The Bonus

From Banks:

The trip to Bangladesh featured a stop in the Middle East. Our layover was in Dubai, the western-style city in the United Arab Emirates on the Persian Gulf. We disembarked from our 14-hour flight from Houston only to be herded into a long line where a high-speed temperature reader efficiently calculated the presence of a fever for all 280 passengers.

After some back and forth traversing throughout the expansive and altogether empty Dubai International Airport, the three of us decided that our five-hour layover provided ample time to venture into the much romanticized city of Dubai.

In our first of many opportunities to negotiate for a price, we haggled with a Syrian cab driver for the price of a three-hour tour of Dubai. He agreed after grimaces were exchanged from both sides and off we went, speeding from the airport into the foggy, black night. The city rose up from the fog with bright fluorescent strength - blue and white lights piercing the fog and outlining a city that deserved a world far more advanced and futuristic than ours. Dubai is a city that is well beyond its time. A veritable heaven for architects, who seemingly have received complete autonomy in every sense, Dubai’s skyline seems to expand forever, confirming not only the desire by the Emirates government to be considered western and advanced, but also the seemingly unlimited cash reserves that have funded such 21st century development. The mantra for Dubai before the global financial crisis seems to have been “build it and they will come”. However, all around the city, skyscrapers and towering apartment complexes rose into the night sky, conspicuously empty and dark – a foreboding sign of a city built literally and figuratively on unstable sand.

Dubai is eerily empty of people and fastidiously clean from any sort of trash. Our cab driver, a mid-aged man who had the habit of winking at us whenever we asked him a question, laughed a smokers’ laugh when we brought up this observation and said that the fine for littering was $125 U.S. dollars. Such a law seemed to be a fine example of the paradox of Dubai. A strong desire for western credibility is equally counterbalanced by the tradition and rigidity of the Muslim world. To see construction workers in turbans scaling large skeletal structures in an effort to westernize their city was a visible contradiction from my American perspective.

We saw Burj Al-Arab, the sail-shaped 7-star hotel that climbs from the ocean breakers off the coast of Dubai. We visited other hotels like the Atlantis, and ventured out into the water on a man-made, palm-frond shaped island. It contained hotels, villas, and cottages, all in various stages of development and occupation. We drove through the financial district and the tech-center, marveling at the amount of energy needed to power the city. We headed to a shopping mall that included an in-door ski resort and laughed at the ridiculousness. We strolled through the high-end beach front shops that were mostly populated with western faces. We saw Starbucks written in both English and Arabic and found western culture saturating almost every part of Dubai.

The experience was a whirlwind – an entire city in three hours. All of my photos are blurred from the backseat of the cab, signifying the speed with which we traveled around the city. Later in the night, we laughed and marveled at how absurd the whole experience was. It was too fast and too fanciful to be real – an out-of-body adventure for sure. But that is only the beginning. Dubai set up the perfect contrast for our next destination.