Thinking Allowed: Dates and Pearls

Our journey from Europe to Asia brought us through the Middle East. Never having been to Dubai we decided to spend a few days to break up our long journey and explore a new spot. We were greeted with hot powerful sunshine just like in the pictures. Our accommodation, with its two bedrooms and kitchen, felt like luxury after our months in Japan and two weeks in Taiwanese hostels. This is a country with space. Everything in Dubai is grandiose in a way we found entertaining: biggest buildings, largest fountains, fanciest resorts, largest frame, biggest waterparks, largest mall, hottest sun…. People here dream big.

The girls and I went to a small museum in old Dubai by the river as we were interested in learning about the local perfume production and some local history. Turns out the museum is actually 17 buildings housing museums on different aspects of UAE culture and history. Each building was well staffed with guards and attendants to give us private tours and guide us to the next spot. I figured we could skip over buildings or sections we weren’t interested in but every time we tried a guard would come inform us we had missed a part or would be standing at the exit to walk us to the next building. We stayed way longer than we expected and made it through 10 buildings before managing to sneak away both impressed and exhausted by the span of the museum. We did come away with a good sense of UAE history though with our favourite parts being the ones about making perfume, diving for pearls, local crafts and textiles, and the evolution of Dubai. It is crazy to think that the older generation of today, now living luxurious lives in skyscrapers, were raised swimming in the creek, subsisting off of dates, fish and camels milk and getting by on an economy of pearl harvesting and trade. Sometimes dreaming big really works out well!

We don’t like malls but decided we needed to visit Dubais largest mall and fountain. Lucky for us, right where we entered the mall was a big, mostly English, bookstore and our explorations of the mall ended up being two hours perusing books. We perused numerous souks which felt pretty touristy. Our favourite was the gold souk which had such an astounding display of glittering objects we were blinded with awe.

We all decided we were happy to be staying in the older part of town with its thriving community of Indian migrant workers and shops of Indian fashion and food rather than the fancier shinier version of Dubai. We expected to enjoy a middle eastern diet but instead indulged in Indian and Nepali food and beverage in excess. Determined to taste local cuisine I went out on a date buying excursion. The kids don’t like dates but agreed that the local dates were actually pretty good. They especially liked the dates covered in chocolate with an almond in the middle. Aurora though still insists that the date would have been better with just the almond and chocolate or even just the almond, which felt like an apt analogy for how we felt about our brief stay in Dubai.