My street

Haven't done a night shot for a while - so here we are... in Karama, on the street that I've lived on since I was 10 years old (a feat almost unheard of in Dubai!)

When we moved here, there was absolutely nothing. Just our buildings which were not close to others in the area. No road. Just a sand track. A visiting library used to come once a week and the nearest shop was about 200m away. To a 10 year old, it felt like a mile. Karama was a new residential area that was being developed and my parents decided to give it a go. All my friends lived somewhere else. Boy am I glad they chose it (but not after being mad at them for a while)!

Things soon started getting built - road, shopping centre, pavements etc and now it is a real hub. Nowhere is far to get to, not even the airport. A few years ago during the real estate crash, whilst rents fell in other districts, they not only stayed the same in Karama, in some places they even rose - which wasn't a good thing unless you were the landlord!

Coming back to the picture, I grew up in the buildings on the right; now I live in the buildings on the left... I watched them being built (1982-84)! If you look down the road, you can see some red lights - those are other buses coming along - another great thing about my street... the connections! I SO didn't want to leave it when we had to move last year, and miraculously, a flat became available on it. My friends or the other people in the building couldn't believe it! Some of them have had to move to the next Emirate. There you go.

Oh, and people do cross in random/unsafe places like that. This junction really needs to be a roundabout. To be avoided at all costs. Too bad the buses have a set route.