How a hotel stay makes me appreciate my life in Abu Dhabi

Living away from home, but in your own city, can change your perspective, writes Debora Lindsay Williams.

Living in a hotel can change your perspective of your city. Fatima Al Marzouqi/ The National

We are living in a hotel. We’ve been here for a week and will be here for one or two more, while a construction crew fixes serious structural problems in our brand-new apartment.

We came to the hotel directly upon our return to Abu Dhabi after visiting relatives in the US. Technically, we’re home, but it doesn’t feel that way. Big hotels are like that, even the ones that claim to offer an “authentic” flavour: guests float inside bubbles of generic comfort. We could be in any warm, palm-treed enclave right now, not necessarily in Abu Dhabi. I suppose people want that consistency; they pay for the certainty of nice sheets, big bathrooms and food that appeals to all ages and cultures.

After five days here, the line between public and private has started to blur. Soon I’m going to be shuffling around the lobby in fuzzy slippers and a bathrobe, as if the entire property has become my boudoir. If we stay here much longer, in fact, a bathrobe will be the only thing that still fits me. Daily stints at the buffet table are taking their toll. Every morning, I vow that today will be the day I have only one croissant – OK, two croissants, or three …

And every day I wonder what happens to all the extra food, not just from this hotel’s buffet table but from all the other breakfast, dinner and brunch buffets being served in Abu Dhabi. Does Abu Dhabi have a version of City Harvest, the New York organisation that collects unused food from restaurants every day and distributes it to the city’s soup kitchens and shelters? Or do all those leftover buffet delicacies land in the bin?

I’ve been here long enough to see the entire rotation of menu items on the buffet, but I’m seeing something else as well. Our long-term stay makes it easier to see what Karl Marx called “invisible labour”: in this case, the workers who create the comfort bubbles enveloping the hotel guests. The woman pouring coffee at 7am is also serving dinner. Did she get the afternoon off or has she been on her feet for 12 hours? The same men have made up our rooms every day. When is their day off? The workers come from as many countries as the guests – our waiter last night was from China, and there was a table of Chinese tourists at the next table – but somehow I think that when our waiter arrived in Abu Dhabi, no one ensured that he had a clean robe hanging on a hook in the bathroom.

Our enforced hotel stay has made it even harder than usual to return to our regular routines after a holiday. We’re surrounded by holidaymakers drawn by late-August “special offers”, and it’s hard to concentrate on school and work and proliferating to-do lists as people frolic in the swimming pool. We have possessions spread out across town – at the office, at our construction site of an apartment, at friends’ houses – and it seems like every day there is a mad search for something that is somewhere other than where we want it to be.

Is it aggravating, this situation? Absolutely. Even my children want to go home, despite the presence of a chocolate fountain on the dinner buffet every night. I’ve had to explain to them – and remind myself – of a word I read in a blog called “Momastery”, in which the writer explains that she felt really grumpy and dissatisfied when people told her that her kitchen was overdue for a renovation. Then a few days later, she put on what she calls her “perspectacles” and took a good look: her out-of-date kitchen has clean, running hot and cold water, a fridge stocked with healthy food and a stove that turns on with the flip of a switch. In other words, she found herself grateful for what her unfashionable kitchen contained, instead of moping about its appearance.

When I look at my hotel stay with perspectacles on, I see that while I have been displaced from my apartment, I will (eventually) have a home to return to, unlike refugees the world over. My children are stir-crazy, but their manic energy signifies their good health. It’s complicated to manage my work life in this situation, but my job doesn’t require me to be on my feet 12 hours a day. And yes, our belongings are strewn over several locations, but they haven’t been blown to smithereens.

Are we frustrated, harried and wishing we could go home? Yes. Are we also ridiculously lucky? Yes.

Deborah Lindsay Williams is a professor of literature at NYU Abu Dhabi. Her novel The Time Locket (written as Deborah Quinn) is now available on Amazon