Dubai - First Impressions

Setting Down in the Desert

In just a few hours I flew from one of the oldest cities in the world to one of the newest.  The Dubai airport is enormous, the reception hall alone could accommodate a hundred football fields.  If Pablo Escobar were an architect he'd create an airport like this.  It's ancient Rome by way of Vegas: high ceilings, marble floors, large faux marble columns.  White on white to the 3rd power.  Even the customs officer was dressed in white.  He wore a bright white sheet and a matching white hat curled at the sides.  He looked like a cowboy as imagined by Georgio Armani.

I decided to take the subway to my AirBnB.  It's an elevated train, to be specific, and the station was as gaudy as the airport.  I bought a one-way ticket for two dollars and ascended the escalator.  I felt like I was on my way to the nosebleed seats in a futuristic opera house.

I boarded the lead car and somehow knew I was in the wrong place, it looked like a bullet train more than a subway.  Turns out I was in the "gold class" car, something I hadn't paid for.  I quickly walked to the end of the car, slid open the glass door and stepped into the actual subway.

Except I hadn't.  A woman with a concerned look immediately spoke to me as I settled near her "Sir, you cannot stay here, you will be fined a hundred dirhams."  I kept walking even though I didn't understand.  At the mid point of the car was a blue line drawn on the floor and on the other side of it were hundreds of men, pressed together.  I squeezed into them, one foot on either side of the line.  I'd just crossed through the "women and children" section of the car which was quiet and open and lovely.  The male section was sweaty, hot and annoying.  The remaining subway cars were mainly for men, or to put it clearly, where men were allowed.  

The subway, it turns out, is a metaphor for Dubai - there is a small elite, a few women and children and a mass of mostly foreign men, sweaty and otherwise.  For every Emirati citizen, there are nine foreigners.  During my ride I saw Indians, Pakistanis, Chinese, Ethiopians, Lebanese, Brits and Filipinos.  The Emiratis are outnumbered both by the Indians and Pakistanis, who combined, make up more than 40% of the population.

The map of Dubai is misleading - everything seems close and compact. However, it's way bigger than I imagined, it stretches along the Persian Gulf for 15 miles.  On my subway ride the stops kept coming but I was getting no nearer.  More than an hour passed before I arrived at my stop, named Dubai Internet City.  Not sure what to expect from a place named for the internet but it was apropos.  Tall nondescript buildings, wide boulevards, bland shops, an occasional tree poking up from the sandy strip between the street and the sidewalk.  It's sunny and hot and unpleasant to walk - the scale is off.  Most of the buildings are hotel apartments, meant for the short term worker, and I felt like I was living in a sea of Day's Inns near an airport.

I dropped my bags and headed to the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa.  I was expecting some monster reaching into the clouds but it carries such a small footprint and narrows so quickly that it left me nonplussed.  Had I bothered to take an elevator to the top I may have felt differently.  Onward to the biggest mall in the world, where every boring global brand is stacked into an endless glass box. 

The mall has an indoor waterfall, a skating rink and a large aquarium.  It's impressive but only in the same way a rich kid who drives his dad's Mercedes to high school is impressive.  Yes, they've proven you can build a giant city in a desert and fill it with millions of people.  The question is, why bother to?