7 Weeks in Dubai

Week 5: Religion and Retail

2008-06-15T12:38:00.000-07:00

“All religions in the world preach peace; it is man’s interpretation of them that causes problems…” explained one of our two guides at the Jumeirah Mosque in Dubai. My friend, Diane, and I were continuing our quest to make her week-long visit as fruitful as possible and I took a couple hours off of work to visit Jumeirah Mosque with her. It is the only mosque in Dubai that allows non-Muslim visitors and we arrived with head scarves in hand to get glimpse inside.

Jumeirah Mosque

Diane in a head scarf inside Jumeirah Mosque

Our guides, a married couple who volunteer for Dubai Center for Cultural Understanding, shared with us the 5 pillars of Islam and explained their Muslim traditions, prayer, and dress. They were open in terms of customs and beliefs; they encouraged us to ask tough questions or raise the myths or rumors we’d heard about the Muslim faith.

Our guides explaining traditional dress

Diane and I left this visit not only feeling welcomed, but also warm and encouraged – what we’d learned about Islam, its teachings and the way it considered other religions was a revelation in my view of the faith. Of course, I realized that if I’d asked the same questions or tried to dispel myths in a highly conservative area, like Saudi Arabia, I’d probably have walked away feeling completely different. But then again, if someone were to ask me about my Christian faith, would I not tell them something very different than if they’d asked a Baptist, a Methodist or a Mormon? Yet we are all Christian. In the US, we tend to judge Muslims by the fundamentalists we see on TV who are violent, oppressive and even backward. I wonder: do those less familiar with Christianity judge us by our history of bloody crusades or the recent coverage of the Texas polygamist sect?

Diane and I decided to balance our religious adventure with a little shopping. We went back to the older side of Dubai to the covered souk (market) where we started the bargaining: how many cool Indian tapestries / wall hangings could we buy as gifts for ourselves and our families? We were the hot pair in the market – once the shop owners saw that we were out to buy and not just peruse, they all wanted to entice us into their jam-packed nooks of stores. By the end of the evening, I’d seen so many beautiful tapestries of various sizes with beads, embroidery, sequins, copper lacing and immaculate patterns…well, let’s just I made a difference in the weekly income of at least a couple of shop keepers!

This balance of religion and retail carried over as Diane and I took our 2-day excursion to Cairo, Egypt. Following the recommendation of a friend, we had hired a female Egyptian guide in advance. Our guide, Mona, met us at the airport and we immediately launched into our tour of the historic area. It was truly like a real-life walk through the history books I read in elementary school and junior high. Just across the Nile from Cairo in Giza, we got to stand next to the Grand Pyramid and admire the 3-foot limestone blocks that rise in perfect structure to form the ~136-yard high triangle. Mona explained how the pyramids were built as tombs for kings and their wives and how mummification was the process of preparing the physical body to be reused when the soul was resurrected in the afterlife.

Grand Pyramid at Giza

Perspective on size of the pyramid - just one block was up to our shoulders

Panoramic View of the Pyramids at Giza

We also saw the Sphinx, which was carved some a single block of stone left after the near the pyramids after the many blocks of limestone were excavated for the pyramids. Its shape in the form of a king’s head with a lion’s body represents the royalty’s pursuit of both wisdom and strength.

Sphinx & Grand Pyramid

Sharing a kiss with the Sphinx :)

Back in Cairo, we visited the Citadel, a hilltop fortress with a beautiful mosque. The inside of the mosque was beautifully decorated, particularly its multiple domes. Visitors were praying near the front of the mosque, just like I had done when I visited breath-taking Catholic churches in Europe. Mona shared her perspective on Islam, which was very similar to what we’d heard at the Jumeirah Mosque in Dubai.

Mosque at the Citadel

Dome from inside the Mosque

Mona, like most women we saw in Cairo, covers her hair with a colored head scarf to match her outfit and wears long sleeved shirts and pants that were both modern / stylish and modest. This was a little different than Dubai where you see few covered women (since most are foreigners like me) but the ones that do cover tend to wear the long, black traditional abaya (think judge’s cloak) and black head scarf.

Also in Cairo, I went to the Egyptian Museum where I got to see the treasure of King Tut, including his 2 solid gold sarcophaguses and the black and gold head dress that covered his entire mummified head and shoulders. It was truly incredible! Even more amazing was that fact that King Tut was not a well known Egyptian king – he ruled just briefly from age 9 to 18 and had a relatively small tomb given his unexpected and young death. What made him famous was that his tomb, unlike most others, was never raided or robbed before its archaeological discovery. Can you imagine what treasure would have been uncovered in the many pyramids and tombs in Egypt if they’d been found by historians rather than thieves?

Not to be forgotten, we did have our retail adventure in Cairo! We saw a demonstration of how Egyptians made the first paper from flattened, dried papyrus plant and bought some Egyptian paintings on this paper. Having tried our hand at reading hieroglyphics inside the nobles’ tombs by the pyramids, we ordered some jewelry with our names scripted in hieroglyphics. I also got to visit the old part of Cairo which, similar to Old Dubai, is filled with tiny alleyways of shops selling neat gifts and handicrafts. I picked up a couple pieces of silverwork and thanked Mona for her assistance – with her native Arabic tongue and knowledge of all the best (and often hidden) hotspots, she helped negotiate prices and checked quality with the local vendors.

Alleyways of shops in old Cairo

As I left the shops and ended my tour of Cairo, the call to prayer began to ring out across the city and blared from the loudspeakers at the large mosque adjacent to the market. I packed up my purchases in my purse and thought: retail and religion…what a great week.

Week 4: Contrast

2008-06-08T13:02:00.000-07:00

It’s possible that the number of oversized, white SUVs I’ve seen in Dubai in the past few weeks outnumbers all those that I’ve seen in the rest of my life. I get it, I guess. The SUV goes well with the overdone lifestyle that this city seems to portray and white makes sense given the intensity of the sun and heat as well as the fine, light colored sand that seems to blanket everything over and over again. Of course, I hadn’t really noticed the quantity of big light colored vehicles until I rented a car this weekend and got a tiny, fire engine red Toyota Yarvis – a Euro-style hatchback that looked like it was made as an appetizer for a big sharky SUV to swallow up.

You guessed it - my car in the middle.

The contrast between my car and every other car on the road was striking and this theme of contrast seemed to play out in about everything I did over the course of the weekend. On Friday, with the company of my visiting friend, Diane, I went to the old part of Dubai to check out the Dubai creek and gold market. Dubai’s decision to dredge/deepen the creek in order to promote trade and transport was a big part of what unlocked the city’s economy and transformed it from a fishing town to the business hub it is today. Today there are boats of all sizes, the most interesting of which are the small, wooden ones that workers use to cross the water.

Workers crossing the creek.

They cost only 1 dirham (~30 cents) each way and were great fun to ride across. The area surrounding the creek was amazing and nothing like the parts of Dubai that I’d been secluded to until now. The buildings were shorter and older, the streets narrower and there was pedestrian traffic everywhere. This is a stark contrast to the audacious buildings and massive highways of the rest of Dubai where a few walkers are corralled by taxis carting most people around.

Near the creek, we visited the Gold Souq (market), a t-shaped string of shops filled with gold and silver jewelry, woven rugs, shawls and fake designer bags. This, too, was a stark contrast to the glitzy retail stores and fancy mall I visited last week. The only thing I really considered purchasing was the cold water that men were carrying around on trays. It was really incredibly hot – I sweat buckets just standing still!

My favorite, beloved pizza from my college days, Papajohn’s, recently popped up in Dubai. Friday night, Diane and I ordered it to enjoy in my room while we got ready to go out to the Burj (7-star hotel) for drinks. Suddenly we realized the number of times we’d had Papajohn’s pizza in our dorm rooms before going over to the “Burge” dorm in Iowa City…it was such a coincidence and striking contrast of the somewhat dumpy old Burge dorm at Iowa to the fancy Burj hotel in Dubai…we got a good laugh out of it.

Drinks at the Burj

On Saturday Diane, two friends from my team and I drove the ~90 minute trek to Abu Dhabi in our itsy bitsy lipstick red Toyota. Abu Dhabi is both an Emirate and a city - the largest and wealthiest in the UAE and the capital of the country. Within the borders of the Abu Dhabi Emirate lays a significant chunk of the oil in the world. Our first destination was the Emirates Palace: once an actual palace and now a beautiful hotel reserved only for royalty. In contrast to most of what you see in the UAE, this place actually gave off an aura of historical significance. It’s egg-shaped golden dome and spotless lobbies were as ostentatious as to be expected, but pretty nonetheless.

Emirates Palace

(The dome from inside)

After the palace, we had lunch at a rotating restaurant on the top floor of the Meridien hotel in the center of town. From this high (and not to mention 360 degree) view, I could see just what a contrast Abu Dhabi was to Dubai. Most of the buildings raise 15-25 stories – none were sky high or growing to almost a kilometer like the new Burj building under construction in Dubai. The streets seemed well-planned and there were a number of parks within sight, not like the 6-lane highways, one way streets and random patches of grass in Dubai. The beachfront was marked by a long boardwalk that seemed open and public rather than blocked off by private hotels like the Dubai beaches I know. Abu Dhabi gave the appearance of real urban planning, which is not something I could say about Dubai.

Abu Dhabi from the sky view

Before leaving town we stopped by the Husn Fort and also drove by the largest mosque I’ve ever seen. Although it’s still under construction, it looks to be incredible. We heard the Muslim call to prayer over loud speakers near the Husn Fort in the center of town. This too was a contrast to Dubai – while you hear regular 5-times daily call in the old part of town, it’s near heard in the modern parts of town where I live and work.

Husn Fort

Mosque on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi

In the end the little red car served us just as well as any bulky SUV and it showed me just how much diversity there can be within a single city and within a country only about the size of the state of South Carolina. Next weekend we’ll be in Cairo, Egypt and I can only imagine how different it will be…

Week 3: It's all relative

2008-06-02T12:13:00.000-07:00

I walked to work this morning at about 7:45 and was sweating to an uncomfortable degree by the time I reached my office – only about ¾ of a mile in total and about half of that in the shade. Wow, it’s hot and getting hotter. It’s about 8 pm as I write this and weather.com says it’s still a muggy 91 degrees. So, I suppose that relative to a sunny August day at around 3 pm and in direct sun, it’s not too bad. But relative to what I’m used to for June 1^st after sundown, it’s hot. That’s the thing though, isn’t it? It’s all relative.

I got to thinking about relativities last week as I walked past the construction site across from my hotel. It was early in the morning and the crew of construction workers was showing up by the busload. I saw a handful of them digging around in the bushes in the median in the street and chuckling in a slightly amused, slightly embarrassed way when they noticed that I was watching. I wondered what in the heck they were up to – elbows deep in bushes - until I saw one of them pull a yellow helmet out of the brush. They’d all hid their helmets in the bushes the night before and were laughing as they dug them out before heading to work! I chuckled too and thought how at ease and comfortable they all seemed. Most of these workers come from Asia (Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, etc), are way from their families most of the year, live in poor housing far from Dubai, and commute over an hour a day to work under the sun and in the dust. People say the reason temperatures in Dubai frequently reach 49 celcius (about 120 Fahrenheit) but rarely reach 50 is because by law the workers get a day off at 50 degrees, so “coincidentally” that doesn’t happen much. Sounds terrible to me. And so I wondered – what must their other alternatives be such that a labor-intensive job in the heat of the desert sounds relatively good? That I don’t know.

This weekend I split my time between Dubai and Fujairah. Weekends in Dubai are Friday and Saturday which is very strange relative to the US, but relative to the Thursday-Friday weekend in Saudi Arabia and Oman…well, at least we get one day of overlap!

On Friday morning I went to the famous Mall of the Emirates, which is a huge shopping mall relative to Iowa’s largest mall in Coralville.

Mall Lobby

Yay for toy stores

It’s also home to “Ski Dubai,” the indoor ski resort I mentioned in Week 1. I didn’t try the skiing just yet, but I did check out the slope. Relative to the monstrous mountains of the Western US, it’s pretty puny. But, relative to the big hill in Wisconsin where I’ve also skied the last 2 years, it actually looks pretty cool. Not too shabby for desert skiing!

Friday afternoon I drove ~2 hours to the other coast of the UAE and for a 1-night stay near Fujairah at the “Sandy Beach Motel.”

Photos crossing to the other coast:

Had I gone there 2 weeks ago, I probably would have thought it was great. But, relative to the 5-star resort in we stayed at in Oman last weekend, this place was a drop in the bucket.

The rooms, pool and beach were nice but sadly some sort of oil spill down the coast left a bunch of blotchy oil spots throughout the water. I walked out of the ocean with a big glob of oil stuck to my leg – disgusting. I even saw one woman with a sticky glob on her head. I was only partly amused in thinking this was a trade off of living in an oil-rich country…

Friday night I sat at the pool bar to have a drink and some dinner. Some old guy across the bar badgered the waiter into letting him give me a drink on his tab despite my repeated refusal. I couldn’t tell what he was saying in Arabic, but it must have been much more abusive that my polite declinations in English because the waiter always gave in to the old guy and not to me. I guess relative to what I’ve experienced in the US and in other places this was, well, normal. Frankly, everywhere I go there is an old guy trying to buy the young girls drinks and some unlucky waiter or waitress stuck in the middle!

Saturday I went scuba diving off Fujairah and it was FANTASTIC, even relative to the dives I’ve done in Hawaii and Puerto Rico. The first dive was to a ship wreck about 90 feet underwater. There was a school of at least a 500 fish hovering around and many other individual fish, as well. The water felt cold as we descended so deep, but I realized as I quickly got used to it that it was not cold at all. It only felt cold relative to the surface water, which felt like a HOT TUB as we came back up. The second dive was really shallow – about 15 feet – over a big wall of rock and coral. We saw tons of fish, eels, 4 turtles and 3 sharks!

Aside from weekend adventures, the work here is going fine. We are working hard but not too hard and the team is getting along great. I guess I would say all relativities aside, so far, so good.

Week 2: Commonalities

2008-05-26T09:30:00.000-07:00

It seems the smell of manure is universal. I’ve been in Dubai exactly 2 weeks now. As I walk to work everyday, I’ve marveled at how clean the city generally is. However, there is this one spot, this one corner, this one freshly potted area that, well, it smells like manure. And not just any manure, but cow manure. It must be the fertilizer that they’ve used on the potting soil in a newly constructed and planted area between the sidewalk and street.

The funny part is this smell of manure got me thinking that this place is not so different than other places I know. I certainly smelled my fair share of a multitude of manure varieties growing up – our farmhouse north of Afton had cow pastures on both sides and we had our own manure spreader to dispose of what we collected from horse stalls. There are other things too, like the hazy dust that seems to blanket Dubai each morning. I’m not sure if it’s just ocean haze or sand that ruffles up from the beach and construction sites, but to me it’s no different than the white cloud of gravel dust that descended on our house each time a car whizzed by.

Inklings of Chicago pop up here too – like when I’m crossing the street. There is an intersection between me and my office that requires me to cross 4 separate sections of street before I’m all the way across. Each time my toe crosses that invisible plane where the sidewalk ends and the street begins I wonder, will that car slow, give me a friendly wave and let me cross? Or will it hit the gas and honk as I narrowly escape death by tire tread? I can never be sure….and it feels just like home! There are also 3 Starbucks within walking distance of my apartment, which is also just like home.

This weekend we made a short trip to Muscat, Oman where we enjoyed a fabulous beach resort and quaint city.

The beach resort was truly great – nice pools, manicured beach, good restaurants, even a lazy river that you could float down from one area of the hotel to the next.

In town, we went to a traditional Omani restaurant where we had a private room, which is the norm when your party includes both women and men. We sat on cushions on the floor and ate off a mat.

The food – meat, fish, curry, bread and rice – was delicious and filling.

We also went to the local “souk” or market where men stood outside their stores and stalls becoming us to buy scarves, shawls, woodworks and silver jewelry.

Both the restaurant staff and the market men looked us up and down as we came and went, surely glad to see that we foreign ladies had at least covered our shoulders (Omani women usually cover their shoulders and hair; some cover their faces too). Where are the commonalities here, you ask? Well, I can think of a million times that an “out-of-towner” walked into a small town and found themselves as the identifiable outsider, welcomed mostly by stares. But both in the Omani streets and Iowa small towns, stares and wondering eyes are always followed by quick friendliness and polite help whenever needed. When I boarded the plane home from Muscat I was the one and only blonde passenger and I could finally relate to my college friend, Paresh, and how he was almost always the only non-white in my circle of friends. I guess a chance to be on the flip side of the coin is the best lesson in empathy one can ask for.

There’s one thing that’s definitely not a commonality: the toilets. When I lived in Spain, I always thought the widespread existence of bidets was just weird. Then I noticed they were pretty common in other parts of Europe, too. In Dubai, there are not so many bidets, but pretty much every bathroom has a little hose connected to the toilet, I presume for “personal cleaning.” So, now I’m wondering – are we Americans the only ones not washing our backsides in the bathroom? Hmm, I’m not sure I want to know the answer, but I suppose time and more global toilet inspections will tell.

Week 1: Contradictions

2008-05-17T05:33:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I got dressed up in a skirt and heels for a 7 course meal with “afternoon tea” at one of the most expensive and swanky hotels in the world. Today I peed outside in a sand dune behind a shack in the desert. After my first (and pretty fabulous) week in Dubai, these types of juxtapositions, contradictions, ironies and irrationalities seem to be the norm. The city itself is somewhat of an anomaly – it’s a fast growing metropolis surrounded by a sea of sand. It appears western in so many ways – the architecture, the growing infrastructure, the commerce, the brands and chains, the lifestyle – yet it is indeed in a Muslim city in a Middle Eastern country. So, what’s up with that?

From what I can tell, much of the Dubai way of life comes from its very diverse population. Only a small portion of the people living here are local “Emiratis” (native to the United Arab Emirates or “UAE”) and in daily interactions, you don’t come across many Emiratis. Most construction and service workers appear to be East Asian – Indian, Pakistani, Indonesian, Malaysian, Nepali, Phillipino, etc. Business folks are often western – many Europeans and some Americans and Canadians. There are also many Lebanese and some Saudis, plus some South Africans, Australians and Russians. Emiratis, however, tend to hold senior positions and are the driving force behind the gargantuan push to develop this city right into the forefront of the world.

Speaking of development – the amount of construction going on here is seriously incredible. Everywhere you look there is a new skyscraper or hotel and another being built right next to it. While I was pausing at one stoplight, I counted 15 cranes in site. I’m not convinced that the rate of construction is healthy – who will fill the doubled amount of residential, office and hotel space in the next year or two? But, I’m not in charge here, a powerful, royal blooded Emirati Sheik is.

Along with the new and shiny residences in Dubai comes a surprisingly high cost of living. Restaurants, cabs, clubs, groceries, etc. don’t come with the “developing country discount” Americans often expect, but then again, Dubai is different. This high cost of living draws hard lines among the different social classes. The immigrant workers I mentioned above rarely afford to live in Dubai itself; instead, they commute ~2 hours each way from the neighboring Emirate, Sharjah.

Fortunately for me, my commute to the office is a 10 minute taxi to our formal office at the Dubai International Finance Center or a 10 minute walk to our alternate office overlooking the beach. Other than the freakishly hot weather, it hasn’t been that big of a change. I wear western clothes including shorts and a bikini on the weekend.

I lived in a serviced apartment (that means I have my own kitchen and laundry, but they still come in and make my bed for me everyday).

I haven’t run into a single person who couldn’t converse with me in English and the food selections I’ve found near my apartment and the office is similar to any sizable city in the US. If anything, I’ve already gotten to do a couple of cool things that I couldn’t do back home, like swim in HOT ocean water (think warm bath) and drive dune buggies across the desert.

Next week, I think I’ll try the indoor ski resort for a break from the sun. I mean, that’s what you’d expect in the desert, right?