OK, so I’m back from Dubai. We’d a great time although to be honest we didn’t do much apart from eat, sleep and shop. So, we could have stayed at home really. The heat and humidity made it very difficult do do much outdoors other than lounge around by the pool or on the beach so most of the plans we’d made for desert excursions and what-not went out the window.

That said, we did see enough of Dubai to get some kind of impression of the place and it’s a weird one. Obviously most of my preconceptions didn’t hold up: most of the local people we met and spoke to were very nice and hardly any of the taxi drivers brought us out to the desert to behead us. Then again, most of the people we met and spoke to weren’t actually from Dubai or even Arabs; the majority of people working in the service and tourism sector seem to be from the Far East – Pakistan, India, Thailand, China and so on, with a handful of Westerners thrown in.

When you’re walking around the malls though, you do come across a lot of Arab shoppers and it’s hard to reconcile the traditional garb – thobe and keffiyeh for the men and full hijab for the women – with the mobile phones, designer sunglasses, handbags, shoes and exotic lingerie that they were variously carrying or perusing. I know that Dubai and the UAE in general is the most westernised of the Arab nations but it is kind of ironic that the largest shopping mall outside of the United States of America should be in an Islamic nation, where Western notions of consumerism and materialism are apparently anathema.

But I guess that’s just another of my preconceptions blown.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 2nd, 2006 at 1:31 pm and is filed under Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.