Emerates

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Upon landing in Dubai, and filled with concerns with an acceptable visa, I retrieve my baggage fortunately just making it way towards me on the carousel and I politely ask a fellow at the “visa” desk what I should do since I have only an electronic version of my visa. He directs me to Room No.1 on the left and down the big arrival hall area. To cut a long story short involving my going back and forth, I get my visa, having only to pay an additional 30Dhs or EAD (about $10Cdn, more or less). Now the how to get to Dubai – manage somehow to understand from bus and taxi staff that I can get a Dubai public bus pass for 20Dhs that will get me to the Ghubabai Stn. and from there I can get a city bus to Abu Dhabi. With luggage in tow, I get to Abu Dhabi and cab to my niece’s digs, something like this – Green House Centre, Cyber Café, Najda and Electra; these are directions that cabbies apparently understand as they do not the Sahara Apartments (something to do with not that much traffic or demand for that address.

However, I arrive only to find that I am off to brunch with the other Westerners, largely teachers, to One Hotel for a good time. It is, after all Friday and while not the actual start of the weekend in UAE, it is the party day. For perhaps 220Dhs, or roughly $Cdn60, not exactly cheap, we get an all-you-can-eat buffet, 3 floors of it with incredible variety, and for the pice de resistance, free-flowing booze, including my favourite, Heineken, and other draft beer and champagne and much, much more. A great way to fend off jet-lag! (I realize later, of course, just how little help it actually was to overcoming jet-lag, nor was anything else other than time and extra sleep to re-set the timing of my normal biological rhythms.)

Afterwards, coasting home, I learn that, while only non-Muslims with a residence visa can obtain a liquor licence for a limited amount of alcohol a month, quite a formal process with forms and all, I can nevertheless get simply walk into Spinneys LLC (licenced supplier) and purchase liquor, including my everyday home bar scotch, Grants. Booze might have been a little expensive, but who is really going to complain; after all, I am off to Iran in a matter of days, a completely dry country, and feel the need to enjoy what I can now, cutting down on the total time I will be on the wagon! Later that evening we go for a walk to the Abu Dhabi Cornishe and walk there with a hoard of others, thousands of foreign workers used in the UAE as cheap, imported labour, doing work other Emerati nationals refuse to do, a practice not uncommon among any other country world-wide. They mostly carry out hard labour in construction and other industries and otherwise mainly service sector work, along with the Fillipinos – often, abused females performing nanny work --- paid poorly but nevertheless considerably better than they earn at home. Emeratis apparently have all the government jobs and, presumably, are also mainly found in big business, commerce and finance.

The walk to the Cornishe and the beach left us with an “eery, almost unsettling feeling” walking among the hoard of other mostly male Pakistanis, et al. Few, if any females, could be found, although there may have been a light sprinkling of them, as well as some other tourists. Disparities in the UAE are evident everywhere, income and wealth of course, gender and hierarchal treatment possibly, perhaps even racism though that is presently unconfirmed. Fortunately, I don’t feel much of this in practice, except for being the obvious tourist, camera at the ready and eyes staring all about. I am never going to “blend in” as a Muslim any time soon, as I hope to in the coming months, despite the many efforts I will have made to this end concerning attire. However, I have travelled here specifically to capture photographs of those sights of interest as they are and are not.

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