Villa hunting.

This week, I started looking for a house. Although in Dubai, they are not called houses, they are called villas. We want to rent a villa for a year, since we are not sure how things will go, and we think the property market here is headed for a correction. Unfortunately, finding a villa is not easy. One of the difficult decisions we have to make is where to live in Dubai. Dubai, like many cities, is made of smaller communities, much like where we used to live in Queens. Within Dubai, the children go to a school in Jumeirah. From various places still in Dubai, the commute to school could be as long as an hour. When you have to have a seven year old fed and to school by 8am, an hour long commute is not optimal. Harumph. So, I think we will be looking in the neighborhoods of Jumeirah & Umm Suqeim, for now. I saw a villa that I liked today, only to call the broker back to be told that it had been rented. It is almost unimaginable that villas are rented as fast as they are, since the price for a villa the size we would like starts around $7,000 (USD), a month. It pains me to think about the type of house we could have in the US for that price, even if we are getting a housing stipend. Keep your fingers crossed that we can find something close enough to school that Alex won't have to wake up at 6am and that I won't spend all day riding in the car!