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| burkha barbie dolls at mall of dubai |
so, for all the warnings we had about dressing to cover ourselves, including a scarf for our hair, and no public displays of affection, the places we went in dubai were a bit more flamboyant and more excessive than america… true, some folks were dressed traditionally, and a few women wore burkhas, but other than that, we could have been in a beverly hills shopping district… and we didn’t see anyone smooching, it’s true, but some were holding hands or linking arms, and none of the security guards were freaking out, so we did hold hands where others did and no one yelled at us… my worst fear was mom and pop watching me interviewed by christiane amanpour about my terrifying ordeal in a middle eastern jail for holding hands with bob.
it will actually be that strict in oman and jordan, but this was dubai… what a kind of weird and superlative-filled place… the biggest, the only, the tallest, the richest, the most modern, etc… i found it (as approximately only a 50-year old city or so could be) to be without much warmth or charm, it was more like “look what we have! and look how big it is! and look how much it cost! and guess what, we have three of them!” kind of a place… there is a sense of grasping or desperation or insecurity under the surface and so full of glaring visible contradictions… a woman in a burkha walking through a mall with missoni, jimmy choo, and countless other designer dress shops pitching tiny cocktail dresses and spike heels… then in the middle of all that, the haunting sound of the islam prayers over the mall loudspeaker (quite beautiful, really)… a shop with aladdin’s lamps and hookah’s right across from a subway… souks and starbucks… crazy! definitely a mideast meets west kind of place, and a rush to build more man-made world-shaped or palm-shaped fake islands and floating hotels and a race to grab tourism and hold it tight because the oil is running out…
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| the burj khalifa, tallest building in the world |
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| view of sandy city below |
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| a gold atm: put cash in, get gold out |
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| detail of fountains at burj al arab from above... same guys that did bellagio in lv |
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| burj al arab hotel, iconic sail-shaped building |
bob and i took a crew tour to go up the burj khalifa, the tallest building in the world. one single elevator takes you most, though not all of the way to the top in less than a minute… the view is pretty amazing, and you can see that the city is, well, on top of a desert, and a lot of white sand between everything, not asphalt or grass… many water features and roundabouts and small garden patches with a few parks… from up there, our ship in the harbor looked like a toy in a bathtub. it was parked across from the qe2 (which was purchased for multiple millions and meant to be turned into a floating hotel til the project money ran out…), next to the aida diva and just down from the sheik’s (emirate of dubai who ousted his father in a coup some years back) yacht, the 2nd largest privately owned yacht in the world. it used to be the largest til someone from russia had one made larger… the port is kind of grubby, really, gravel and sand pits, sand and trash… the city is full of interesting and fascinating architecture and a few older structures and some pretty mosques. more tomorrow from the sandy land of excess!
ciao, me
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| reflection of burj khalifa in other building on ride home |
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