Roll Me a Dubai

This article covers my experience in Dubai, a glittering diamond clinging to the sand-chapped rectum of the planet. I flipped 180 degrees in my estimation of this place, a testament both to my complete ignorance of how stuff works and to the quality of the people I met there. Hopefully I can swing you ‘round to my line of thinking.  Or, failing that, make you laugh a couple times.  Here goes.

Not Shown: Hot Flight Attendants

First, facts and stuff. Dubai started out as a pearling city.  That provided a nontrivial influx of trade, diversity, math, and secularism in its early formative years.  Ironically much of this influx came from Iran.  Pre-revolution Iran was apparently a pretty sweet place, a concept that makes me go cross-eyed. Anyway, in 1966 hydrocarbons were discovered offshore Dubai in “Hi this is the Middle East” quantities.  Unlike the neighbors, the first thing Dubai’s leadership did was to spend these Dirhams on diversifying the economy and building infrastructure. The city’s population ballooned 300% in the first 3 years after First Oil. Nowadays, Oil revenue accounts for only 5% of GDP (compare to 35% for Abu Dhabi) with the lion’s share coming from tourism, aviation and finance. They run a little airline out of there.  You might’ve heard of it.

In other words, they got a head start and knew what to do with it. That’s why instead of a royal family that all have Rovers for their kids, the Emirate has amassed such wealth that you can’t swing a dead cat in the street without hitting two Lamborghinis (1).

Now back to the story. When EK222 finally put rubber on the tarmac, I was elated.  The rocket fuel in my veins came from the knowledge that I’d see Amy the Aussie soon.  Australian values tend to align exactly with mine – reverent to irreverence, comical and creative, bearish on sleeves.  Amy fits conveniently into all these stereotypes. A more fitting ambassador for her species you shall never find.

           Amy bravely volunteered to be my guide through Dubai. She also offered to show me the Emirates Cabin Crew world. More on that later. (2)

           We hopped a train to my AirBnB abode on Jumeirah Beach (3).  The word “beach” conjures up a lot of pre-programmed images in my head.  Because I’m in no way special, you probably have similar notions, especially if you (one of my 6 readers) spent any amount of time on Texas beaches:  Minimally sorted coarse-grain sands, a few restaurants, morbidly obese beachgoers in Spurs and Cowboys jerseys, and the odd hypodermic needle in a discarded Whataburger wrapper.  Know the place?

           Jumeirah Beach is not those things – rather, those South Texas Tetanus Factories aspire to be Jumeirah Beach when they grow up. Along the sport-court-but-squishy jogging path solar-powered wifi towers periodically sprout up, providing a cool new-agey feel even if it’s cloudy and they aren’t working.  A massive kite festival was taking place.  This didn’t inherently move the coolness gauge because, you know, kites, but floating tigers and dragons spice up any sunset. On the non-beach side of the running track exists every conceivable restaurant and child-entertainment-mechanism.  Volleyball courts were everywhere.  I could hang.  And off in the distance the Burj al Dubai hazily haunted the horizon, just obscured enough by the sand and smog to look like it could actually be a ghost.

"Ooooooooo" - me

           It was, in short, a reasonably chill strip of sand.  But this isn’t a real estate website, it’s a (terrible) travel blog, so I’m describing it as a means to an end; to talk about the people there. They were just like normal beachgoers! They were, if anything, more diverse and generally more fit. Everyone rocked western swimwear and seemed to be having an awesome time. Volleyballers were exactly as sexy as they ought to be, and everyone swore just as much when propelling Wilson into the net. I remained in a shirt-ful condition out of respect, but needn’t have.  My loss (4).  Damn.

           This started to chip away at my preprogrammed impression of Dubai, a misconception borne from being too lazy to not listen to lazy journalism, and having my previous Dubai experience tempered with proximity to an actual shitheap. Yes, Dubai belongs to the UAE, a decidedly Muslim and conservative confederacy. Yes, there are laws on the books that’d be out of place on Bourbon Street.  It’s also not a nice place if you’re a poor immigrant worker who came on a “I’ll loan you my passport till I pay off my plane ticket” plan. But Dubai is a huge, glittering city full of global elite who want to make money and have a great time.  For day-to-day expat or tourist purposes, that influence renders the prior concerns negligible. And while those detrimental characteristics suck, this is a (pedantic) travel blog, not a full-on investigative effort.  Can’t solve em all.

The assault on my uneducated perception of Dubai continued with the assistance of Amy and her fellow passport graffiti enthusiasts.  When you see a city with a group of people who all made it their home recently and are still be in exploration mode themselves, you see a unique side of it.  It’s a good side. I’d expected a culturally narcissistic, oppressively hot, downright boring place where I couldn’t express my ideas or find enthusiastically fun people. Mostly false, temporarily false, absolutely false, false and false, respectively.  I enjoyed being conspicuously over-served at a Friendsgiving party, went to an African dance club, encountered some local music at the AirBnB, and generally didn’t do anything that’d be out of place in any other big global city. Dubai is what you make of it, and there’s enough to do in Dubai to keep me happy for a handful of lifetimes.  

Culture-wise, here’s my breakdown. On a fundamental level, a society can either be fundamentally open-minded and diversity-oriented or it can be focused on religious crankdom.  Crankdom preserves a paradigm of unyielding patriarchy and “don’t ask those questions” ideology.  These two options exist at opposite ends of a spectrum, and it’s not possible to work towards both simultaneously; the former requires and praises new ideas and evaluates them based on objective usefulness, while the latter holds a certain set of old ideas sacred and violently opposes contradictory viewpoints. Prior to this trip I thought Dubai was more in line with its unacceptably backwards neighbor, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. But it’s clearly not. Dubai exists considerably further along that spectrum. Again, being not special, I assume that as many as 4 of the 6 people who actually read this blog share similar misconceptions.  

KSA Tourism Brochure

The ham-fisted religiosity endemic to the Middle East doesn’t like me and I don’t like it.  But in Dubai the primary deity is money, so the theologic camel manure doesn’t make it into the day-to-day in smellable quantities. Turns out the religious absurdities of Dubai aren’t tangibly worse than the religious craziness of the American South (5), but Dubai affords more opportunities to get a girlfriend with an accent and a cool career.  Point, Dubai.

If you take one thing out of this blog, it should be, and always should have been, that I don’t know anything about anything.  The Dubai portion of this trip served as a stark wakeup call to be more judicious in the information I let between my ears.  You only know the soup you swim in, and in my case that soup told me Dubai was a boring, sandy, oppressive (in all meanings) business park with a shopping addiction. Mostly inaccurate.  Shopping is the national sport. It also reminded me that every time I think I’ve been to a couple countries and seen a couple things, there’s an army of bigger fish.  In this case, the army all wears funny red hats and looks upon me pityingly when I announce I’ve only been to 30 countries.  I may as well have brought a half-cooked spaghetti noodle to a gunfight.
via GIPHY

You don’t come home from these trips thinking “oh, ok, now I know enough, I’m good.”  The sentiment is more along the lines of “The gap between what I knew and what I know is enormous, what other places can I go learn about? Gaps are fun.” Then you make the obvious joke about gaps, then you go somewhere else.  And it never stops being that way.  I loved the Dubai leg of this trip, and am eternally grateful to the friends I met along the way.

Yours in mediocre travel musings,

R

(1) Citation Needed

(2) I’m writing an entire post on the lives these people get to live.  They’re a rad bunch - interesting, ballsy and very attractive

(3) If you’re ever in Dubai, give Thierry a shout

(4) And also the loss of the whole city of Dubai.  Did you know I do crossfit?

(5) The hardest part of writing this post was picking which (I only get one?) article about crazy people in the South.  I like the one I settled on, but also considered this, this and this.