Dubai Airport
I landed in Dubai for my layover to my flight to India, recovering from a fourteen-hour flight from Boston, smelling of sweat and sleep deprivation and sour mood. I didn’t know the time — not in Dubai, not in India, not even at home. During transatlantic flights, the exact time does not really matter, only the amount of time left to the next milestone, because as soon as I properly registered the time where I was, I would be whisked away to a new time zone at five hundred and sixty miles per hour.
My family had about 90 minutes to wait before our flight to India, which gave us some time to wander around the airport mall in Terminal B. I couldn’t help but notice the casual bilingualism on all of the signs, Arabic and English sharing signs — with Arabic on top. To my right stood two men, one in traditional Arabic clothing, one in a brown police uniform (as opposed to the black of the United States). They were talking in Arabic, when I noticed they made this guttural /kh/ sound, as if trying to cough. I remembered hearing that same phoneme when an Israeli friend of mine spoke to his mother in Hebrew. What else did Arabic and Hebrew share? What else did their cultures share? What more could those cultures share?
Looking right, my mother said, casually blending her Hindi and English, “Liquor Dubai mé hai? That’s a good sight.” Indeed, Dubai, although ruled by an absolute monarch and governed in part through Islamic law, held a large duty-free liquor store in its airport.
So much for religious adherence.
The crowd was what Americans would call “diverse.” Indians and locals and Americans and what seemed to be actual African (not African-American) people flowed through the crowded halls. All of the cashiers were brown, and although I wouldn’t have pegged them as Indians, my aunt later told me that many Bangladeshis go to the United Arab Emirates for work — and Bangladeshis were Indians until 1947.
Yet all of the models for Dior and Swarovski and Burberry were white, with sensuous skin and poses that seemed engineered to maximize the amount of cleavage acceptable in civil society.
I walked into a technology store, scanning over the fitness trackers and drones and surprisingly high-end headphones for sale, with price labels in AED — Arab Emirates Dollars — stuck on the bottom of each box as a seeming afterthought. I examined one box, which held a fitness tracker that pretended to be an analog wristwatch. The front was in English, and on the side were translations of the label in…French and German. None of the boxes in the technology store appeared to have anything in Arabic. Out of curiosity, I asked one of the store staff, noticeable by the cheap-looking teal jacket that all airport store staff must wear, what the exchange rate was between AED and USD — US Dollars.
“3.6,” he said without pause, as if the ratio was trained into his unconscious.
My family’s flight was approaching, so I walked back to the gate for the Dubai to Bangalore flight, passing a man dressed in trendy-Cambridge-hipster clothes and LA Dodgers cap and talking on his cell phone in Hindi, and plugged my phone into one of those universal outlets that can take any plug from anywhere.
A voice whispered from the intercom, informing passengers in a soft British accent that the gate was open. The voice seemed to insist that British English was the universal language of the globe, an insistence born in the 1800s, when Britain was the largest exporter of culture in the world. But I wondered how much influence Britain has on the world today, as it begrudgingly sits in the EU and follows in the wake of the largest exporter of culture today: The United States.
My family returned to the Dubai airport on the way back from India. This time, our flight to Boston was in a different terminal than our flight from Bangalore, so we got to take a self-guided tour around Dubai’s shrine to international business.
All of the ceilings were high, at least double the height necessary for a comfortable room. The floors themselves were even further apart from each other, as emphasized by the open atriums that almost had their own weather patterns and the escalators that climbed two or three times higher than the petty examples in your neighborhood strip mall.
The pillars holding up the ceiling were wider than most redwoods and covered in vertical chrome strips. The glass elevators floated in glass elevator shafts with chromed frames. One atrium even had palm trees and an artificial waterfall — Dubai’s way of saying, “Fuck you, we’re rich.”
Finally, my family found our gate. My father asked if I wanted some coffee before the flight, which I was more than happy to take on his dime. We found a chocolate store nearby that we thought sold coffee. But then I saw hot chocolate on the menu — and I decided to buy that instead.
I asked the man behind the cash register, who was wearing a sharp navy suit, that I wanted a hot chocolate.
“What kind?” he asked.
What?
The man gestured to a shelf to my right. This store sold ten types of hot chocolate, an assortment of strengths and add-ins. I asked for a hot chocolate made with 85% dark chocolate, and said, “Ten different flavors…wow.”
“Yes, this is something you can only get at an airport,” said the man at the counter.
“I thought this was more a Dubai thing in general,” I said.
He replied, “Well, maybe here and the Dubai mall. But you’re leaving Dubai.” He smiled.
The hot chocolate cost 29 AED. Only after I took my cup and sat next to one of the many Christmas trees in this airport for an officially Muslim nation did I realize that 29 AED translated to 8 USD— more expensive than the trendiest cappuchino in Cambridge. But this hot chocolate was not your average hot chocolate. It had an actual block of dark chocolate held to a wooden stick and left to melt into a cup of steamed milk. But even though that hot chocolate redefined hot chocolate for me, I felt guilty making my father pay for it.
The Dubai Airport is extravagance for the sake of extravagance. It is an endless stream of boasts preceded by “We’re so money that…” Yes, Dubai is very Muslim and very conservative.
But the real Allah here is capitalism, its devotees worshipping in the direction of Madison Avenue and the New York Stock Exchange.
