A Day in Dubai!

The Flight

The first stop on my journey to Durban was Dubai. I will be spending the summer with Aidan, another student from UD, and he had the great idea of spending a day (two nights as it would turn out) in Dubai. Neither one of us knew much about Dubai other than it had some of the largest buildings in the world, the most luxurious resorts and all kinds of other crazy things you would never expect in a desert. That was enough to sell us on the visit.

Aidan lives in New York so we flew out separately from the US and met at the Dubai airport. I flew Emirates, an amazing flying experience that involves none of the MMA fighting involved with flying United. During the 14 hours flight you receive two meals that tasted surprisingly good and complimentary drinks all the way.

The seat in front of you has a touchscreen the size of a small laptop in front of you that is full of games, music and all the Hollywood and Bollywood shows you could ask for. Most people on the plane tried to sleep, but the old Indian woman next to me was howling with laughter most of the plane ride from some Bollywood talk show. After finally falling asleep for a short while, I was awoken by a flight attendant, “Sir, welcome back to reality. Would you like some breakfast?” Definitely one of the weirder ways I’ve been woken up. The breakfast was great and we landed two hours later.

The First Night

After meeting up at the airport we headed to our hotel that was, according to Google maps, “across the street” from the airport. While this was technically correct, we soon learned that nothing in Dubai is walkable. “Across the street” meant crossing a parking garage the size of a few football fields and three highway roads all running parallel to each other. We didn’t make it far before bailing and taking a shuttle to the hotel.

Shout out to highways with no bridges

What do you do when its 11pm and you’re hungry in Dubai? Order takeout chicken shawarma with fries. The phone in our room couldn’t call outside of the hotel so I had to attempt the order using the front desk phone in front of everyone waiting in line. After 15 painful minutes of me trying to the explain what I wanted, I hung up to hear the desk attendants audibly laughing at me. At the least the food was good.

The Metro

A combination of the time change and excitement drove us out of bed by 7am. By 8:30am we were fed and on our way downtown via the Metro. Other than the fact that the Dubai Metro and the Chicago “El” both ride on tracks, they have absolutely nothing in common. The stations are sparkling new with escalators and beautiful glass ceilings. The platforms are airconditioned and glass gates reaching 10 feet up prevent anyone from failing into the tracks. Trains arrive every four minutes and glide silently into place. The interior of the trains is even more different. The trains are wide, with few seats and lots of room for standing. Signs on the wall show off the fines you can get for various activities; no eating, drinking, chew gum, etc. After two stops a man boards the train to rescan everyone’s passes to make sure they did not sneak on. Everyone is quiet and respectful.

 

By the third stop I start to realize something else is up. I feel like I’m in a middle school dance again and all the boys are on one side and the girls on the other, both too afraid to talk to each other. By the time we are close to downtown I realize this is no coincidence and finally see the sign marking off designated side for women and children. This rule is followed by everyone, foreigner or not, Muslim or not, and the only women by the men were wifes/girlfriend who were directly seated next to their partner. There was no PDA anywhere.

Other major differences where the fact that the trains were quiet, clean and perfectly orderly. Whenever I think of taking the CTA in Chicago I think of homeless guys chugging tall boys of Icehouse at 10am, teenagers blasting rap on their phones and trash littered all over the train. The Dubai Metro definitely has class, but at least Chicago has personality.

The Mall

I hate malls. They suck. You have to walk everywhere, everything’s expensive and workers follow you all over the store. Plus I’m a terrible shopper. Being the youngest of three brothers means 90% of my cloths were hand-me-downs and the other 10% involved shopping with my mom. By the time college rolled around the only extra money I had went to food and beer (sorry mom) so I never went shopping on my own. As a result I feel totally out of place trying to buy stuff for myself. Over the past three years I’ve bought two shirts and both of those were online.

That being said…I was absolutely blown away by the Dubai mall and would go again in a heartbeat.

Let me hit you with a few stats courtesy of my boy Wikipedia. The Dubai Mall is comprised of:

·         13 million square feet

·         1,200 shops

·         200 restaurants

·         22 cinema screens

·         93 MILLION annual visitors

o   For those without a calculator that means roughly a quarter million visitors a day…

The place has so much more that, but I’ll do my best to describe what we saw. The Metro empties out into a massive indoor walkway about a half mile long that connects directly to the Mall and Burj Khalifa. The walkway has moving pathways, is air conditioned and is, of course, spotless and trash-free.

Rent-A-Segway would be my million dollar Dubai business

Since we got there so early in the day we were able to see the place go from opening to a fully packed shopping mania. The mall consists of four floors full of long, curved hallways of shops. These hallways intersected at huge open areas where all four floors were visible and the ceiling above the intersections were constructed in some pattern unique to that area. 

The glass ceiling designs ranged from swirls, to stars, to complex geometric patterns. Some areas were completed filled with suspended butterfly ornaments or some other wild design. All signs were in both English and Arabic and all the staff and vendors spoke some level of English.

 

Field trip to the mall. Very cute.

Not many people know it, but rubbing a camel's chin while shopping gets you the best deals

They had an absolutely massive aquarium on the second floor with huge schools of fish, manta rays, sharks and a landscape of underwater vegetation. People who paid a fee were able to enter a tank that was lowered into the aquarium.

The shops were of every brand imaginable as well as plenty that I had never heard of. Naturally, I had to swing into the Gucci store to check out some of their stuff. I touched a jacket that would cover my rent for the fall semester.

The food in the mall was also insane. Coffee shops and small pastry shops dotted the mall, but one section held the mother of all food courts. It had everything. Everything from Five Guys, to random Pakistani fast food, to Piada, to Assia Wok (that’s how its spelled!), and then dozens of restaurants that I had never even heard of. I got Japanese noodles. Aidan ended up getting Pizza Hut.

Asian Food Heaven :')

One of the most interesting parts of the Mall was the people inside of it. Every nationality was represented and everyone from gawking tourists like us to wealthy shoppers filled the halls. The dominant nationalities were Middle Easterners and it was interesting to observe the range in which they expressed themselves. Many wore designer cloths, jeans and snapbacks while others wore the traditional white cloth garbs for males and hijabs for women. Everyone was on their iPhones. One thing I had noticed with the female Middle Eastern students at UD, but that really showed in Dubai, was the way in which women who observed traditional clothing rules still showed off. While most of these women could only show their face, they made it count by having flawless olive complexions, every hair in place, makeup perfectly applied and dazzling smiles. It was a unique form of beauty rarely seen in the US.

The Burj Khalifa

We booked tickets to take a ride to the 124^th and 125^th floors of the Burj Khalifa around noon. The elevator that shoots you up to the observation deck moves at a speed of 9 meters per second and the screens on the wall showed the heights of various wonders (the Great Pyramids, Eiffel Tower, etc) which disappeared as you rose above their height in real time. Upon reaching the top you were able to walk around inside or go outside to a small balcony. The views were completely surreal.

The sense of scale was totally bizarre. At first glance it looked like you were towering over the surrounding skyscrapers in a manner similar to being in the Sears Tower or something similar. Then you realized that the towers you were towering over were actually comparable to the Sears Tower in height and that the “small” towers next to them were skycrapers that would be imposing in most cities. 

 

Below them were multi-story hotel resorts that looked like model homes. People looked like tiny specks slowly crossing “thin” roads. Golf courses dotted the landscape and green was abundant in the city. The vast swaths of desert on the outskirts of the city showed the absurdity of such water use in the city. I can’t imagine the amounts of water that need to be pumped in and desalinated to allow such green to exist.

The circles are actually the worlds largest water fountain

The largest mall in the world from above. Notice the wavy roof? That's an indoor ski course. See the roof with about 20 air conditioning units? That's an indoor ice rink.

All too soon our time as done and we were back on ground level.

Don’t wander Duabi

With jet lag exhaustion closing in on us, Aidan and I made the decision to jumpstart our energy with a trip to the beach. Simple, right?

No.

We took a taxi to what we thought was the closest road to the beach. This turned out to be the closest highway to the beach. After walking for about 15 minutes we hit a massive construction area surrounded by fences. Undeterred we followed the fences for over a mile hoping that it would end. After almost an hour of trying to find our way to the beach, the sun began to set and the old shops around us went from cutely authentic to sketchy. We also realized we hadn’t seen anyone that remotely looked like a tourist in about a half mile, so we called it quits and took a taxi back to the Mall.

Farewell Dubai :’(

After grabbing dinner at the mall we were able to watch the Dubai Fountain display. The show happens every half hour during the night time and the combination of the worlds largest fountains with magnificent lights synced up with a Spanish guitar song was breathtaking. As stupid as it may sound, it really did look like the water was dancing to the music.

The backdrop to the water show

Link to video coming soon...

 I had chills the entire time. When it was over we walked home with blistered feet and tired legs and slept like babies before our 10am flight.

-Dan

P.S. I’m in Durban now and have finished about a week and a half of work. The work is exhausting and the weekends are fun so I’ve had very little time to get posts out. Only time will tell if I surpass David’s blog record.