I landed at the newly minted Emirates terminal in Dubai after a thirteen-hour flight from Seattle. I expected this billion-dollar edifice to run as efficiently as Hong Kong, which took twenty minutes to exit. Here, I had to take a ten-minute “people mover” underground train. Disembarking, there was another 20 minutes of meandering through an empty hundred-foot-high glass concourse with pink marble flooring, only there it seemed, to impress. It could easily have doubled as a palace or grand mosque. At its end, three immigration officers emerged to serve three hundred passengers.
From the airport a taxi took me to the Madinat Mina A’Salam, another billion-dollar project in the playboy billionaire district of Jumeirah Beach. Resembling an ancient Arab estate, it had its own canal system to transport guests by mini dhows. Beside it, across a causeway, stood the world’s first 7-star hotel—the Burj Al Arab, its white canvas-like exterior the shape of a sail on a dhow. The lighting on the Burj changed colour every few minutes throughout the night, radiating soft hues of green, powder blue or lilac.
The next day, another taxi drove me to a business meeting by way of Sheik Zayed Road, the strip of six-lane highway on the edge of the Arabian Gulf. This road was deemed to have the greatest number of skyscrapers per kilometre in the world. Along the road, buildings came in every size and shape, from needle shaped structures of jet-black graphite to rotund bodies of shimmering multi-coloured glass seated like bejeweled dowagers awaiting their audience. Fifteen feet above the median, as if floating in the air, ran a rapid transit rail—the stuff of Star Wars.
One Sunday, I sat having brunch with an Emirati friend at the Atlantis, its two-storey aquarium “nurturing a thousand species” and, like most objects in Dubai, the largest in the world. At naively expressing my disappointment at not experiencing the “real” Arabia, my friend threw up his hands in exasperation.
“Will you never appreciate the vision, pain and courage that have lifted us from lice-infested nomads to this, the envy of the world?”
My friend gave me the look of a wise father to an errant son. “If you must see what we were like, go east, young man. To Oman. There you can seek the romanticism you yearn for. But you will be sorely disappointed.”
“As for me,” the Emirati continued, “leave me my aquarium to marvel at and my beautiful six-lane highway that I really don’t need. To you, I donate all my camels and sand, my ten wives and fifty children,” he added jokingly.
I did go to Oman. It had only recently opened up to visitors. On my first day I decided to tour Muscat, the capital. My taxi arrived—a banged-up, dirt-covered antiquated Toyota Corolla sans air conditioning. The driver could barely speak English. I had to communicate by showing him pictures from my guidebook.
Pointing out the ancient souk, a local fish market, the national museum, reputed to be one of the best in the region, my cabbie shook his head in disgust. “Why you go there ? Come. I show you.” According to my map, the man was taking me in the opposite direction. What could I do? Eventually we arrived at his destination. Was it a mosque? A hilltop overlooking the town? No, it was a newly built American shopping centre.
Parking at an angle to deliberately cover two spots, the driver pulled my arm with such enthusiasm, he almost wrenched it out of its socket. “Come, come. I show you best food.” He ushered me to a food court and deposited me in front of …. Kentucky Fried Chicken.
“Now we good as Dubai. Even better.”
