Gretchenfrage

October 16th 2016

12:20 — Al Ghubaiba

Daniel, another German from the Hostel on his way to India, quickly charges up his metro ticket, then we enter the bus, not paying much attention to our seats. Inside, we are re-seated several times by the driver so that the women can sit in their own section to the front of the bus. Finally, we start driving — towards Abu Dhabi. A two-hour bus ride and a few more minutes by taxi later, we arrive at our destination for today: The Sheikh Zayed Mosque.
When entering the prayer hall, where the Friday prayer is held, we once more realize that we are indeed in the emirates: The hall is insanely large, incredibly pompous, and in a corner an escalator leads down to the toilets. We were also shivering quite a bit in in the main hall, where the air-con is apparently set to what feels like 16°C.
Here, we also find some time to get philosophical and introspective: We discuss the meaning of religion and Islam before going back to complaining about the broken Wi-Fi in the coffee shop of the mosque.

Goodbye Dubai — Review

Tomorrow morning we will move on to the next part of our journey — about time for some reflection and some closing thoughts on Dubai:

Dubai is a large Disneyland — a huge playground of oil millionaires and often equal parts absurd and impressive. Be it golf courses, ski slopes or gigantic water fountains — Dubai has declared war on the surrounding desert.
The landscape and architecture are fascinating, sunsets and water could be lifted from a travel advert, and the concentrated luxury you'll find here has its interesting moments, too.
But there is one thing that Dubai is not: Authentic. The city feels surreal, but not alive. We can't imagine people actually living in the countless skyscrapers, most of them built by a single company, being pulled up everywhere around us.
In stark contrast to the public face of Dubai lies the worker's district our hostel is in — probably the most real part of Dubai and one of the few that grew organically.

Dubai wants to prove itself on the world's stage and buys prestige and influence from all over the world — but all that doesn't help the city to the aura of a true metropolis. The question of what will happen to this desert mirage after the oil runs out or a real estate bubble bursts remains.

No doubt we have seen and experienced a lot here, but we will probably not be back anytime soon.

And because we don't want to leave our experiences in Dubai, a city that likes to portray itself as cosmopolitan and modern, without proper context, I picked two articles to share with you from my research that show a different side of Dubai.

Human Rights in Dubai — wikipedia.org
A good overview of the human rights situation in Dubai (see esp. Sharia Law, Forced disappearances and torture, LGBT rights)

The Dark Side of Dubai — independent.co.uk
A long, but fascinating article about modern slaves, economy, environmentalism and more. Keep in mind that the article was written back in 2009 — from our experience, the water pollution has improved and the scars of the financial crisis have started to heal — at least we can't confirm these observations.

And of course, as per the terms of our bucket list, we have also found about about two things you should better not do in Dubai:
We'd recommend not boarding the women-only section of the metro — that can cost you 50€ (well... for men, that is). And we sure weren't in the mood to explain to some official why we are actually allowed to enter.*

Also, you should refrain from bringing your pen-knives to a mosque-visit. The staff will keep them for you and hand them back when you leave (in a way that you could just take them and walk right back in the mosque...) but it takes about 20 minutes before you can finally move on.

That's it from us from Dubai — the next post will be from Singapore.

*Translation note: This reference is probably confusing without the proper context. Feel free to just ignore it.