#36: The 75-Year Flood (Part I)

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is a relatively new country as far as the rest of the world is concerned.  Situated on the Arabian Peninsula directly across the Persian Gulf from Iran, its modern fortune arose from beneath its own desert floor in the form of oil and gas.  UAE’s initial ruler quickly reinvested much of the crude profits back into the country, resulting in a very hastily built collection of cities that seemingly sprouted up overnight.  The UAE oasis with the largest population (and ego) is Dubai, which stopped caring about what the rest of the world thought was modest and satisfactory around the same time its ocean of black gold was discovered.  And while the high-rise luxury infrastructure in Dubai may have been built with oil money, it is maintained with what is harshly yet adequately known as “f—k you money”; so named because if you have it, that’s exactly what you can say to anybody who tries to tell you what to do with it.  Following the doctrine of money equating to power, economic powerhouses from all over the world have flocked to Dubai in recent years to be part of the wealthy in-crowd.  It should come as no surprise to anyone that this includes politicians.  Unfortunately it also brings nefarious characters looking to take advantage of the prosperity.  That is where my team comes in.

I couldn’t even get out of Dubai International Airport without being exposed to the lifestyle.  Almost all of the rideshare cars in the city are $45,000 sedans or $85,000 sport utility vehicles.  Seeing a $300,000 car driving down the road is a regular occurrence that doesn’t even turn heads.

What caught my attention the most weren’t the luxury cars, but the entertaining way that the businesses had two signs above each storefront: Arabic and English.  Even more intriguing was the lack of rhyme or reason for how they chose to complete the translation.  Proper nouns are often translated letter for letter from English, which doesn’t always work because the two alphabets are not the same.  Other times, the whole Arabic word is used in place of its English equivalent.  My favorite of the examples below is KFC, which is roughly translated as “Kintaki Dajaj”.  They obviously did their best to find a way to spell “Kentucky” with Arabic letters, but then they used the full Arabic word for chicken rather than the literal spelling which would be “Tshikin”. 

This was my first time staying in a 5-star hotel, which I must admit was a fairly underwhelming experience.  I am the type of traveler who uses hotels for little more than sleeping and showering.  Most of the deluxe services were things I did not need.  The constant hovering of the staff was a nuisance more than a novelty.  The formality of the situation was relentlessly awkward.  If it were my own money I would have just saved it and stayed at a typical establishment.  The room was nice though. 

In my usual fashion, I threw my luggage in the room and immediately set out to get some work done and see the sights.  In terms of overall square footage, the Dubai Mall is the largest shopping mall in the world.  The point of contention is that not all of it is technically retail space, which makes it the second largest mall by some calculations.  Either way, one cannot argue how needlessly grandiose the place is.  I didn’t travel across the globe to go shopping, so I therefore only saw a fraction of the mall but I couldn’t help but notice it has its own full-sized ice rink.

The real reason we were in the mall was because it contains one of the entrances to the Burj Khalifa.  At just over 2,716 feet, “The Burj” is the tallest building in the world.  The freestanding structure is 160 stories in height, with the 148^th floor observation deck being the highest publicly accessible area.

Certainly not as tall as the Burj but just as eye-catching is the Museum of the Future.  The highly complex building design is that of a torus, which is a fancy way of saying it is shaped [roughly] like a donut.  The windows are openings in the steel façade which are actually giant Arabic symbols forming quotes from the ruler of Dubai.  Out of the thousand or so visitors in the building, I felt like the only one who noticed the irony of the world’s most over-the-top and energy-inefficient country hosting a museum professing the importance of sustainability and mindfulness. 

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In Part II of this blog, we will continue exploring some of the tourist sites in Dubai before the trip gets interrupted by an unprecedented event that made headlines all over the world…