got gas?

Just a quick post on a bit of everyday life: fueling up. The price for gas, or petrol as it’s often called here, is cheap. It’s quite the story problem to calculate, converting liters to gallons and dirham to dollars but I think I figured out that it hovers around $2 per gallon. What was it when I was in the US last summer? About $4 per gallon? Despite the great prices in the UAE, we still suffer a little pain at the pump. Here, the problem is the lines. All stations in the UAE are full service stations, there is no pump-your-own choice. The pumps tend to look like they were installed in the 1970s but that’s unlikely as most of the stations I visit probably didn’t exist in the 70s. Heck, the road that the station is on might not have existed in the 70s. But still, slow, non-digital pumps without credit card readers are the norm in this otherwise tech-mad environment. Turns out, the vast majority of cars have the gas tank on the driver’s side. And these old style pumps have short hoses that will only reach the tank on the near side of the car. And the station flow of traffic is very regulated, no flipping a u turn to come at the pumps from the other side, everyone must enter one direction and drive through in the same direction. So those lucky so and sos with a gas tank on the passenger side rarely have a wait while those of us in the big majority sit in a line, waiting while the digits on the pump slowly flip to fill the tanks of the other half dozen people ahead of us…

gas lines