Dubai - Las Vegas of the Middle East

Burj Khalifa

     After spending six weeks in Oman, learning and understanding the culture that makes this place so unique, it was nice to get out of the country, for a bit, to experience something new. Going from Muscat to Dubai could not have been a bigger adjustment. Some part of me thinks that I actually experienced more culture shock from this situation than coming from New York to Oman.

      As I rode in the bus, from Sharja International Airport, towards Dubai, I looked around at the speckled groupings of tall, very tall, and the tallest buildings that make the region so famous. It seemed as though each one of these mini cities carries with it its own theme. There is an education city that consists of different colleges and educational institutions and there is a media city that holds all the media outlets, and there are others like this. The Mall of Dubai was this massive place that is at least five times the size of any mall I have ever been to. There are seemingly endless amounts of stores filled with all different kinds of expensive merchandise and it also incorporates various modes of entertainment, besides enough shopping to keep you busy and broke for years, such as an ice-skating rink and an aquarium.. The Mall of the Emirates has its “Ski Dubai” attraction, which is not just a small fake mountain for people to ski on, but also an entire ski resort. It had restaurants and ski shops that, all put together, makes a person actually feel like they are in a ski lodge. As you are leaving these places, scratching your head as to how anyone can afford any of this, you then see some of the nicest cars you will ever see parked out front, and your question is answered.

     Dubai is not like most of its Gulf brethren in that it is not gifted with all of the natural resources that Abu Dhabi, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are blessed with. This makes all of the glamorous and “larger than life” infrastructure a very respectable achievement because the government had to generate all of that revenue from virtually nothing. They created an environment that was friendly to foreign investment in a way not many, if any, places in the region have been capable of doing. The financial crisis has hit the place hard and evidence of that is easy to see, however, the lavish infrastructure still attracts wealth from all over the Gulf and the world to come, invest, and have a good time.

     Many people consider Dubai to be a cultureless wasteland where good old traditions have been thrown to the wind in order to make way for an unwelcome amount of glitz and glamour. To me Dubai was semi successful experiment on what a state, with no natural resources, can do if it really puts its mind to it. There is a culture there and it is based off the consumerism and glamour that it has become so famous for. When I go home an tell people about Oman it will be about the Sultan’s amazing development achievements and the people’s subsequent love for him, about the lifestyle based around WE and not ME, and about the general friendly disposition that most of the people here carry with them. When I tell people about Dubai it will be about the malls, the rich men that you see in and outside them as well as the hotels, and the large amount of western chains have made their way into the city. This is not an absence of culture, but a culture on its own.