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Published: January 1st 2014
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Eating ice cream with a camel
Shane Dallas (of Travelblog fame) and I at B&R with slightly dishevelled hair I've come to the conclusion that if Dubai impresses you, there must be something fundamentally wrong with you. I find it tedious even to write about the place, as it feels like everything worth mentioning has been already uttered ad nauseum. The way I see it, Dubai is a haven for the ambitious, the haughty, the pretentious, and the plain desperate. Maybe it makes people feel posh by association to prance about in its ridiculous shopping malls. Everything's fake, thus it attracts the fakest of the fake. The city is like a perverted Disneyland, just that it's not mice and ducks that are worshipped, but locust capitalism itself. Just imagine if the Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans and Nepalis who do all the work around there went on strike for a week. Dubai would implode. Façades would crumble and the locals would starve. The expats would be slightly dazed and confused. The chimerical mega-skyscrapers would shrivel like futuristic phalli.
However, the highlight of my brief stay in the Emirates was meeting Shane Dallas. He was wearing a suit and a dazzling golden tie when we met at Internet City metro station, having just had an important Skype-conference. It's the first
time we met, yet he greeted me like an old friend. We took the metro to his place, a nice apartment he shared with his friend Fiona (a.k.a. Comrade Chan), where he changed into the familiar khakis and Indiana Jones-hat, thereby transforming into his alter ego, the Travel Camel. We spent the next few hours together, starting at Bur Dubai to visit Dubai Museum and the nearby souq, before enjoying a great banana-leaf combination lunch at a low-key Indian eatery, and finally hopping over to Deira on a traditional wooden dhow. He was nice enough to accompany me to buy my bus ticket to Oman at an office that took us quite a while to find.
When I came back from Oman, I took Shane up on his offer to stay with him for two nights, as Fiona was about to leave for Ireland. While he spent most of his time in his apartment hotel working on various projects and preparing a speech for the Travel Blog Exchange (TBEX) conference in Dublin, I went out and explored the city just a bit. I checked out Dubai Mall, the world's largest shopping mall. It's best described as a megalomaniacal array
of glass, glitz and concrete, and a veritable monument, a temple to consumerism. The term has never been more fitting. It must be absolutely terrific (or terrifying) to roam around inside on diethyl ether, á la Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. To get to the mall, you must walk from the metro through endless air-conditioned tunnels. It takes about 15 minutes to enter seamlessly into the mall. In fact, one can probably spend their whole life in Dubai without ever leaving the air-conditioned zone and being exposed to the natural (admittedly harsh) elements.
On a lighter side, Shane and I had two fabulous dinners at a nearby Indian vegetarian restaurant. Part of Shane's gimmick is to frequently frequent Baskin-Robbins anywhere he goes. What a coincidence that the ice cream parlour was just around the corner of our restaurant! In hindsight, maybe he planned it like that all along... We enjoyed the sinful treat, all the while chatting about travelling, amongst oher things.
One thing I noticed is that Shane's moniker fits him rather well. Every time he sees a camel, his eyes sparkle, he jumps up and down in joy and tells you what a beautiful specimen
this one is. A few pictures in Dubai Museum and select souvenirs in the gift shop triggered precisely that reaction. He is also extremely passionate about travelling, and never tires discussing destinations and sharing stories. Meeting him and spending time together has been quite the experience. If anything, it was a nice and genuine encounter amidst the sham that is Dubai.
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A charming wooden dhow, veggie Indian food and a yummy-looking manakeesh (but what is it?)--good to know there are offerings for the non-millionaire set in Dubai. I can't imagine I'll ever have the resources to visit, but I'd love to see those wild fake islands though perhaps they aren't so interesting seen at ground level. Fab that you and the Camel got to meet and make our virtual community a real one!