BACK TO THE FUTURE: Time Travel to Dubai

Visiting Dubai was like being transported by a time capsule 50+ years into the future, where life is less wasteful, more efficient, and exceedingly elegant.

The city seriously looked like it should have space ships zooming around the buildings! It reminded me of a high-tech city from one of the 3 newer Star Wars movies (Episodes I, II, & III). Dubai is not only the home of the tallest building in the entire world (de Burj Khalifa –which used to be called “Burj Dubai”), which was recently featured in Tome Cruise’s new Mission Impossible action film, but it seems very clean and efficient. Most amazing of all, was the architecture of every single building in the city. Dubai is so wealthy that someone commissioned a bunch of man-made islands to be built off its coast. Many of them are small and privately owned, but the most impressive of them all is Palm Island. Palm Island isn’t technically an island because it is attached to the land at the base of its palm tree shape, but when something is that significant, people don’t fuss about the details. I took some phenomenal photos of Palm Island from my airplane window shortly after takeoff (I will try to post these soon!) In certain areas of Dubai, fuel is much cheaper than water.

My flight arrived in Dubai (from San Francisco—a very long flight) around 7pm and my flight to Nairobi didn’t leave until 10:45am the following day, so Emirates Airlines put me up in a hotel and paid for me to enjoy 2 meals at their expense. (Side note: Emirates is the nicest airline I have ever had the pleasure of flying on and I highly recommend it. They provide these accommodations to any passenger with a layover in Dubai for more than 8 hours but less than 24 hours).

In the check-in line at the hotel, I spotted another American. It wasn’t difficult to tell where he was from: he was wearing a white t-shirt, jeans, and a New York Yankees hat (he couldn’t look more American if he tried—LoL!) This made me smile and we actually met a few minutes later by the elevator. I had signed up for a 2-hour bus tour of the city and I suggested he check it out. He had been to Dubai several times before, on his way to work at the American Embassy in Baghdad, but he had never been on an official tour so he jumped at the opportunity. We became fast friends and he volunteered to take pictures of me with my camera along the tour. It’s thanks to him that I have so many wonderful photos of myself in front of Dubai’s hottest spots. There was something very comforting about hanging out with another American in a country where I had such a difficult time understanding the thick Arab accents. I met a few other hotel guests on the tour as well, but none of them were from an English-speaking country.

I was surprised at how safe I felt.

I actually felt safer in Dubai than I have felt sometimes in downtown Salt Lake City, where I grew up. In addition to finding another American to keep me company and watch my back, Dubai is a very conservative city: You can actually be thrown in jail there for being drunk in public (despite the fact that there are bars on just about every corner—I wonder how that works out) and, you can be ticketed and fined a great deal of money (Dirham) for using swear words anywhere in public. They also don’t allow men and women to be alone together unless they are married. Most of Dubai’s taxi-cabs are white with red roofs, but they also have white cabs with bright pink roofs that have female drivers and are only available for women and children, with the exception of a married man in the company of said wife and children. I thought that I would need to wear a scarf around my hair in Dubai to respect the culture and attempt to blend in, but the locals I met on the long flight there said that was completely unnecessary. They said wearing a tank top and shorts would be inappropriate, but that I should be myself and not try too hard to imitate the Muslims. Besides, they said, Dubai is the most liberal place in the entire region.

The TOUR:

*main Downtown Strip freeway/highway

• 7 lanes going each direction (14 lanes across), runs right through the center of downtown
• incredible architecture on both sides of the road; a lot of thinking outside of the box (like nothing I have EVER seen before!)

*the Beach: the water was warmer than the air outside! 

• swimming would feel like being in a cooler hot tub or a hot bathtub.

*Palm Island

• each “branch” or “leaf” of the palm is 1km long, and the bottom of the island reaches 1km deep (underwater)
• studio apartment on Palm island costs half a million dollars!
• villa on one of the Palm’s “branches” or “leaves” costs approx. $8 million!

*Atlantis hotel

• located at the very top of Palm Island
• hosted the largest fireworks display ever to take place anywhere in the world; it took place in 2008 for the grand opening of this hotel and cost a whopping $20 million!
• has a gigantic (and Free) aquarium inside on the main floor

Dubai TRIVIA:

*Dubai reaches 75% humidity at times

• Dubai bus stops outside are equipped with air conditioning for these occasions

*Dubai sometimes experiences windstorms where you can’t see your hand in front of your face

• definitely a desert and yes, they have camels (but no, I didn't see one on the night tour)

*Extremely energy efficient

• hotel key card slides into wall just inside hotel room door and turns on the electricity for the entire room (then I can turn individual lights on and off using the regular switches). This way, guests don’t use up any power or electricity when they are not physically inside of their rooms.

*80% of residents in Dubai are foreigners, and only 20% are from this area originally.

• perk/bonus for residents who originate from Dubai: don't have to pay utilities (ever) when they rent an apartment or house

The only places in the US that Dubai reminds me of in any way are Las Vegas and New York, with a futuristic twist, of course. Dubai is home to the largest mall in the world (much larger than the largest mall in the US: the Mall of America in Minnesota) and has flashy lights in a huge array of different colors that are reminiscent of Vegas. It is known as “The Vegas of the Middle East” because it is by far the most liberal city in that area of the world. Dubai also reminds me on New York with its skyscrapers and melting pot of different people. In Europe, the best place to be on New Year’s Eve is Barcelona, in the US it’s NY, and in the Middle East… it’s Dubai.

The only people in Dubai that made me a bit uncomfortable were the women wearing Burkas (aka Burqas).  This surprised me, because I fully expected to see some women wearing them, and yet, I was still thrown off by seeing them. I have worked and volunteered with a lot of Muslim refugees back in Salt Lake who wear Hijabs, and I think they are beautiful and really highlight one’s facial attributes, but I had never seen someone in-person wearing a Burka. I thought it would feel just like I was next to someone in an overly-large hijab, but instead, I felt like a large black ghost was floating by me, always submissive, and always following a man dressed in a business outfit –-one that an American man would typically wear to work in an office— I guess I always assumed that the husbands of such conservative-looking women would look a bit more conservative themselves. Instead, they were chatty, only talking with other men, while their shadowy ghosts floated silently along behind them, with the only visible part of their bodies (their eyes) never looking up from the floor or uttering a single word. I’m used to women being chatty as they stroll through the hallways of a hotel and the men walking beside them nodding and contributing something to the conversation only here and there. This was a surreal experience for me and I didn’t know how to act around them. I wanted to look at them, perhaps give them a friendly smile, but they were so determined to restrain their eyes from glancing up to meet mine. 

Despite one awkward elevator ride with the burka-clad women, this was an amazing overnight adventure in an incredible city!