Shop Til You Drop in Dubai
I have not been to another place which displays the excesses of Capitalism as much as Dubai. Lucky for me I had spent a week in Nairobi and not in Bushville, Africa so the shock was not as great as it could have been. I’ve heard a bit about Dubai from fellow travelers. Heard enough to say “not if I can help it” when answering the common “are you going to Dubai” question. Well, I could not avoid Dubai or at least it makes sense to use it because of the transportation connections so in a way I could not help it. I spent two nights in between my flight from Nairobi and my flight to Sanaa, Yemen giving me two days to explore. I wasn’t too excited about buildup from fellow travelers (all of which I believe are big shoppers), but what little excitement I had for going to a new country was totally shot up when I could not find a hotel room for less than $100!
After two days, I feel like I saw everything Dubai has to offer me. No, I did not get to the beach. Nor did I see the giant hotel that looks like a sail. Nor did I see their manmade island communities that look like palm trees. Nor did I get to their horse or camel races. Nor did I see the indoor ski area. I didn’t even enter one of their malls. I did see the tallest building in the world (actually, there are so many of them being erected around the world outside of America I am not sure it is the tallest, but it sticks up way above everything else quite a distance from the center of the city and it looks really stupid on its own). So what else is there to see?
Dubai is split by what they call the “creek”. I would call it a large salt-water inlet. This is probably the best attraction of the city followed by the architecture of all the new buildings. You can take water taxis of buses up and down the creek and watch all of these buildings go by. The creek is lined with many old boats that are from other countries. They are in Dubai loading up with everything you can imagine to take back to their countries like Iran, Pakistan, India, etc. to sell. Some of these are the least sea-worthy buckets I have ever seen and when loaded up and pulling out of the creek, I have to wonder how they can make it to the Gulf of Oman let alone the Indian Ocean. Seeing all the crap they buy stacked in mountains next to the boats before loading them is a humorous eye-sore for a city looking so spiffy. The place is too spiffy if you ask me. It kind of looks fake except for the grisly boats docked.
I’m not sure Dubai has much of a heart. The people are friendly enough, but none of them are from Dubai. About 85% are from other countries. I met two gentlemen from Dubai. They were both very friendly, but I am not so sure they even like their country. They both mentioned “dirty” Indians and Pakistanis that are everywhere. The real local men dress in white dishdash robes with head coverings. They look quite spiffy and sheikh-ish. The women generally wear black burqas with just the eyes showing. Since there are many stores selling very racy outfits “for belly dancing”, my mind is usually wondering what they are wearing under their not-so-chic burqas. Apparently, anyone needing to hire someone can get a visa for a foreigner and then import them. There are also a lot of ex-pats from Britain. I mostly saw the wives out shopping. I was surprised by the number of white women in burqas with European accents leading me to believe that there are a lot of foreigners married to Dubai husbands who have fully accepted Muslim traditions. Dubai may be the most international city on earth being that so many of its residents are foreigners from many countries and there are tourists from just as many countries if not more. Some of the tourists were there for beaches and relaxation, but based on the number of crates I saw people checking in at the airport, I would say most are there to shop. Maybe the European wives in burqas are there for the same reason?
Shopping is the big draw supposedly because the prices are great due to Dubai being duty free. From what I saw in the souqs and in regular stores, Dubai does have it all. It would be a great place for me to replenish travel supplies if I needed any. I did not. Dubai is famous for gold and I went to the gold souq to see why. I saw store after store selling the gaudiest gold and jeweled jewelry that I could ever imagine. I broke out laughing a few times imagining someone wearing them. For instance, “necklaces” of webbed gold chain weighing 220 grams. Not only were these necklaces UGLY, at 220 grams the cost would be well over $10,000. There were literally hundreds of stores selling these items with windows stuffed. Why display a dozen big, ugly rings when you can display hundreds of them with stones ranging from less-than-a-carat to well over ten carats? They are obviously trying to overwhelm the would-be-purchasers. I was impressed with the sheer numbers of grams, carats and colors, but I was not interesting in buying anything.
I did spend most of my time in the gold souq looking for security. I wanted to be there at opening or closing to see how they could possibly re-stock/un-stock the window displays as jewelry stores normally do. I am not sure they do that in Dubai. I could see very little in the way of security. A few cameras in stores, but I did not see one guard or policeman in the souq. The doors to the stores were wide open! I saw no cameras in the souq itself. I am convinced that there was a lot of security, but it was not to be seen. Like the city itself, there just isn’t a lot of signs of security (very shocking coming from Africa where there is so much security and so little to be secured!). I heard a bunch of sirens while eating lunch and definitely took note of them because they were out of the ordinary. An hour when I left the café, I was surprised to see the emergency vehicles down the street. I went to see the excitement since there were hundreds of people there, too. I got scared when I was in the middle and security personnel started blowing whistles and people started to move fast. Damn! When in the Mideast, don’t get into the middle of a protest! Or so I was thinking as I was trying to move without getting crushed or beaten up by the approaching militia. It turned out that there was a jumper on a building and they were clearing a path to bring him out of the building after talking him out of jumping. They put him in a police car and everyone cheered and went back to their normal lives. I saw another policeman on a motorcycle at a roundabout, but that was about it in a city full of things to steal. Needless to say that Dubai is a very safe city.
English is the language in Dubai. Oh, everything is in Arabic as well and certainly the Arabs speak that official language, but all of these foreigners only speak English. I guess if you give up your country to foreigners in numbers such as Dubai then you can plan on giving up your language and probably a lot of other cultural things as well. I suppose that is one reason I did not like Dubai. Just a modern city that could be named X.
I was interested in this shopping business a bit so I did some checking on prices. I’m sure they have prices that are better than most of the world, but my checks only confirmed that America is still the cheapest place that I have visited to buy THINGS. Apparently, many people are paying a lot of taxes, VAT and duties on their THINGS in order to justify Dubai as a shopping trip. If they were smarter, they would head to New York City, pay about the same to stay, buy things cheaper and have a lot better city for being a tourist. I have to come back to Dubai and I may just go to one of its super malls (one is dedicated to only Chinese products… just like Walmart!!!) for some more of Dubai’s great cultural events. Maybe get a closer view of the tallest building as well.
Finally, the airport in Dubai is one of the modern wonders of the world. It is a shopping mall where you can board planes to anywhere in the world! The shopping is called “duty free” which seems stupid since the whole emirate is that way, but I guess this is for the people on layover connecting to other destinations. When I entered the departure “HALL”, I was faced with a spaceship hanging from the ceiling doing a light show of sorts. Under it was a giant, golden palm “growing” out of a huge, circular sales display/booth. The merchandise being displayed and sold was gold and the first display I looked at had raw gold. In fact, along with many smaller chunks, it had three kilo-size ingots. Let’s see, that’s 1000 grams each times $1000+ per ounce and that means that a tiny area of the display had $100,000 in gold! Plus, the whole booth had much more gold and to the left there was a top-of-the-line Porsche and on the right a top-of-the-line BMW being raffled. And I did not see one security guard around!
(P.S. The food in Dubai is great coming from everywhere like the people. Best part, though, I found a lot of mangoes so my addiction continues to be satisfied!)
(P.P.S. I am now safely in Sanaa, Yemen. The old town looks great. I saw a report that a mortar landed next to the US Embassy here today, but they did not know if it was aimed at the embassy or the school it actually hit… I kid you not. Maybe it was a rival school!)
Tags: Mideast, yemen
vagabondrick
I take it you are not fond of “dubious Dubai”! It certainly seems to be a tourist facade. It sort of reminds me on East Berlin before the wall went down. – You got through checkpoint Charlie and entered a fantastic shoppin emporium that was over a square block in size. Just about anything imaginable from the far ends of the Soviet Union was available there, and at fairly decent prices. The surrounding block had westernized restaurants. But when we accidentally got on a S-Bahn bus and were out were the ordinary people lived, a very different picture emerged. I suspect you might have seen something quite different if you had been away from the city. Kathy