My local shops

Over the last 3 weeks I have shared my life and my patch in the UAE with family and friends. I've begun to realise that there are some things that I accept as normal and natural, however they help to weave the fabric of life in UAE. While I accept them as every day life, on reflection they are so different to life in NZ.
While the cities in the UAE have huge shopping malls. The big brand shops have a presence eg shop shops like Aldo and Nine West, in these malls. There are also the very upmarket shops eg Swarovski crystals, and Amarni. However the rest of the towns and cities are made up of hundreds of tiny shops operated, managed mostly by local Indian, Pakistani, Bangladesh etc people. Behind my apartment is a small clustering of local shops. The ladies tailor, the laundry, the grocery shop, the gents hair cutting, a travel business of which I know nothing about and a small cafeteria where you can buy a cup of tea and a sandwich.
The ladies tailor has 5 chaps who sew the extensive embroidery on to cut out pieces of fabric that will inturn become the jambalaya dresses the women wear. My local laundry man washes and irons my sheets and towels. 2 sheets, a pillow case and 1 or 2 towels for 7 AED. Such a pitance. The grocery store is much the same as the corner diary. The people who work in these shops work 6 to 7 days a week, and long hours for such a small wage. However bad we think their life is, its so much better from where they came. One of the tailor men speaks reasonable English. Reasonable enough to tell me enthusiastically that India scored whatever they did 365?? in the cricket and beat NZ 5 - 0 in the series!
Beside the red car is a reasonable sized dumper bin. We don't have a door to door rubbish service. Instead we have numerous dumper bins scattered around the housing areas into which we put our supermarket bags of rubbish. Within 2 - 3 minute radius walk from my apartment would be 6 - 8. Every day, large trucks come around and empty the dumpers bins. A small glimpse into my world.