Category: 
So I put my hands up, they’re playing my song, and the butterflies fly away
Noddin’ my head like ‘Yeah’
Movin’ my hips like ‘Yeah’
And I got my hands up, they’re playing my song and I know I’m going to be ok
It’s a Party in the…
It’s a Party in the…
UAE. Wait, that’s not what Miley Cyrus is saying?
I had to fly halfway around the world, to a city/state that just barely allows holding hands between a man and wife in public, to hear a song about listening to Jay-Z and Britney Spears in a club (in the U.S.) and realizing everything would be okay. Irony at its finest. Oh, did I mention that I heard this song in a taxi on the way home from a bar…a bar that had a Statue of Liberty replica next to a palm tree and Corona beer signs? Is the cognitive dissonance hurting your brain yet?
Going into the residency, I had several pre-conceived notions about Dubai. The “City of Gold”, “The Las Vegas of the Middle East”, “The world’s Biggest, Tallest, and Best of” everything…that’s the PR spin that you get when you do the minimum amount of research. A city founded on opulence and ego, trying to diversify from oil money to being a tourist destination and the financial capital of the Middle East.
Rather than try and learn everything about Dubai before I got there, I purposefully took the ignorant path, to really “feel” what Dubai was like before trying to understand what I was seeing. Over a week later, it’s Miley Cyrus that I remember first.
Hearing that song now that I’m back in the U.S. brings back all of the cognitive dissonance I felt upon arriving at the Dubai Airport. Getting off the plane, the level of security was seemingly non-existent. No strip searches for drugs, no machine-gun-laden security, no nothing. I walked through passport control without a single word to anyone outside of the Duke cohort. Approved: 30 day tourist visa. The security checkpoint as I left Wal-Mart this afternoon felt more rigorous.
As the residency continued, I started to get this crazy feeling that I was considered nothing more than a walking ATM, and everyone would see to it that there were no obstacles to separating me from my money. From the alumni panel, to the guest speakers, the hotel staff…everyone had this frankness about themselves that everything is okay as long as you have money. Want to live in Dubai? You have 30 days to find a job (or get out). Want to drink in Dubai? It’ll cost you $15-$20 per drink, but it can be done. Need to buy a pair of jeans or a shirt? Sure, no problem, we’ve got every designer you’ve never heard of! Want to rent a sports car? Take your pick from any of the Ferrari’s parked in front of the hotel.
But what if you don’t have money? That was the question that started to bother me a few days into the residency. Less than 24 hours after I arrived, I saw part of the answer to that question during the ‘pitstop’ to deflate the tires before dune bashing. 20km outside the city, there’s a whole other side to Dubai that’s not quite the “City of Gold”. Dubai has flourished on the backs of migrant workers, but the wealth certainly isn’t being distributed equally.
There is a middle class in Dubai, it doesn’t really visit places like the hotel we were in but I can assure you that they are there. People in the lower income bracket have a miserable existence, this more true of Dubai than the other Emirates. Then again, the poor are not treated well anywhere.
Yeah, I realize there’s got to be some middle ground that I didn’t see. My reaction is more to the disparity between what I saw outside the hotel and the tourist places I visited vs. the workers inside the hotel and the Indian supermarket.
I can’t remember who was telling me this, but the hearsay is that every scotch I bought at the Halloween party was more than the bartenders daily salary. To me, it was a bit expensive as compared to the U.S., but certainly wasn’t going to keep me from paying my mortgage; to him, what can it be like to see this type of behavior day-in and day-out?
I’m going to try and sort some of this out for my next post…but of course, Ian has to jump in and steal my production function analogy before I can get to it…