britexpat76

You can't get Pakistani, Lebanese, Jordanian, Syrian, Egyptian, Indian, Filipino women or Single fit birds under 25 Visa's here.

NorthernLad

Well DSF seems to be getting people going. Made mistake of going to MoE at lunchtime, it is rammed (people queuing on rooftop car park).

Patsy Stoned

I left there at 11.30. It was already unpleasant.

Millsyisland

I've never really got my head round what DSF actually is (I know it stands for Dubai Shopping Festival) - is it simply a sale or is there more to it than that? Do shops have to participate?

Millhouse

I got a great text from IKEA... went along the lines of:

'DSF offers! not a sale, just our regular great value prices. 3rd Jan-Feb'

er, so no discounting at all?

Boomhauer

..and they don't like non Whites especially Black people.

al dente

I got that, 'not a sale, just low prices', which made me think they were a little reduced.

Patsy Stoned

They put lots of events on, shops don't have to participate but most do. A lot of the shops just drag the same old rubbish out year after year and put it on a dsf sales rail!!
Some of the shoes in Aldo look as though they have been out for years!!

Eeyore

So who in the UK is constantly saying how totally shit everything is and that there is no point in even trying? Not the government, not the media. The media is certainly accurately reflecting how difficult it has inevitably become for an awful lot of people, given how dependent on cheap and easy credit UK consumers had become in the last 10 years or so, but that is exactly what they should be doing - not glossing over the very real problems and trying to pretend that actually, everything's wonderful, which is what the media *here* did for a long time after the crash.

It's actually quite notable that the media here is now willing to talk about the property "crash", rather than the much more euphemistic terms they were using in 2008-9 - back then, once they'd realised that they couldn't completely deny it any longer, they switched to words like "slowdown", and talked about prices "softening".

Additionally, the piece in either the Khaleej Times or Gulf News from around July/August 2008, in which someone Very Very Senior Indeed in one of the major developers here insisted that the global slowdown would not affect Dubai and would in fact lead to property prices here rising to even more stratospheric levels, mysteriously disappeared from the online archives...

lanarkwitch

As I said, and will have to say again evidently, people at home have had enough of the negativity, and constantly bashing on about it doesn't do anyone any good, in fact it can even threaten any potential recovery. I speak to people at home in Ireland and Scotland regularly and they are all fed up with it. Ireland in particular, yet they were one of the first to attempt to get their house in order.

No one is saying anything abut glossing over it, but what's done is done, we're 5 years into this mess, and as this thread is about Dubai 2013, I for one am going to concentrate on the positives.