You learn to build things with people who are always, on some level, halfway to somewhere else.
There's a particular feature of working here that takes a while to name. The professional population is in motion. People arrive for a role, build a life around it, and many will move on, to another country, another chapter, in a few years. The city runs on talent that's largely passing through, and everyone knows it, including the people passing through.
It changes how relationships work. In a more settled market you can assume the people around you now will be the people around you in a decade, so you invest slowly. Here that assumption doesn't hold. The colleague you rely on, the counterpart you've finally built trust with, the manager who understands how you work, any of them might be gone by next year. So might you.
You could let that make everything shallow. The better response is the opposite: get to the point sooner, build trust faster, value the working relationship while it's here rather than assuming there's endless time to develop it. Transience teaches a strange efficiency about people.
It's one of the quietly defining things about working in this part of the world. You build well with people who won't always be here. After a while, that stops feeling like a loss and starts feeling like a skill.