Full set of United Arab Emirates photos can be found here
Going from Africa to Dubai is the travel equivalent of bingeing on a big bag of lollies and feeling slightly queasy afterwards. The taxis are brand new and have meters! We got a special pink roofed taxi from the airport signifying a female driver. The lights of a modern city are dazzling, you can easily get lost in the malls and it feels like almost any experience is for sale. That this has been built out of the sand using oil money doesn’t appear to worry anyone, least of all the numerous ferrari, porsche and hummer owners.
We were staying with the very gracious Saskia, a friend from Sydney who lives in Dubai working for Emirates and her flatmates Sian and Vanessa who kindly got me drunk on arrival with the nicest wine I’d had in months. The Emirates employee accommodation is not too shabby. Just the lounge room of her apartment is three times the size of most of the hotel rooms we have been staying in. We sank into a climate controlled stupor in a very comfortable bed.
The following day it was off to the brand-spanking new Dubai mall. This is the top activity in Dubai and they have made it a super-sized experience. Inside the mall is a two-storey fish tank with the largest single piece of polymer sheet (or something like that) in the world. UAE denizens seem very keen to rack up as many world records as possible, I guess to assuage their inferiority complex at being so new at this mega-city lark. It seems similar to Australians being so obsessed with doing well on the world’s sporting stage. There is also a three storey high indoor waterfall complete with sculptures of diving humans, a large internal ice rink and, outside, a huge fountain complex which ejaculates at set intervals with a dazzling light and sound display. And not to forget attached to the mall is the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa. We went up it one evening for a dusty view of the landscape. While not as exhilarating as standing on the glass floor in the CN tower in Toronto, it gives a good overview of the extent to which Dubai has expanded across the desert. The building had to be bailed out by Abu Dhabi in the end. Being constructed during the Global Financial Crisis wasn’t good for its prospects and even now it has a very low occupancy rate, not hard to believe given the overwhelming number of skyscrapers to choose from in the city, as though an architecture student’s wet dream has been sprinkled across the landscape.
We spent longer than is healthy in the mall – 8 hours – enjoying fine meals, replacing worn out shoes, cameras and pants, getting lost trying to find the exit. The taxi rank is quite an experience in itself. Leaving at 11::30pm on a Friday (the Islam holy day) we were confronted with a mammoth queue of people and an equally long one of taxis that were being slowly paired off. They have an odd system of two rows of taxis of which thirty at a time are filled by people trudging back down the centre of the cars past the taxi queue they were just lining up in. These thirty taxis are then sent off at a whistle from the attendants and another thirty are slowly filled. In the hour we were waiting in the queue we had figured out some efficiency improvements. The taxi drivers are almost all Bangladeshi, Indian or Pakistani. One that we talked to complained about the increasing cost of living in Dubai after 22 years there, and said that the rest of his family had returned home to Pakistan. He thought that his children would be educated and hopefully find jobs there. He was also enthusiastically listening to the cricket and extolling the virtues of tournaments played and nearby Sharjah.
Our time in the United Arab Emirates was not totally focussed on consumerist culture and we did make the two hour journey down to Abu Dhabi where the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque is located. Ironically, this structure seems to reflect the excessive wealth in the UAE as much as the malls. It is an enormous building, built for about half a billion dollars (construction started in 1996) with opulence everywhere. The marble inlays depicting flowers on columns and the floor were designed by British artist Kevin Dean, the link with Islam being that heaven is described as being a garden, and then constructed using marble from almost everywhere in the world. The chandelier was the biggest in the world at the time of construction (it has since been pipped by an even bigger one in Doha). The carpet inside the mosque is the largest single piece of carpet in the world. The mosque can hold 40,000 worshippers and the call to prayer in Abu Dhabi is now solely conducted from this mosque and broadcast to all the other mosques in the area.
For such an expensive and big building it has an odd purpose, seeming to mainly cater to foreign tourists, a kind of Islamic outreach program where people from other countries are lured in by the bling and then given a gentle lecture on the benign and modern nature of Islam as practised in moderate countries and the overlap with other religions. Our guide was a young university student who could barely contain the words in her mouth, so excited was she to speak them. We asked about the way Muslims pray and dress. When praying Muslims stand shoulder to shoulder to express their commonality. While praying five times a day is ideal (it’s a quick five minute prayer) it is not compulsory if you have another very important activity underway, such as conducting open-heart surgery. In between praying time Muslims will often invoke the name of god 99 times, counting three sets on their prayer beads. We asked about the way Muslims pray and dress. When praying Muslims stand shoulder to shoulder to express their commonality. While praying five times a day is ideal (it’s a quick five minute prayer) it is not compulsory, especially if you have another very important activity underway, such as conducting open-heart surgery. In between praying time Muslims will often invoke the name of god 99 times, counting three sets on their prayer beads. There are 100 names of god but the last is unknowable. As an atheist I always feel like an intruder in these places, especially when Western people say “Well we all believe in God, don’t we?”. Religion and religious people are not all good or all bad, so long as they don’t push their dogma on us non-believers.
Abu Dhabi seemed a bit less excessive and less higgledy piggledy in layout than Dubai to us, but we’re basing this on a short day trip there so we can’t give the place a thorough analysis.
Back in Dubai the travel chores continued and we fairly wore ourselves out with running around doing little things. In fact Sarah got so absent-minded that on going out to the local shops she forgot that she had shoved a pair of undies in the back pocket of her jeans when sorting through the laundry, and these were now flapping about on display and spoiling her otherwise carefully chosen conservative attire. She got a few strange looks.
Dubai is the designed to attract foreign workers. The tour guide at the Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi admitted as much, saying that the United Arab Emirates needs foreign expertise because they are such a young country (in some senses). Only 17% of the country are Emirati with almost half of the population originating from the sub-continent. In what can be a harsh desert environment small extravagant touches can make all the difference, such as air-conditioned bus shelters and the soft rubber running track along the beach and ultra-modern exercise equipment. Perhaps partly it’s just because everything is so new, and energy is valued so cheaply here. It would be interesting to revisit when the varnish wears off.
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