Goodbye, Dubai

Samira is a tall, attractive Afghan-American woman of 40, as typical as anyone of the constant influx of people to Dubai. We’re struggling to make ourselves heard over the deafening international thump-thump music at Buddha Bar, the restaurant of the moment where we’re having dinner with my friend Karl.

Samira likes Dubai. I loathe it. I’ve visited briefly 13 times, on the way to or from Kabul, never for more than a week, beginning in 2002. While it has expanded enormously over that time, it has also become ever more traffic-choked and homogenous. And although an article touting Dubai’s “fabulousness” appears in a reputable American publication almost weekly these days, the truth is that it’s a bad place that people from worse places think is a good place.

The hotels are, after all, packed with vacationers. If you are from a small city in Russia, or the eastern part of Germany, a third-rate hotel on the beach in Dubai is probably the best place you can imagine. Posh décor! All-you-can-eat buffets! (The smoked fish is often outstanding.) A beach in the hot sun! (Well, there is a cement plant next door, but only part of it shows over the big fence.) A bathtub-warm sea! (Even if it has a visibility of about one foot, and no discernable marine life.)

If you like to vacation in Las Vegas and enjoy the climate in Phoenix or Houston, Dubai might be the place for you. It joins the worst of urbanism with the worst of the suburbs: sterile towers, no parkland, traffic murderously dangerous to pedestrians, full of chain stores and restaurants galore. About the only thing in its favor is ethnic diversity. But I dislike the people–a few friends aside–as much as the built environment.

Who are the worst? It could be the fawning, passive-aggressive politeness of the Filipinos who fill many service positions here. They are probably homesick and exploited and behind the murmured “No” to your request is a burning hatred of what they do and where they are. Or the pedantic nature of the Indians higher up on the hospitality ladder. They relish explaining why you cannot have a cappuccino in the dining room with your dinner, but only in the lobby bar. (The Russians are probably worse on this count: A return to their repressed inner commissar gives a peculiar zest to their “No.”)

It could be the many Emirati men, who treat the Filipinos and Indians like dirt. Or the overstuffed Germans working as engineers and architects, who take a certain relish in recounting how young Arab men, on finding out they are German, will explain how much they admire Hitler. (“Of course I tell them that this is horrible, but if Israel continues to behave in such a brutal way .  .  . “)

The Europeans are here for a degree of responsibility or level of earnings they can’t find in their no-employment economies, but they also lack the refinement and cultural awareness that is the saving grace of most Europeans’ bad politics. They are the kind of Europeans who don’t mind eating imported processed food and living in jerry-built, air-conditioned towers.

Not everyone who comes here for business reasons likes it. Karl has spent years in Saudi Arabia and Kabul, but his home is Washington, and he shares my interest in places with character and texture.

“They keep telling me if I go here or there,” he says, “I’ll see the really exciting side of Dubai. But whenever I get there, it’s like the restaurant we were at last night. Dead.”

That was an intriguingly tacky Russian nightclub with very inexpensive blinis with red caviar. It had a floor show featuring a band and a half-dozen well-trained dancers of both sexes; but it was only half-full, and the other customers were a stolid lot–a mix of Russians, Arabs, and who-knows-what who didn’t seem to be having a great time. No sense of revelry. I hoped the dancers weren’t among the many immigrants from low-wage economies in a sort of debt slavery to those who brought them here. Every day the newspapers report the rescue of some woman in this predicament.

Buddha Bar doesn’t have a sense of revelry, either–despite its reputation as the most happening restaurant in Dubai, and despite a punishingly loud sound system. But Dubai is about business, not fun. We were talking business, too. I was impressed to learn that Samira not only has an undergrad degree in finance, but is an M.D. Karl has two degrees in finance and did a stint at the World Bank. Everybody around us looked as though they had studied some crushingly boring stuff at one point or another–except for a petite Emirati couple in local dress, he all in white, she all in black.

But then, you have to have paid your dues to afford the prices at Buddha Bar: the $15 appetizers, $100 sushi platters, $11 martinis. The food, though fresh and tasty, is not on a level with comparably priced restaurants in New York or Rome or Paris. It lacks finesse. Here, too, the interstitial nature of Dubai comes through: The waiter forgot one of our orders. This is absolutely normal in cheap places in Dubai–it’s an attention deficit disorder thing that is also pervasive in the Third World–but I didn’t expect to find it at these prices.

One thing Dubai has going for it is energy. As I left the plane that brought me from JFK, and followed the extremely long series of halls and escalators to Passport Control, I realized that my usual position in the front of the crowd was being challenged, and then taken, by dozens of young men in shalwar kameez striding at a jogging pace past me.

In Europe, where people are leisurely, and in the United States, where they are fat, I’m usually one of the first from my plane to reach Passport Control. Not here. My first thought was that we needed more people like the running men in shalwar kameez in America. It was 8 P.M., and they had places to go and business to do. But they may be here because it’s hard for a Pakistani or Yemeni or Bangladeshi man, a young Muslim man, to get a work visa for the United States. And I’m not prepared to argue that this is a bad thing. While I was in the air, news of an airport bombing ran across the screen.

After the Russian nightclub, there’s a long cab ride back to my hotel in Sharjah. It’s 3 in the morning and, finally, the road is almost free of traffic. Sharjah is the next Emirate down, and I’m staying at a four-star hotel there because it’s about $100 cheaper than it would be at my usual haunt, the Dubai Marine Beach Hotel. When I started coming here the five-star hotels were a bargain, $120 or so, but those days are long gone. The downside of Sharjah is the traffic-choked drive to Dubai, plus it’s a dry Emirate. If you have to have a beer with lunch, it’s not the place for you.

Sharjah is at about the level of development Dubai was when I first started coming here, with more local businesses than chain stores. A whole row of coffee roasters intrigues me, but I know that if I go for a daytime visit the traffic will be a nightmare. The average Sharjah resident who commutes to work in Dubai spends an hour-and-a-half in each direction.

The next day, I swim laps in the 18-meter pool for 45 minutes and only three people interrupt my solitude, each taking a five-minute dip. The crowds, and the kids, are in the free-form beachside pool. Many of the guests at the hotel are Arab–perhaps because the absence of alcohol is no problem for them, or because they’re used to the hundred-degree temperatures and 90 percent humidity of the Gulf summer. Two pretty girls speaking refined-sounding Arabic (I can’t tell from where) walk past me to the beach. I wonder if they know how to swim; that’s my acid test for Third Worldism. Even the elites in Third World countries like Afghanistan can’t swim. They pass, barely, doggy-paddling side by side.

Then I have a perfectly decent chicken tikka sandwich and a chocolate milkshake at the beach bar and take the first of the day’s two trying cab rides. This was just to the Sharjah Souk a few miles away, but Sharjah’s Union Taxi Co. is staffed almost exclusively by savage-looking bearded gentlemen who speak only Urdu, or some mountain dialect of Arabic. Or so they say. Running up the meter out of linguistic confusion is another tactic. This driver is in the Urdu group; he understands some Farsi and Arabic but deposits me near a row of squalid downtown shops. A series of consultations with pedestrians lead us to the right road, but he misses the exit, clearly marked in English and Arabic, Souk Merkezi. But then, he might be illiterate.

I’ve been told that the Central Souk is the cheapest place to buy Kashmiri embroidered clothes, and they are about half the Dubai shopping mall price. The shopkeepers are from Kashmir and some have a scary jihadi look. Some seem rather desperate: There are few shoppers. Upstairs are some Afghan shops, including one with blue Herati glass.

I poke my head in and say, “Khub asteen?” (You’re good?–the universal Afghan greeting.) The shopkeeper breaks into a broad smile and invites me in, but I’m trying to get to Buddha Bar on time so I have to decline.

The next cab is even worse. I turn down the first three wild and woolly drivers, none of whom knows where Dubai Marina is. (This is like not knowing where Georgetown is in Washington, or where the Upper East Side is in New York.) Finally, I resign myself to a bad time and get in with another fellow who doesn’t know, either.

He speaks Arabic. I can say that I want to go somewhere in Arabic and remember how to say “turn left,” “turn right,” “straight ahead,” “here” and “there,” but I can’t summon “near,” “far,” or “faster.” You don’t normally want to tell a Dubai cabbie to go faster, but this one is an exception. Although Dubai itself is 30 minutes away without traffic, he hugs the right lane, apparently fearing to stray too far from Sharjah. After 40 minutes I put an end to his misery and get out at a shopping center. A Dubai cab pulls up and the Indian driver speaks good English and knows where I’m going.

The next day, it takes only 20 minutes to go from my hotel to Dubai’s Terminal Two, a decidedly downscale airport some distance from Terminal One. The flights to the dicey places leave from here: Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq. But the terminal has been slowly upgrading over the years, and now the Duty Free is pretty comprehensive. I usually buy last-minute gifts for Afghan friends here, including liquor, which is no longer sold even to foreigners in Kabul.

“Are you going to Baghdad?” the Duty Free clerk asks, and I feel that I’ve qualified for a promotion of sorts. The flights to Kabul and Baghdad leave around the same time, but I can usually tell the Baghdad passengers apart. They are harder. None of the crunchy/Euro/NGO types you see in the Kabul line, and no families. The men are big and silent and usually American. They make no attempt to dress inconspicuously, I assume, because many of them will be carrying guns. This time there are more women–Iraqi women–than I can recall seeing before, which might be a good sign.

I can’t decide if being thought to be Baghdad-bound is a good thing or not.

Ann Marlowe is the author, most recently, of The Book of Trouble: A Romance.