WILD TIMES IN PARADISE The women earning big and behaving badly in the sun
Sunshine, sex and stacks of cash… no wonder so many women are choosing to live abroad. But is it all pool parties and promiscuity? Cosmopolitan investigates ›
As soon as she saw them, almost winking at her from the shop window, she knew they’d be hers. She’d just received her first proper paycheque – £1,500 – tax-free. That was to cover the rent on her huge villa (complete with pool), and leave change for the £400 pair of Louboutin shoes she’d just purchased, on a whim. Designer bag swinging from her arm, she almost skipped, beaming, back into the bustle of The Dubai Mall. Just another cashrich expat, in a sea of shoppers.
The thing is, Lauren Carver* wasn’t cash-rich at all. She was a 22-year-old creative-writing graduate a month into a new job, writing for a magazine in Dubai. Like most of her peers, she couldn’t get a paid job back home in London. But instead of slogging it out at unpaid internships, working a bar job in the evenings and on weekends to pay the rent, she found somewhere she could get a ‘foot in the door.’ The fact she was being paid a whole lot more than her mates back home to work somewhere the sun always shined? Well, that was just a bonus.
Of course, the minute she arrived in what locals call ‘The Sandpit,’ UK life became a distant memory. Gone were the rainy commutes and thankless job interviews. Weekends spent bingeing on box-sets and boozing at old-man pubs were replaced by all-day brunches at five-star hotels, shopping in designer malls and partying until sunrise. “I kind of lost my head the first month I lived there,” the now33-year-old says.“I spent my entire salary as soon as I got it. I’d just graduated and it felt ridiculous, but it sucks you in, the glamour of it.”
It’s not difficult to see why. While wages and opportunities dwindle here (current forecasts show that our average earnings will be no higher in 2022 than they were in 2007**), swathes of young people are leaving the UK behind, seduced by the promise of higher wages, faster career progression, better weather and an unquantifiable sense of adventure in growing
A world of opportunity
“I kind of lost my head the first month I lived there. The glamour sucks you in”
expat hubs around the world. An annual survey by Natwest International found that the number of female expats has shot up by 116% in the past five years, and those aged 25 to 35 increased by a third. Whether it’s commerce and clubbing in Beijing, designer… well… everything in Dubai, or just a better pace of life (and tax-free salaries) in Bermuda, increasing numbers of young, single women are packing their bags and carving out new lives.
For 29-year-old Jasmine Clark*, it was the lure of a fly-bythe-seat-of-your-pants job market that got her on a plane to Beijing.“I had an admin job at the embassy first, then started working for a small business whose company was growing. I didn’t have project management skills, but they were prepared to train me up,” she tells me. Now a successful and quite senior project manager, she explains that “back home, everyone seems to have their job role. It’s accepted that you stay in that position and work your way up. But here, there’s more scope for diversifying. If you have passion, you can get further quicker than back home”. Something that may explain why there are currently 4.7 million British expats worldwide.†
But while it was work that drew her to Beijing, it’s play – or, rather, Beijing’s 24-hour party scene – that’s kept her there for over six years.“It doesn’t matter how old you are, everyone hits it hard,” she says. “People go crazy in a way you would on a wild holiday. I saw a couple at a festival who had taken so many drugs, they started having sex in the middle of the crowd.” Unbelievably, no one reported them. Getting caught in flagrante delicto in China would have almost certainly meant jail.
Partying hard
By “crazy”, Jasmine means: staying out until 5am on a work night, flitting between cocktails at one of the city’s rooftop bars, private rooms in Michelinstar restaurants and backstreet dive bars where beers are 30p and you share tequila shots with strangers. In summer, there are all-day pool parties with world-class DJs. “It’s common for people to keep going to sunrise. Clubs sometimes don’t close until the last person stops dancing.”
It’s a similar story in Bali, where freelance stylist Jennifer Smith* now lives and works. In the day, people go about their jobs as they would do anywhere else, but at night and on weekends…“We get high on mushrooms and acid at this incredible villa. They hold crazy parties where everyone strips naked, swims in the pool and touches each other for hours,” Jennifer says. On another occasion, she tells me that, while high, her and her boyfriend had a threesome with another expat. “We’d taken mushrooms and decided to get into this giant bath. One thing led to another, and I ended up on top of her, with
my boyfriend touching me, fucking me, and watching us together.”
Everything in excess
Even in places where the cultural norms and laws don’t permit holding hands in public – let alone orgies and skinny-dipping – excess for expats is par for the course. In Dubai, being drunk in public is a criminal offence – yet women drink for free on ‘ladies’ night’ (which actually lasts from Sunday till Wednesday) in the areas where alcohol is permitted. It’s a paradox not lost on school teacher Karen Mitchel*.“I moved here three years ago and haven’t looked back,” she says. “I save £1,000 a month and still go out every night. My rent is paid for. In Dubai it’s hard to have a night in. There’s always something happening. It truly is the land of decadence.”
Yet, in the next breath, she tells me about a couple, who she’s just heard have been arrested and put in prison: “She went to the doctors because she felt unwell, and it turns out she was pregnant. They were reported to the police because they weren’t married. Now they are both in jail.”
Surrounded by wealth and, usually, only socialising within the expat community, people forget they’re not at home. Sucked into a
vortex of luxury goods and the kind of live-in-the-moment mentality that comes from thinking, as most of the expats I speak to do, that they can always go home one day, it’s easy to lose your way. To forget where you are. Forget the rules.
“People change massively,” says Lauren of the conversion that happens once expats touch down in Dubai.“They start out very down-to-earth. Particularly those who haven’t come from wealthy backgrounds. Suddenly, you’re in this decadent place, with cash in your pockets. It can suck you in if you don’t make a conscious effort to stay grounded. You become spoilt. It’s like being in Disneyland, but for a really long time.”
Jasmine, too, has seen first hand what happens when the expat bubble bursts. “You have to have a tough skin and be selective about who you are close to here,” she says, wearily.“People can be superficial. Men cheat, but it’s magnified because you see the same people all the time. There is a sense of urgency and desperation to a lot of relationships. Anything that will provide a bit of security when you’re so far from home.”
A double life
Every woman I speak to says the same thing: that, for some, living in another country is a free pass. A pass to the types of behaviour it’s easier to get away with when it’s not your culture – and when your family, the roots that set our moral compass, are thousands of miles away. They talk of the gut-wrenching moment when a friend you’ve got close to announces they are leaving. Of the days when, even though you’re surrounded by beauty, all you want is a bit of drizzle and a fry-up from a greasy spoon.
For Lauren, it was work that pulled her out to Dubai – and eventually pushed her back home.“I just never felt 100% comfortable. As a journalist, I couldn’t write what I wanted. I wrote pieces that got pulled just before they were due to run, because they were deemed inappropriate. I couldn’t talk about what I did at weekends at work. I never really felt… free.” She’d done what she’d set out to do – saved a deposit for a house, and got her foot (now clad with a designer shoe) in the door. Now it was time to leave.
The rest? They’re still out there. Living life like it’s one long MTV video that people are only half-watching. And do you know what? Really, who can blame them?
“In Dubai it’s hard to have a night in… it truly is the land of decadence”