“I want to go to — what’s that hot country with a lot of money? Dubai.”
Grandmaster Flash
I didn’t necessarily have any great desire to go to Dubai. Namely because, even in the photos it just looks hot, and I have a strong aversion to the heat. It also just seemed like a lot of expensive malls in the desert. But on Christmas Day a mistake fare from Etihad Airlines had popped up — $200 roundtrip — that I bought on a whim, thinking surely they’ll cancel it. But they honored it, so it was off to Dubai and Abu Dhabi.
It was hot. But some places, like New Orleans, would feel silly if they were cold, and Dubai is like that. Camels walking through the snow would seem off. And there are a lot of malls, including the comically huge Dubai Mall, which has its own artificial mountain for skiing (yes, it did seem kind of silly in the desert), an aquarium, and so much space that there are doubles of some stores because they are so far apart from each other. But you have to stop into the malls every so often, because it’s very hot in Dubai. It’s definitely an experience. I stopped into fancy date shops, I had camel milk at a coffee shop in the food court, and I walked through the shoe section of a department store — just the shoe section — that was bigger than entire stores in the U.S.
But Dubai is more than malls. The highlight of the trip was a late-night tour the Little India neighborhood in Bur Dubai (Old Dubai), where we snacked on chutney-filled puris, watched them make massive dosas in a restaurant kitchen, drank fresh-pressed sugarcane juice, and ate jalebi straight from the fryer. We washed it down with cold kulfi, the best way to end the tour, because it’s very hot in Dubai.
On other days, because it was a solo trip, I would wander around, taking a ferry across the Dubai Creek to check out the spices in the souks, or heading to the top of Bhurj Khalifa, because you can’t go to Dubai and not see the view from the tallest building in the world (sand for miles). I also went on a desert safari where we learned about the area, saw a falconry demonstration, saw some of the Sheikh’s outrageously expensive camels (some cost millions), rode cheaper camels, and ended the night eating even cheaper camel stew and smoking hookah with a group of strangers who became friends, including a woman who claimed she worked for a mysterious government organization and was training the young man she was with.
At the end of the trip I was flying out from Abu Dhabi and so, because I had saved so much money on the flight, I treated myself to the nicest hotel I’ve ever stayed at (just about everything in Dubai and Abu Dhabi was the nicest version of it I had ever seen, from the plane to the airport to even the juice). I toured the blindingly white Sheikh Zayed Mosque, took a boat ride, and ordered more delicious juice (I still can’t get over how good the juice was) from room service while I watched The Weakest Link (it seemed to be on 24-7 during the trip). And then it was time to head back home because, as I found out, Dubai and Abu Dhabi are very hot.
