'I enjoy giving people advice'

This much I know Omar al Busaidy is the senior commercial attaché at the British Embassy in Abu Dhabi.

I studied at a British curriculum school and then did a degree in marketing at the American University of Dubai. While I was studying I also worked full time. My mother encouraged me to work as well as study because the UAE is a very competitive place and there are lots of nationals who are very well educated.

First I worked in the National Bank of Dubai, as a customer service representative, then as a business development executive and then as an assistant product manager. After studying I used to return home at 11pm. I am a people person and I like to be out and about. When I had the interview for my present job, I said that if you put me behind a desk, I can't do anything. I am 22 and I just graduated this month. Now I am living in Abu Dhabi. I like to go out to peaceful places here. I have finally escaped the busy life in Dubai. I think I aged very quickly there.

People say I look and talk older than my age, but it's because all the development is happening so fast and you experience so much you get sick of it very quickly. I like to go out to cafes in hotels. I don't like to be around too many people when I'm relaxing. I like to go out with just one or two other people. I like to go to the cafe inside the lobby of the Emirates Palace or to the Shangri-La hotel. I like to go to Marina Mall when there are no people there.

My hobbies are jogging, football and volleyball. Obviously I listen to Arabic music, but I also listen to chill out music and I am a hard-core house music fan. I love house music: deep, funky, progressive and electro. I've been to Moscow, the UK, the Czech Republic and Greece. I definitely want to go to Italy and France. I love history. I love to see artefacts and I love learning languages. I speak French. If I've visited a country I usually try to go somewhere else but I definitely want to go back to Greece. I went to the different islands including Mykonos.

I don't just want to go to places where you have the whole modern civilization and everything that's set up. I want to go to places that are more stricken by political forces, war torn areas. I like to go there to see what happened. I love politics and I love reading about politics. Politics is basically what runs the world. My inspiration is the late Sheikh Zayed. He did a lot for the neighbours in this region. He invested in their infrastructure without expecting anything back.

What I want to do is to bring people together and form partnerships that might not have happened otherwise. As an Emirati in a private British curriculum school, many of my neighbours were from the UK and the US, so I got the best of both worlds. I understand both mentalities. People here expect the same respect as they would give to the people that they were dealing with. I enjoy giving people advice and I am open for whoever wants to speak to me.