I’m now safe and sound at my hostel in Mumbai and I have to
say, after two and a half days of non-stop travel, a shower and a shave never
felt so good.
The fact that my trip took so long was, admittedly,
self-imposed: I snagged a cheap plane ticket between DC and Mumbai that left me
with a twenty-hour layover in Abu Dhabi, just enough time to hop a free shuttle
to Dubai, sleep for five hours at the only youth hostel in a city known more
for luxury jaunts than for backpacking adventures (EasyFlat 12, check it out),
explore the city, and hop another shuttle back to Abu Dhabi. So, to cut right
to the chase, here’s a picture of me on top of the Burj Khalifa, the tallest
building in the world. My study-abroad research project on rooftops must surely
now be complete:
Okay, okay, so now let’s take a step back. I’m off to India
for about nine weeks this summer to do research on the 200,000 people who make
a living in Delhi by sorting through trash and reclaiming recyclable materials
(a.k.a. “waste-picking”). But what initially piqued my interest in informal
recycling was this terrific study abroad program last spring that went to
India, Senegal, and Argentina and has shaped a lot of my thinking on cities,
politics, space, and everything else—lots of big, amorphous categories of
thought that I hope to be probing this summer, with waste-picking as my probe.
But first, Dubai! Since that semester studying abroad set me
up to be pretty damn cynical about the city when I arrived yesterday.
The United Arab Emirates is a tiny little country only just
officially formed in 1971 (it’s got about 10 million people; only 2 million are
considered “Emiratis” and the rest immigrants, often from South Asia, who put
in all the labor to build and sustain the city). And Dubai is the epicenter of
its very unique, very peculiar approach to taking massive amounts of petroleum
revenues and somehow generating an economy that can sustain itself once the oil
dries up. It’s a city notorious for building the tallest building in the world,
the most expensive hotel in the world (one can, among other things, take a
helicopter from the airport to the hotel and then a submarine to its underwater
restaurant), the world’s only (therefore largest) indoor ski slope, and of
course a [heretofore undeveloped] five-mile stretch of fake islands in the
shape of the world map that they created by dredging up sand.
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| "World Islands" off the shore of Dubai |
Are these unique tourist attractions absolutely fascinating? Well, duh. But did my
semester studying cities also set me up to be very critical of this
master-planned approach to creating a city to serve only a few, and built on
the backs of millions of migrants who have lived and worked in conditions that
many have equated with slavery? Well, yes, that’s true too.
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| At the Dubai Mall - because every mall needs a shark tank, of course |
So I’m a little surprised to say that the city started to
win me over in the short time I was there. The hostel put me in the heart of
the old part of Dubai (what was there before the skyscrapers started going up about
twenty years ago), in what is now a largely Indian neighborhood. My shuttle to
the airport was at noon and I wanted to make the most of my limited time in the
city, so I asked Google when the sun was going to rise and set my alarm for
5:28. And what more appropriate way to start my day than, as I tried to make my
way to the Dubai creek to hop an old abra
wooden ferry to a bazaar on the other side, I ran into a Hindu prayer session
in full swing. I figured the universe was trying to tell me something, so I
took off my shoes, bought an offering, and went joined a long procession
through the temple.
Nobody blinked an eye at the random white dude with the big
green backpack, though a few kind men did help me along the way: one who clued
me in on what was happening, another who helped me tie a cloth on my head as I
failed miserably to mimic the hand movements of the person before me in line,
and one more who confirmed that no, I didn’t have to drink the milk; I was
supposed to pour it over the head of the statue instead.
I lead a very blessed life; I guess the universe was
reminding me of that at the start of this trip, too.
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| Dubai marketplace, early in the morning |
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| The Dubai Creek |
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| Crossing the Dubai Creek - also the last known photo of my sunglasses, dropped somewhere in Dubai Mall. |
Anyway, I spent about three hours wandering around this
quiet part of town that felt more human than the image I’d had of a
hyper-modern oil-city that’s trying too hard to be a big deal. The people I got
to chat with from Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India had remarkably similar ways
of describing their situations to me: life was better here (though the
trade-off of not seeing their families was extremely difficult), almost as good
as it must be if they could get a job in America! I found myself rooting for
this odd, sensationalist city; at least as long as skyscrapers were being built
and tourists were flocking to them, there were jobs and the American Dream
a-la-Dubai could be more than a desert mirage. I want to root for a more equal, more
just Dubai—but at least I am finding myself rooting.
The rest of my day, I wandered through the Dubai Mall and
went up and down the Burj Khalifa. Moral of the story: it’s really tall. Like,
really, really, really tall.
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| Selfies might be a theme on this trip... |
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| Shadow from below |
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| And the shadow from above |
I knew time would be short because my ticket to “At The Top
Burj Khalifa” was for 10:30 and my shuttle to the airport was at 12:00, so I
made sure I knew the route out of the Dubai Mall (where the tour finishes) beforehand.
I’m glad I did this, since it took about an hour and a half winding through the
maze of the mall and accidentally taking one walking loop around the Burj
Khalifa—desolate and eerie in a city where people are either in private cars or
labor uniforms—until I found the taxis. So after all this, the most complicated
logistics in traveling halfway around the world? Finding the exit from the
mall.
