Hi all,

I’m Peter Gettings and I have been given the amazing opportunity of going to Dubai to work with Khansaheb Civil Engineering and Interserve for 8 weeks starting tomorrow!  Currently I am in my third year of an Honours Degree in Quantity Surveying at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh.

So, the time has now arrived and I am sat waiting at the airport for the first leg of my journey to Dubai to begin.  After not being apprehensive about going away at all since I found out 9 weeks or so ago, it would be fair to say I am now a bit nervous about what awaits me when I get there, however the feeling of excitement is far out weighing the nerves!

I can’t wait to get stuck into some practical experience after three years of lectures and endless exams, although the university life isn’t too bad really.  What better place is there to be involved in a construction project than Dubai?  Where cutting edge materials, techniques and personnel combine to produce projects on a massive scale, at fast pace, to extremely high quality and in challenging conditions (I’ve heard heat of up to 50 degrees Celsius being banded about).

I have got a window seat for the flight from London to Dubai so I should at least get some sleep on the plane as it is an overnight flight and then I’ll be raring to go when I get there.  Well that’s the boarding call now so I best be off!

(p.s. The above was written at Edinburgh Airport on 13/06/09 at 16:45 since when I have being having internet issues which have thankfully now been resolved)

Now for my update,

What can I say?  First things first, the weather is incredible, five days in and I have yet to see a cloud or been able to stay outside for more than 15 minutes.  It’s a case of moving from air-conditioned house to the car and then to the office.  The evenings are bearable though and I’m slowly getting used to it, there won’t be much sunbathing going on though!  Day temperatures are between 40 and 49 degrees Celsius (over 50 degrees and the labour can’t work so met office figures never quite reach this level) and at night it is about 30 degrees.  The humidity is also particularly high and it makes the place like a jungle.  I’m impressed that work gets done so fast over here in such conditions.

I arrived at 5:15 in the morning on Sunday (first day of the week), thankfully rather than being sent straight to the site I was taken to head office and introduced to a lot of the staff there.  Ian Gordon, my host, then handed me over to Amanda who took me to my accommodation, which to say the least is rather spacious, I have a two bedroom villa on the edge of the city complete with three bathrooms, kitchen, office and lounge as well as a back garden which was kind of dead as the villa had been vacant for two weeks but I’m on the case now watering it for an hour every evening and the lawn has a green tinge to it already.  Both bedrooms have a balcony and from one you can see the night skyline of Dubai glittering in the distance. I think I’m going to have to rent out the spare room for some socialising funds, beer is £6 a pint so I have heard although I have yet to sample this seemingly liquid gold!

Work is really good, I am working for Khansaheb who are the main contractor on a site at an extension to the “Mall of the Emirates” shopping mall which has the highest turnover of any mall in the world, it’s huge, even going for lunch is a mission trying to find the food court.  On the first day I met everyone in the site office, had the good old health and safety induction and got issued with PPE, and then had a walk around the site to see what was going on.  One thing that catches the attention is the massive ski slope, which is wrapped around the outside of the mall!  From inside it looks very real, complete with man made snow, pine trees and log cabins, they don’t do things by half in Dubai.  Khansaheb built the original mall and now the owner wants to add a further 40 units and a link to the metro system which is opening on 09/09/09.

Mike Harris who is the contracts manager at the site has produced a schedule for me for the eight weeks that I am in Dubai, I am very happy with it and it shall give me a good oversight of the whole construction project with a particular emphasis on the commercial quantity surveying (QS) side.  For the first week I have been working on tracking design changes through the different revisions of construction drawings.  From this I have been producing a schedule of changes and assessing their likely time and cost impact on the project and whether they were over and above what was agreed in the contract via variations and thus need to be paid for by the client.  All very technical but it has allowed me to get to grips with the layout of the site via meticulously going through dozens of drawings.  I have also been sitting in on lots of meetings, which are very interesting to see how all the different consultants and contractors interact to solve the many problems that arise.

The weekend is upon us now as Friday is the main day off due to Dubai being an Islamic country; Khansaheb employees also get every second Saturday off.  The working day for site office staff is 7am to 6pm so they like to work them hard!  We usually take about 30-45 minutes for lunch with tea, coffee and water free flowing to keep the hydration up during the day.  Luckily I have a company car to get about in but the roads in Dubai are a nightmare, 6 to 12 lane motorways going through the city and very little else.  My villa is about 10km away from site and it took me over an hour and a half to get to work on the second day (when I didn’t have someone to follow!) and I must have put about 50 odd kilometres on the car but I did at least get to drive all around the amazing high rises and hotels.  The world’s tallest building, the Burj Tower, is nearing completion and it is awesome, driving past it you can hardly see the top without sticking your head out the window.  I got the journey down to 30 minutes yesterday, which isn’t too bad as traffic is quite busy in the mornings and they do love their speed bumps in my neighbourhood, I would say I go over at least 20 every morning.

So this weekend is going to be one of discovery and doing some touristy stuff, I can see taxis being the order of the day though as they are very cheap and I need time to recover from my ordeal of driving what feels like a hundred hours and a thousand kilometres this week.  The “big bus tour” has been widely recommended, in open top red double-deckers imported from London no less, so I might give that a go and hit the souks (markets) and haggle me a bargain for something I don’t particularly need.