Pop Quiz! Dubai: Cairo as…

a) French wine: Mexican, Turkish, or Egyptian wine
b) Jennifer Aniston hair: a mullet
c) Martha Stewart’s attic: Crazy Great Aunt Betsy’s attic
d) George Steinbrenner: Yogi Berra
e) One scoop of lemon sorbet: 3 scoops of gooey Ben and Jerry’s
f) All of the above

The answer to this quiz is F. How did you do? Dubai is, without question, more refined (a), stylish (b), and immeasurably neater (c) than Cairo. Like George Steinbrenner to Yogi Berra, in some coldly rational way it also makes a lot more sense (d)—but in the end, svelte and moderate as it may be, it’s decidedly more boring (e).

After the whole Ghanaian visa debacle, we were left with 36 hours in Dubai, an amount that turned out to be about all we could handle from both the budgetary and self-image perspectives. We are glad we got to see it, though. The post-Cairo shock of Dubai began immediately upon settling into our Emirates Air seats. The morning at the Cairo airport, like so much else in Cairo, had been chaotic—a taxi that failed to show, a couple hours in a cafeteria waiting for the check-in to open, a little visit with the Egyptian visa authorities to argue our right to leave the country without paying a fee (successful, but not without some palm-sweating moments), and a broken security device that meant switching gates a couple times. But on the plane it was another world. Flight attendants buzzed about catering to our every need, the seats were roomy and had fun rolling foot rests, and—coolest of all to us technology bumkins—there were hundreds of movies, new and old, and full music albums on demand, keeping us plugged in happily throughout the flight. The pattern continued on arrival in Dubai, where we were awed to walk without hassle through the impeccably organized airport, into a taxi with a meter, with a driver who followed lane lines and stop lights. Arriving at the youth hostel, though, we had our introduction to the other side of the Dubai coin—the cheapest place in town, one night at the hostel still ate up our budget for an entire day, and there was certainly no backpacker type feeling in the air.

On the upside, there was a television in the room, and waking up the next morning, 9 hours ahead of East Coast time, we had the joy of sitting in bed watching the election results coming in on CNN—no better way to start a day than with a long-awaited beating on the powers that be. After a little bit of gloating, we headed into town. (Another Cairo difference: We could take a city bus in Dubai, which actually carried the number of people that it had seats; in Cairo people were literally hanging out of the doors and windows of the buses, and tourists, expats, or anyone who could afford a taxi would not think of taking one of them.) We did our first round of imaginary shopping (or, accurately, I did some imaginary shopping while Erik pretended to pay attention to what I was pretending to buy) at the Gold Suq, a series of hundreds of stores selling gold jewelry in a dizzying array of extravagant, shimmering styles. To go along with the countless bangle bracelets (which I imaginarily bought for all of you, ladies, so I hope you like them), there were necklaces that could have weighed down an elephant, arm cuffs, tiaras, and even a sexy shirt of solid gold.

Leaving the suq with our credit cards unscathed, we walked along the wide creek that runs through downtown Dubai to the Dubai Museum, located in an old fort. The museum was a combination of a history of the development of Dubai, and a series of life-scale models showing examples of traditional crafts and lifestyles in the area, including both town-dwellers and Bedouin nomads in the desert. The story of Dubai’s astronomical growth over the last 50 years was striking—the population went from around 60,000 in the 1950s to 500,000 in the early 1990s, and is larger today, and physically the city grew from little more than a small, dusty port into an amalgamation of superlatives: tallest towers, most exclusive condominiums, biggest mall, and so on. Even more interesting, though, was the way the city presented itself through the exhibits. There was a subtext in the models of artisans’ workshops and Koran schools that felt familiar from visits to American natural history museums: there is room for these lifestyles in this museum, but out there in the real city, there is no place for them anymore.

As we sat at a creekside café, Erik smoking one last sheesha (water pipe with flavored tobacco) before saying goodbye to the Middle East, we continued to notice how diverse the people walking by were. In Egypt, we had never quite gotten used to the homogeneity of the population; there were foreigners, like our Danish friends, but they really stood out as foreigners; otherwise, besides small pockets of Sudanese refugees, it seemed that everyone was, by birth and ethnicity, Egyptian. By contrast, Dubai seemed to have as many Filipino, Chinese, and Indian people as it did Arabs. It felt markedly different to be in a multicultural setting again (and we enjoyed getting to eat Indian and Thai food!)

Sufficiently rested, we next tackled our biggest Dubai challenge: the Mall of the Emirates, the world’s largest mall. At first, what was overwhelming was the size; it took a good hour just to get our bearings and have some sense of the lay-out of the place. There were several soaring, metal-and-glass courtyard areas, with long rows of shops within and between them. At one end, next to one of several food courts (but not the one with women in cocktail dresses and stilettos waiting to get into the Armani café), was a viewing area overlooking the atrocious wonder of Ski Dubai—the indoor ski hill. Complete with a fire roaring in a stone fireplace, Ski Dubai had everything one could want for a winter getaway-- pine trees, sledding slope, chairlift, snow pants, and hip ski instructors to boot. Everything, that is, except for, say, the great outdoors, or any hint of authenticity. But maybe that’s the snobby New Englander in me speaking; the people playing inside their glass winter palace seemed to be enjoying themselves. Once we had adjusted to the scale of the mall, what became overwhelming was the fanciness of all of it, and, by sharp contrast, our own scruffiness. (For the sake of accuracy, again, I should admit that this didn’t faze Erik at all—only I felt like a pariah in my beat up travel clothes.) Everyone, it appeared, was dripping with money or, at the very least, on top of the most current fashions. This went for the observant black-robed women and white-robed men as well—the robes themselves were of fine fabrics, and their shoes, bags, and jewelry exhibited wealth as clearly as designer clothes did on other people. The shopping-and-showing mania continued at the Dubai Airport (voted the world’s best duty free!), where we spent the night. Attractive as some aspects of this materialist paradise were, and as ready as I’d be to spend another day there if I had nothing to do but spend money, by the time our flight to Ghana boarded in the wee hours Wednesday morning, we were quite ready to leave.