1.
We had been in the city for only a matter of hours but had already dropped our bags at the hotel and made it out to find something good to eat. I try not to eat on planes. If I can, I grab something in the lounge prior to boarding. It was an overnight flight, so skipping the in-flight meals was easy, but the eight-hour flight and the four-hour time difference meant that it was afternoon for my body even if it was early morning in Dubai. I was hungry, but that’s exactly how I like to arrive at a new place.
Our hotel was in a bit of a no-man's land between the Dubai Creek and two intersecting highways. The most notable things about the area being the Ancient Egyptian-themed shopping mall, adjacent to our similarly-themed hotel, and the collection of hospitals and clinics scattered around the area, all part of the Dubai Healthcare City. This part of town isn’t especially compelling, but it does have a couple of nice hotels and is close to the northern parts of the city, where I wanted to spend the first few days of the trip exploring.
A short Uber ride from our hotel took us to the Bur Dubai, to a southern Indian restaurant that I had marked on my Google maps. There, the star of the show was the Kerala beef stir-fry, eaten with flaky roti, and a plate of biryani on the side, all washed down with masala chai.
After the meal, I walked for a bit, taking some pictures of the area around the restaurant.
That evening, we headed to Deira on the north side of Dubai Creek for dinner at a Syrian restaurant. After a meal of Levantine favorites – hummus, tabouli, an assortment of grilled meat, an eggplant dip like baba ghanoush but with added tahini - we strolled down Al Rigga Road, which runs through the heart of Deira. The number of fliers strewn on the ground advertising sex workers might give the impression that Dubai is a city of lonely migrant men, but the street was packed with families and groups of women, as well.
On another night, we returned to Deira for dinner in one of the city’s oldest Persian restaurants and then strolled along the creek for a bit, taking note of all the floating restaurants and dhows hawking dinner cruises.
2.
On a different morning we started with a traditional breakfast at one of the city's heritage restaurants that specialize in Emirati and Arabic breakfasts. From there we walked through the historic district of old Dubai, to the spice souk on the south side of the creek and then crossed over to Deira side by water taxi. In Deira we walked through the gold souk, eying the bling, before returning to the hotel to take shelter from the midday heat.
Dubai’s “old town” is definitely touristy, but it’s worth a stroll and it happens to be surrounded by the parts of Dubai that feel most like a city. Bur Dubai on the south side of the creek and Deira on the north are not what most people think of when they think of Dubai. They’re more low-slung apartment blocks than glitzy high rises, more urban than sprawl, and maybe most importantly, more south Asian than Arab, a reflection of the large immigrant population.
That large immigrant population is one of the reasons that the Emirates and the whole Gulf region have a taint about them. It has become a bit of an internet meme to dismiss Dubai and Qatar as having been “built by slaves.” I won’t try to whitewash Dubai, but I’m not convinced that most of this sort of flippant criticism is motivated by any real interest in labor rights or any deep regard for the workers who come to the Gulf. A lot of it is motivated by the desire to make the Gulf into bad guys, because that’s what our current geopolitics demands. And here’s the thing: I get it. These countries are absolute monarchies, with questionable records on human rights.
I’ve spent the past fifteen years studying and working in economics, all of that time focused on the developing world. I can admit that I’ve always had a certain ill will for the Gulf, or at least for their rulers. It’s not fair that this group of people just happened to find oil under their feet, taking the region from dusty backwater to globally important and immensely wealthy, while millions of people in other parts of the world live lives of desperate and grinding poverty.
I promise that I’m not here trying to defend Dubai. It is true that about 16% of the labor force live in collective accommodations that are less than ideal. It’s true that workers in Dubai often have their passports confiscated and held as leverage by employers. And it’s true that wages for some highly skilled work, like software engineering, can be quite low because of the vast supply of qualified engineers willing to come to Dubai.
At my first job out of grad school, I worked on international labor rights issues. My time in that role was brief, but I do retain from it an understanding that claims need to be specific to be meaningful, to be actionable. I am reminded of the case of Mike Daisy, the monologist whose The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs made quite a stir about a decade ago with its criticism of working conditions at the Chinese factories where Apple products are made. Problem was, the most dramatic claims made in the show turned out to be fabrications. Daisy’s defense was that he’s not a journalist and he was dramatizing certain elements to make a larger artistic statement.
What I took away from my time working on labor issues is that this kind of impressionistic view is nearly worthless.
3.
The other common dismissal of Dubai is that it’s not a real city. It’s fake. It developed too quickly. It’s sprawling and overbuilt. It’s artificial and lacks culture. It’s a big, dumb, glitzy facsimile of what a real, well-planned city ought to be. If you go on YouTube, you can find a bunch of videos making these arguments.
The funny thing about these videos is that they all couch themselves in the language of this is what nobody will tell you about Dubai or here is the unpopular opinion about Dubai. Meanwhile, there are scores of these videos criticizing the place for the exact same set of reasons and they all have many more likes and agreeable comments than dislikes or criticisms.
There are many places in the world that are everything Dubai is not. Places with long, rich historical and cultural traditions, places that are well-planned, places where almost everyone is either paid a decent wage or covered by a well-functioning social safety net and where workers’ rights are for the most part respected. Here's the thing about those places, they tend to be very difficult to get into.
Countries like Canada, Australia, the Nordics, they tightly control immigration to make sure that only the highest-skilled and best-educated migrants make it in. There’s much to praise about those systems, but such systems remain presentable partially by virtue of whom they exclude. The majority of migrant workers who end up in Dubai quite simply would not be allowed to move to any of those places. I point this out not to exonerate Dubai, but simply to mention what makes it a unique place.
Again, I’m not here to carry water for the Emiratis. This post is about travel, not about labor rights or immigration policy. From the perspective of a traveler, Dubai, especially old Dubai, has much to offer precisely because of its migrant communities. That’s the long and the short of it.
If you tell me that much of Dubai is a giant mirage rising from the desert, I may agree. If you tell me that it has serious human rights concerns, I will definitely agree. But don’t tell me that Dubai is not a “real” city. If you tell me that Dubai is not a real city, it can only be because you’ve never been there or because you went there and relegated yourself to the mirage.