Glitz, Glamour, Instant Noodles

October 10th 2016

Just before 10am, Frankfurt Airport — Boarding

We are walking past the business-class seats, marvelling at legroom and luxurious cushioning. A cover of Everybody wants to rule the world plays from the airplane speakers above. The stewardess takes a moment to finds our names on the boarding pass but greets us confidently with close-to-correct pronunciation.
An Arabic announcement warns us of travelling with smartphones of the model Samsung Galaxy Note 7 and the screens in front of us teach us all about the DragonMart — the worlds largest Chinese retail location outside of China, right here in Dubai. Sounds good, doesn't it?
Next up we see a laughing Arab man in traditional clothing, obviously amazed by the incredible multimedia entertainment on offer on Emirates flights — and he does have a point there, as far as we can tell. Unfortunately we can't find the time to test the Arabic, Indian, Indonesian, and Korean movie selection. On the next flight, perhaps. I manage to check out a Chinese film at least: Distance — An unconventionally structured movie portraying three episodes in the life of a common man. Favourite scene: Three Chinese officials in suits in a harbour with the same green 'China Shipping' containers in the background that you can see in the Frankfurt Osthafen. Despite the somewhat unclear storytelling and thanks to some pretty cinematography a solid 6.5 out of 10.
After about two hours, Jan's withdrawal symptoms are so bad that he buys an additional 500MB of in-flight Wi-Fi for a dollar — "I can even go on 9gag with that", he proudly proclaims. I use my free 10MB to take a staged picture of Jan and his sleep mask instead.

21:00 — Dubai
Of course, Dubai's trademark hubris does not stop short of the airport — we are greeted by huge halls with dozens of marble (or something like that) columns and Arab men in traditional gowns at the immigration.
But all that pump and splendour disappears real fast as we take the metro to our hostel — this district (of which I still do not know if it even has a name) consists predominantly of large residential buildings with simple, often run-down apartments mostly occupied by Dubai's migrant workforce, large parts of which come from India. After wandering through the evening heat for almost an hour, some locals help us finally find the hostel: In a nondescript, six-story apartment building with no sign of a hostel existing inside.
In the ground floor lobby we are sent to the third floor where, among identical looking apartments, we can indeed confirm the existence of The Domme from a sign on a door. As you might guess from the outside, the hostel is a regular, 4-ish room apartment — with a shared kitchen and bathroom and twelve beds in the living room.
The friendly woman managing the entire operation is sitting in the Kitchen with her laptop and checks us in there.
After another walk through the neighbourhood past the dozens of Indian computer and electronics shops on the search for an ATM we prepare some instant noodles in the communal kitchen and begin to wind down for the day.
Before going to bed I exchange a few words with the Russian man in the bed beneath me about German and Russian culture and I arrive at the conclusion that spoken German really does sound a bit aggressive and that "Arbeit macht frei" is a particularly poor choice of the only German words to speak.