongoing inefficiency even cost us money in the long run – but then would all the residents of Abu Dhabi be without their Etisalat stories! I was reading a consumer problem page in the paper where people wrote in with problems and the newspaper tried to sort them out. One was someone moaning about an Etisalat problem and at the end of their letter, instead of the usual outcome of how good old Gulf News had helped to fix the problem it just said ‘despite repeated attempts to contact the company, Etisalat failed to respond to our request’. But then powerful state owned monopolies can presumably take that attitude – like being only one of four countries in the world to ban Skype, but unlike North Korea, this is for more commercial reasons!
Everything else went very smoothly and seems to be mostly sorted out. We were told we didn’t pay a deposit on the apartment (I’d dispute this but as it went through J’s salary it’s hard to be sure). However we are mysteriously owed AED 2500 by the landlord which just might be 50% of the deposit we ‘didn’t pay’! It was sad saying goodbye to the car but the hand over of the registration went very smoothly and we found ourselves outside the vehicle registration with Helen clutching a new registration card within about 10 minutes. We were all convinced we must have done something wrong. The trip to Dubai to get the scratch fixed was well worth it and we enjoyed the Hilton Jumeirah as an expensive but fun break.
The Shangri La was as wonderful as ever, though the weather was so hot and humid it was impossible to stand outside even for a moment without becoming covered in a film of sweat so we didn’t really fancy the pool. We enjoyed Bord Eau for a last dinner and the seafood brunch at Pearls and Caviar.