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Hi,

We took a weekend drive to Ras Al Khaimah, another Emirate in the UAE. To get there, we had to cross through Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman and Umm Al Quwain. It sounds like a long distance, but it was only about 120-150km from our place. We went with Momo, our dog, and because of this, we didnt manage to spend much time out of the car, as she would get overheated very soon on the burning sun. We went down to the Beach to let her run a little, drove along some little roads between sand dunes, and of course went to buy Alcohol in Umm Al Quwain since we were nearby.

Here are a few pictures of the tip, enjoy.

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Getting Alcohol in Dubai unlicensed – Barracuda in Umm Al Quwain

So you heard all the “horror” stories about Dubai and the UAE in general, and you are worried that you might go dry when it comes to Alcohol consumption. You can safely put aside your fear, there are several ways to get Alcohol here and most of them don’t even cross the line of legality. Read on for more details….

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With Dubai’s increasing traffic, the Municipalities introduced a new TOLL system called SALIK. There are gates called SALIK gates in a few places, and when you pass underneath, it deducts the sum from your account. There is no Unlimited sticker like we have it in Hungary and probably in all other countries, but you pay each time you pass through the gate. The good thing is that you dont have to even slow down, the system will auto-deduct the sum from your ballance.

So how does it work exactly?

Once you get your car, you need to go to a Fuel station close to the TOLL area, and you will subscribe for SALIK services. You pay 100AED (25USD) and this includes the sticker for your windshield with the microchip and 50AED in credit. As soon as you apply the sticker you are good to go. See the above diagram for understanding what is SALIK and how it works.

For more info, read on……

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Dubai is loaded with confortable services which enable one not to get out of the house/office for most of the time. You can pay all your bills online or at gas stations, so you wont lose time at Post offices or in lines. The newest thing (to me at least) is the Traffic fine enquiry online. There is a website you go to:

Dubai Police

and on the top right you click “Traffic Fines Inquiry” and it takes you to a form. Here you enter your License plate number and get the results in an instance. Look at the picture below.

What happens is for instance you speed and a camera catches you. In two days time, the pictures are downloaded from the cameras and the website is updated. When you query the site you see that you have a ticket, you give your Credit Card number, and settle the fine. Also there are no black points for speeding tickets, so its basically a money making way for the Dubai municipalities. The traffic fines are not sent to your address at all, so the only way to know is to check online. If you fail to do so, you will be asked to pay all outstanding fines upon registering your car, which takes place every year.

There are harsher punishments also, like vehicle inpounding for crossing a red light etc, and again here you can decide when to give up your car to the Police. People mostly do it while travelling, so its not as painful as otherwise.

I had to do this many times, but still not enough to stick to my head, so I always end up googling for it. I decided to Blog it now finally, so I will always have this information handly, and hope to help others too.

My Distribution is Debian Linux, but I assume it will work on others too.

To set your time-zone, do the following:


ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Budapest /etc/localtime


that is if your time zone is Budapest. Just browse the /usr/share/zoneinfo/ folder and see which location matches you.
When that is done, you need to adjust your time. Lately on systems that have internet connectivity, I just use a Time Server which keeps my time updated hourly, as I set a Cron job to do so.

To get this done, I install “ntpdate”


apt-get install ntpdate


Now I set cron to run the job hourly, but you can set whatever timeframe you want:


crontab -e


Here I added the following line:


#Setup NTPDATE
@hourly /etc/network/if-up.d/ntpdate


then restarted cron


/etc/init.d/cron restart


and that was it. Our hourly automatic time update is set. Now to test if all went well, I manually updated the time:


/etc/network/if-up.d/ntpdate


and checked if it was okay. If you see the right timezone and right time, just save it to the BIOS clock as well so even offline the time will remain correct more or less:


/sbin/hwclock --systohc


and we are done. Enjoy having a Linux box with never failing correct time!

So I have done my first full tank, and ran it down until the level hit the needle at the very bottom, and I thought I would post my results.

Attached you see the bill the Gas station gave me, which is required for my measures.

At Gas stations, receipts are not usual, so if you really need one, its hand written. The way Gas stations work is you pop your fuel tank open with a button from within your car, and lower your window. The gas station guy comes to ask you what you need, and then does it for you. I asked for Premium fuel (98 octaine) and a full tank. He fills it up, comes back with a number, and you pay him. He gives your change back, and off you drive. So yes, you could say the service is very efficient and convinient. Your tank is full, costs you peanuts, and the guy doesnt even sigh if you dont pay a tip.

The bill is for AED 103, which is $28.2 USD, and this is for a full tank Gentlemen.

One gallon’s price is AED 6,75 ($1,8), which is 4,54 Liters. Here in the UAE the measure is Imperial gallons and opposed to the 3,78 Liters US gallons.
This makes 1 Liter of premium petrol cost $0,4 USD, not bad right? And its still very expensive compare to Saudi Arabia believe it or not.

So we have how much it costs for a Liter of petrol, so lets see the fuel consumption on the Infiniti G35 Coupe I have. Its a 3,5Liter 280 HP engine.

I filled up the car to the maximum, drove it until the meter touched the MIN needle on the gauge and refilled it to full. The Odometer at this stage showed 520 KMs and it took AED 103 for the full tank. One gallong is 6.75, so the 103 got me 15.26 imperial gallons, or in other words 69.3 Liters.

If you divide 69.3 with 5,20 you get the 100km/liter figure, which in my case is 13,3 Liter/100km. Not too bad for a beast like this car is. Of course since I am using 98 octaine petrol, the car runs more efficient, but still I am very impressed with it.

More later, cheers

As every day we do, this weekend we also went to the park to play with the dog(s). Yes, Dogs is the right word, as we have 2 accompanying Momo currently. Our Japanese friend left for Japan and another Croatian family entrusted us to look after their dog. This means we have 3 dogs, actually had 3 dogs as today the one of them went back to the Japanese owner. This morning, while still having all 3 of them, we took these pictures at the park.

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Just leave your car outside while you go for vacation, and this is what you get when you return. This also applies to cars that are waiting in the dealer’s parking lot to be sold. Often time people pay 50,000USD or more for a car that is covered in dust so bad that you can barely say what model that is.

I found this car in the parking lot while walking the dogs, quite shocking. It wasn’t there a week ago …….., this is what the desert does to everything.

In Dubai, all cars are encouraged to be taken for service at every 5000KM, and if you fail to do so, your warranty is void. My car was just at Service before purchased, but as I found the AC not cooling enough, I took it to Nissan for a checkup.

Infiniti being the high end Nissan much like Lexus for Toyota, has a different treatment at the Service center. I was serviced first, and a waiter showed up with a selection of cold drinks to make the wait more confortable. They also assured me that I wont have to get in line with the other Nissans for long, as they are making a separate service aisle for the Infinities, so the owners can feel a more exclusive treatment. To be honest, I had no problem being with the other “plain” Nissans, in fact the service was superb for them also. Its a very typical Dubai thing, if you can afford to pay more, you expect to be treated as a VIP. Me being a simple Hungarian kid, I couldnt care less for the exclusive treatment, although the cold drink did feel pretty good in the heat

Once I get in line, they put a cone shaped object on top of the car with a number printed on it, which will be your service tag number. Then a technician came who was wearing an Infiniti shirt differentiating himself from all the other Nissan shirted guys. He took my complaint down on a piece of paper, checked the car around for body damage in case I would claim them for doing some damage to my car while at service, and then took the keys and drove it off.

As we are in the peak period of the summer, the service took 2 days to get my car fixed. They drained the AC coolant from the car (poor mother nature, I wonder what they did with the dangerous gas they drained), flushed the system with high pressure water, refilled it and adjusted the compressor. On top, they replaced a so called Micro Filter, which blocks all dirt entering the passenger cabin through the AC system. This all costed me 150 USD, as AC servicing is not included in the warranty. Should the compressor fail, they will replace it for free, but just refilling the system is on my account. Nicely enough they gave me a day-pass to the Dubai Ski as part of their promotion, and cleaned the car inside out.

The AC is good as new, and throws ice cubes at me while driving. This particular Infiniti comes with a dual AC system, which means the Left side and the Right side can be adjusted independently. It is also Digital and automatic, like all modern cars are.

This is a picture at the service center, while waiting for the Infiniti technician to assist me.

The service tag I got looked like this. It was hanging on the key-ring when I got the car back. This is actually a fine example of how mobile numbers are important here. They even use my mobile number instead of my name on the tag. In the Driving school they also identified me by the phone number, at fuel stations they identify you when paying for your road toll, etc etc. Its an interesting concept in Dubai, but seems to work very well. Your number is your identity.

Cheers, more on the car later

Dubai summer is at times unbearable hot, and since I need to park my car outside on the street, I wanted to get some protection against the heat and car interior damage.

Most cars in Dubai have tinted windows, which helps the case, and I decided to do some research and go for some quality tint while remaining within the legal boundaries.

In the “Wheels” magazine I found a couple of ads, and the best companies seem to offer heat resistant tinting as opposed to only darkening the windows. Tints range from AED 50 (approx 15 USD) to AED 3500 (approx 1000 USD), which is quite a large window of selection. The top players are LLumar, V-kool, 3M and Solar Gard. They all seem to be efficient in fighting heat, so I decided to get the one that has the best promotion currently. LLumar was offering a full (Side and rear) 30% (Dubai legal limit) tint job with a fully transparent (0% darkened) windshield foil making it an all around foiling for AED 1200 (Approx 300USD). I booked a slot for Saturday 11AM, and drove the car there. We took a taxi and went for shopping and lunch to Wafi Mall, and came back at 1:30PM to find the Infiniti almost ready with the full tint. The guys seemed to be professional, and the tint so far works like a dream. Of course it cannot keep all the heat out, but it helps reducing it by 50%, and the UV and IR rays at 99%. UV rays damage the interior, causing ripped leather seats and faded dashboards. With this, I should be good to go leaving the car outside all day.

Here is a picture of the car at the tint-shop, getting the driver side foil sized and cut out.

For more pictures press the Read more…..

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