Dubai - A Love-Hate Relationship

Dubai Photos Are HERE

After Iran we had originally thought of making our way to India via Pakistan, overland. I had been chatting a lot about the country with the Pakistani guys that run the shop down the road from our flat in London, and even bought the Pakistan guidebook a few months ago. But given the increased amount of violence in that country over the last year or so, it was looking more and more likely that we wouldn’t be possible to visit. There are still parts of Pakistan that are safe to visit, but now it seems as if the Pakistan government is not issuing tourist visas (and home countries are not giving out the needed recommendation letters) so it’s now very difficult, though not impossible, to get a visa. Plans change as always, and bending like willows in the storm (I’m seeing posters for Karate Kid everywhere) we made plans to fly to India via Dubai instead.

We have friends in Dubai that we had always been meaning to visit, but given that it is jostling with Las Vegas for the place I’d least like to visit, the prospects of us getting there were very slim indeed. However, now that we were in the area, so to speak, it made sense to drop in for tea. From Shiraz to Sharjah (one of the seven emirates that make up the United Arab Emirates, along with Dubai) the flight was all of 45 minutes and flying with Air Arabia, was really cheap, costing something like $85 each. The onward trip, some five days later from Sharjah to Chennai in India was about 4 hours and about the same price. A great deal. One of the many reasons people find for not traveling is that they think flights will cost them the world. That’s not true at all. The rise of discount airlines has made it very affordable to fly within a region. Airlines like Air Arabia (covering the Middle East and India) or Air Asia (Asia and India) have very flights that won’t break the bank. They can all be booked easily online, all you need is a credit card and an internet cafe with a printer to print out the e-ticket. Booking airline tickets on the go allows us to be flexible (like the willow) unlike round the world tickets which have to be booked out months in advance. A great website for finding discount airlines is Which Budget.

On the flight over, we were reaquainted with the world outside of Iran; the airline stewardesses were wearing skirts! Not to mention, their heads were scarfless. Almost as soon as we took off, about half of the women in the plane unwrapped their head scarves, now they were free of the Iranian fashion police.

After landing in Sharjah we thought we’d take the budget approach and catch the bus over to Dubai. The trip should have taken about two hours, but by the time we got into the centre of Sharjah, about an hour later, we hopped out and took the UAE approach and got a taxi. The temperature in UAE was close to 40 degrees and the humidity was intense; the bus with no A/C was not fun. We gave up on bus transport after only the first try.

“Look at the Pretty Buildings!”

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is a tiny country that is actually made up of seven separate city-states (emirates) such as Sharjah, Dubai, Abu Dabi. Each emirate is practically joined together and it’s difficult to see where one starts and the other finishes. Sharjah was actually a bit grubby and looked no different than India or any West Asian country. Lots of little Indian restaurants, auto parts shops, internet cafes, cheap clothes shops. There were a lot of Indians walking around – they make up the bulk of the manual labour force in UAE. Once we hit Dubai however, the change was abrupt. Huge skyscrapers loomed into view, gone were the “normal” shops and in came chain stores, shopping malls, luxury car dealers, chain restaurants and white people! The skyline is amazing. I couldn’t help staring out the window, feeling a bit like a child as I stared up in awe at the “big buildings” As far as the eye can see, it’s shiny skyscrapers, in between which are more tall buildings in the process of being built. The scale of the building work is hard to believe. It’s got to be the world’s biggest construction project. Near the Dubai Mall (the world’s biggest shopping mall) is the Burj Kalifah, the world’s tallest building at 110 stories. Up close it doesn’t look that big, but viewed from a distance, in relation to the buildings around it, none of which are less than 50 stories, it is enormous. We enquired about visiting the Burj Kalifah, but there is a waiting list of 2-3 days to go to the top and it costs $25. You could go straight away for $100, but we decided to give it a miss, and took a photo (free) outside instead.

Actually, I was surprised at how impressive the building work in Dubai is. The buildings are all of very high quality design. The sleek stations of the brand-new metro system are very cool indeed. Even the motorways and overpasses are created in such a way that they look nice – unlike the ugly but functional ones at home. Everything seems to be designed with a grand, unified plan in mind. It all seems to fit well together and is pleasing to the eye.

I was less impressed with the shopping malls. They are incredibly huge and have attractions like cinemas, skating rinks, and even an indoor ski field, but at the end of the day, they are just shopping malls. Perhaps to someone in Europe, where big shopping centres are only now starting to be built, they are something interesting, but to me, growing up in Canada, where shopping inside of malls is normal, I wasn’t fussed about them. Actually, in Edmonton we used to have the biggest mall in the world, sustained I suppose because people want someplace warm to shop during the long cold winter. Here in Dubai, where the temperature can reach 50 degrees, the malls are needed for just the opposite reason. While the temperatures outside are scorching, all of the malls, indeed every indoor area, is comfortably air conditioned. Because of the outside temperatures, malls are the places to hang out for the locals. It seems visiting the mall is what most people do to pass the time; eating, shopping, going to the cinema, meeting friends for coffee, it’s all done in malls. There’s very little do be done outdoors, except along the beach and mall crawling is the thing to do. We found ourselves either in the Mall of the Emirates or the Dubai Mall on every day of our stay. A bit of a change from the Bazaars of Old Damascus.

Funnily, they do have areas of the city such as the Old Town where the buildings are built in such a way that they look like traditional old Arab structures. There are areas that they call souks but they aren’t souks like we had visited. Instead they are luxury hotels or shopping malls. They have even built an area of restaurants in the design of the mud-brick buildings that we had recently seen around Yazd in Iran, complete with traditional-looking wind towers or badgirs. These wind towers didn’t capture the wind, rather they housed air conditioning units. You might think that all of these attempts to re-create an old-town that new Dubai doesn’t have, would look a bit cheesy – I see this in Canada, where they try to make things look old, when they aren’t – and that is what I was expecting, but in reality everything looks very good. Perhaps not exactly like the real thing, but not unappealing at all.

The Easy Life

Although I was enamored with the buildings in Dubai, I was less enchanted by the lifestyle. As I said, there doesn’t seem to be much to do outside of the malls, and what there is, is expensive. You can go on desert safaris, or do water sports, etc. But they all cost a lot of money. There are cultural events, and a lot of organised social gatherings designed to facilitate the huge ex-pat population getting to know one-another, but it all seems a bit forced. There’s no place like say, Camden Town or Soho to wander around and soak in the atmosphere. In reality you can’t walk anywhere. It’s a car city – the distances are too great to walk and it’s too bloody hot anyway – we tried to walk from the metro station to Michaela’s friend Virginia’s apartment and we were soaked with sweat within a few minutes. There are a million restaurants to eat in, but most are chain restaurants and I was unimpressed with the food in them. It tasted too much like “restaurant food” and I’d much rather eat in an independent place with more original recipes.

Oddly, you see more foreigners in Dubai than locals. All of the restaurants seem to be staffed with South-East Asian, the white-collar workers are all European, North American, or Indian. Every taxi driver seems to be Pakistani. And of course all of the manual labourers are Indian (south Indian, mainly) The white-collar, er… white people, are primarily here earning high-wage “ex-pat” packages, with tax-free salaries, car allowance, home allowance, and benefits. They earn tons of money, and want to spend it. They drive very nice cars, have beautiful apartments with swimming pools and love to shop. They expect a high level of service, which they get. Everywhere you turn there is some Indian picking up up rubbish (why they can’t do this in their own country is another topic altogether) or sweeping the streets of the ever-present sand. In the malls there is always an information desk or security guard that is only too happy to help you find what you are looking for, complete with a “yes sir, thank you sir” to see you on your way. The restaurant staff jump at the snap of a finger, and will customise your dish however you like. Anything can be done for you. Everything is easy, and accessible. There’s always a taxi outside your apartment or a fleet of them outside the restaurants. If you want a packet of cigarettes delivered to your apartment, you only have to make a call. The entire city has been designed to keep the workers happy, and working. All of this great service seems to have caused people to develop some bad manners though, and they often treat the people working in the service industry as exactly that, servants. The locals, together with the ex-pat community don’t seem to see these people as being on the same level as they are, and from little I have seen, often talk down to them as if they were somehow lesser beings. That of course may not be how it is at all, but that’s the way I saw it in our four days in the city.

Living in Dubai really is a living the good life. Everything is there at your fingertips, and outside of work, you don’t have to think too much. It seems to be a great place to make money, and for many people, it’s a fantastic lifestyle. The question of whether or not Dubai would be an option on the list of places for us to live kicked off quite a lively debate in our team of 2, with Michaela loving the idea, and me being dead against it. She loved the swimming pools, the nice beach (with water as warm as that in a bathtub) and the fact that everything just works. On top of that there’s no taxes whatsoever, commutes are short and there’s endless sunshine. Unlike living in the UK where over half of your salary goes to the government in one form of tax or another, flats are tiny and expensive, commutes are long, the weather is rubbish and infrastructure seems to be in a constant state of (dis)repair. I had it in my head that Dubai was going to be an awful place and that’s exactly how I saw it. I thought that the ex-pats were pretentious and spoiled,the locals stupidly rich (and flaunting it) the weather was toooo hot, I hated the shopping malls and the fact that everything was new. That’s one of the reasons I prefer living in Europe over Canada, is that it’s got some history; the cities in Europe are a joy to be in, simply because they have accumulated such layers of stories and characters over the centuries. I love to walk through London with no aim whatsoever. Simply to walk and to soak up the energy. You can’t do that here. I admit that life in the UK is probably more of a struggle than it is in Dubai, or any other “new” country, but maybe that’s the price one has to pay to live in a place that has existed for so many centuries. It’s difficult to make things like the Tube run like clockwork when they’re 150 years old. A faux English pub is not the same as the real thing, it doesn’t matter if they do serve a decent fish and chips (God knows most of the pubs in London don’t.)

Dubai’s Ugly Side
I had already written off Dubai when my friend Mo took us to the real “old” part of Dubai; an area called Deira in which the port of Dubai operates. The port used to play a huge role in Dubai’s economy before the discovery oil and the subsequent re-organisation of the country as a base for foreign companies and later as a tourist destination. Even today, vessels that look hardly sea-worthy bring in a constant stream of goods that keep the city going. Everything from food-stuffs to flat-screen TVs are piled up along the sea front, with an army of Indian port-workers, many asleep at their posts, guarding the boxes of cargo. The area around the port is home to the people that keep the local Arab population and the ex-pat community fed, the city from disappearing under the sands, and the skyscrapers continually rising. It was like a mini India, with filthy curry stands, dirty streets and shops selling real, everyday stuff, whereas the other Dubai houses only nice restaurants, spotless streets and designer shops. The population of this area seemed to be made up not only of Indians, but Pakistanis, Sudanese and a whole smorgasbord of nationalities and skin colours. The area ain’t pretty, but it did seem real, after the sterility of “new” Dubai. Admitedly I wouldn’t live in this part of the city, but just the fact that it does exist and that it’s an integral part of the city, seemed to make Dubai seem a little less perfect – a flaw in the diamond – and I liked that.

I Love Dubai?
So, in the end, our short trip to visit friends in possibly the world’s most advanced city turned into a fact-finding mission as to whether or not we would consider living in Dubai. So, have I come around to the place? Maybe. As a holiday destination, I wouldn’t recommend it unless you like engineering or spending money. But living in Dubai? I do like the swimming pools and the beach. And the apartments are nice. Tax-free salaries are great! I still think the people are spoiled brats, but I’m sure not all of them are. And just because other people are spoiled brats doesn’t mean that you have to be too. I do think it’s possible to live there to be happy, but not forever. As a place to make some money for a couple of years, it just might do the trick. I think it’s really easy to spend all of that tax-free money, but if we can save money living in London (one of the world’s most expensive cities) then we could do it here too. You never know…

The Un-Essentials

Dubai’s Metro is great!. It’s new, it’s fast, it’s air conditioned – and no one uses it! At least none of the ex-pats, who all drive cars And no local would be caught dead on public transport.

Glasses are really cheap in Dubai. I picked up new lenses for my glasses for £85 whereas in the UK they would set me back over £200. I tried to buy a new camera to replace my now-dead SLR. That wasn’t cheap, and I decided against it in the end. For a tax-free country, electronics are surprisingly expensive, about the same price as the UK.

Average Costs to travel in Dubai (UAE Diram – AED ):
£1 GBP = 5.39 AED
€1 EUR = 4.52 AED
$1 USD = 3.67 AED

20 minute taxi ride: 30 AED
2 Cinema tickets: 60 AED
meal in a mall restaurant: 50 AED
return ticket on the metro: 11 AED
beach: free!

That’s about all I’ve got for costs. As we stayed with friends (thank you Virginia and Osman) we didn’t have to pay for a great deal.

Our average cost per day to visit Dubai was £36.32 per day for two people.

Dubai Photos Are HERE