Now we know how the other half lives. Well, actually, it’s far less than half. The other 10 percent, maybe?

Housing here is expensive. The real estate crash that pummeled the city of Dubai, an hour north of us, never really happened in Abu Dhabi, and the capital of the UAE remains a place where square-footage is dear — and about twice as expensive as Dubai.

You perhaps have seen the photos from the Teeny Apartment where we have lived since mid-December. A small living room, a small bedroom, a corridor connecting them … a small bathroom and a sort of semi-kitchen. And that’s it.

Our situation has changed radically, in the past month.

Leah met a family of Americans here through an internet connection, and they invited us over to dinner a few months ago. They live in the same 20-some-floor tower downtown in which our friend Nancy Beth lived.

The building is very nice and still new enough to be known as, yes, The New Building to the guys who deliver food from the local restaurants. Like, 2-3 years old. And it has apartments that are simply enormous, by Abu Dhabi standards.

When the husband and wife took their infant son and left the country for a summer’s vacation, they offered their place to us … if we would house-sit. Which entails such little work that, really, we’re just living in their place for most of three months.

It is … a huge change in our living situation.

I won’t post photos because it is someone else’s house, but to give you an idea of how much space we have gained …

–The place has three bedrooms.

–It has three bathrooms.

–It has a living room/dining room that is as big as our entire apartment.

–It has a real kitchen with oodles of storage and counter space.

It is so big that we have basically not lived, at all, in two of the four main rooms — the baby’s room and the office/TV room. We just closed those doors, as well as that of one of the bathrooms, and that’s that.

It is so big that … for the first time since December … one of us can speak … and the other may not hear a word of what was said.  The sound just has too far to travel. What a concept.

Dubai has lots and lots of towers, many of then with sea views and amenities such as pools and gyms.

Abu Dhabi has far fewer towers, and those it has tend not to have those little frills … like pools and gyms. And this one does not.  But it does have a view of the surrounding blocks, and once inside, you are well and truly removed from the city — which in that neighborhood is quite crowded and very, very busy, down on the ground floor.

I haven’t yet been in enough towers here to know whether this is a common phenomena, but The New Building seems to have its own micro climate. So much cold air inside … so much hot air outside … that windows might fog up, and the whole place seems a bit damp. Verging on wet.

The owners, before going, asked us to keep the AC at “stun” … because they want to try to keep a rope around the humidity inside their place. Which seemed a little odd, when I first heard the request, but now makes perfect sense. It might rain in there if we let it get up to, say, 75 degrees.

Plus, it’s fun to go “home” and put on a sweatshirt. Which is what I do in that building. Back at the Teeny Apartment, I hadn’t used the sweats since the depths of winter, back in January, when it got down into the middle 60s for a couple of brutal nights.

Leah really likes the temporary digs. It may be ruining the Teeny Apartment for her. No bugs, up on the 14th floor. All the amenities of the city within walking distance of the front door — not that you really walk anywhere this time of year.

I still almost prefer the Teeny Apartment. Even with the ants and the soggy “drywall”. We don’t have the humidity issues the tower has, and we can carry on a conversation even if one of us is at the “far” other end of the place. Also, we live in the burbs, where traffic is markedly less intense and where the population density is about 25 percent of what it is where we are now. Gridlock on surrounding streets is a real issue, downtown. In the burbs, not at all.

But, absolutely, it has been a great break and a great education. If we are still here when the one-year lease for Teenysville runs out, in mid-December, we may try to split the difference and find something a bit less buggy and claustrophobic … but not as grand as our “deluxe apartment in the sky” … as the lyric to the “Jeffersons” sitcom theme song went.

We have moved on up for a few months here, but in September we will be movin’ on out.