The kids wanted sun and warmth for their spring break, so I got us tickets to and a hotel in Dubai. Then I spent a month getting more and more anxious about my decision. The only thing I knew about the place was that it was awash with oil dollars, famous for the world’s tallest building and – critically – the capital of a country of hard-core Islamic belief. 

We spent last year’s spring break in Egypt, which isn’t exactly western-minded either – shock-full of Russian tourists enjoying a holiday in the sun in another military-run country – and I visited Morocco as well, but the United Arab Emirates was a different kettle of camels, I reckoned: what few women we had seen in Egypt weren’t all clad in tents, at least, and poor as they might have been, the Egyptians seemed to be self-reliant (- the Moroccans as well – to the point of trying to rob us! -) whereas the UAE is infamous for employing gastarbeiter in conditions not far removed from slavery. 

Be that as it may, the dice were thrown. We would have to make it work. I packed a shawl for my daughter, and explained about cultural differences as gently as I could (I put it to her in veiled terms, you might say…). She took it well, then insisted on painting my nails the night before we were leaving. Coincidence? I don’t know, but I felt oddly proud, even as I contemplated being gang raped in a prison that would make the Midnight Express seem like a Holiday Inn. The gold glitter really suited me. 

On the day of travel my son added his own bit of fuel to the fire of anxiety, when his backpack tested positive for explosives in three out of four detectors at Zaventem. The Belgian security personnel were remarkably relaxed about it, but in my mind’s eye we were already being detained by bedouins for questioning, my western terrorist son and blond, beautiful, burqua-less daughter and I; my snazzy nails and her general gender probably on par with his presumed explosive device in terms of how disruptive we’d be deemed to be to Emirati society.

In the end, none of that materialised (or I wouldn’t have been writing this story). We arrived in the wee hours of morning and made it through customs relatively quickly (a colleague had scared me with tales of having had to spend three hours in immigration), and then took a taxi to the resort. What was remarkable was that even though it was now two o’ clock in the morning there was no sense of the city being asleep. Quite the contrary: there was plenty of traffic on the one enormous motorway that leads through Dubai (seven lanes in each direction) and there were oodles of building sites along the road where apparently work was under way. 

And so we reached our destination, after a drive that took us through downtown Dubai (think Manhattan goes Muslim), followed (in order) by endless shopping districts, truck depots and indescribably dull apartment blocks for the aforementioned guest workers, and finally into a flat, featureless desert, until we hit the coast, where the hotel complex was situated next to a combined yacht marina and aquaplane airport.

The holiday itself was fine, no different from a thousand other package tours. Dubai’s been branded a Disneyland for adults, and it’s true that if you have money you can do most anything you like. There are some super rich people here – my son made a game of counting the Lamborghinis he saw – but what really did stand out were the brushes we had with Emirati culture, such as it is.

Dubai is one of seven emirates and the most tolerant one (it says on Wikipedia. Tolerant of what, specifically, I don’t know. Glittery male fingertips, perhaps). However, like all the emirates it is still very much run by the traditional tribal leaders, so society is feudal and clan-based. That’s weird in itself, but it gets worse: It has some 10 million inhabitants, of which 1.5 million are Emirati citizens and the rest are guest workers. Because of this the gender ratio is completely skewered, with three quarters of all people here being men. And of course their laws are largely based on Sharia, so what women there are remain mostly invisible – if women in Egypt wore their tents with the zipper down and the inhabitants peaking out, here the tents were firmly closed.

At the same time prostitution is ripe; a quick and unscientific search on Tinder makes me estimate that nine tenths of all women there are either professional working girls or gold diggers – the latter category presumably trying to catch the eye of one of the outrageously rich family members of the ruling class.

In a country with ten million inhabitants it seems that the sheer amount of building works in Dubai city is utterly disproportionate, too. Turns out this is correct. They are extending DC like crazy, with the ultimate aim of reaching a capacity of 11 million people. Why? I don’t know. Maybe they want every single desert-dweller to live there. For now, many of the skyscrapers are empty, however. But then Dubai is synonymous with over-the-top constructions: the worlds tallest building is here, as I mentioned, but they are already working on another one that will be even higher than the Burj Khalifa, with its 828 meters. 

Then there are the artificial city areas in the shape of palm trees (two with a third on the way) that protrude into the sea, and the artificial archipelago in the shape of a world map where tourists are invited to buy a property on one one the fronds, or – why not? – invest in an entire country/islan, and invite your neighbors to a friendly game of Risk.

The Palms were branded as the ultimate luxury resorts until the developer had to add hundereds of properties to the limited space (they had miscalculated the cost of production), which lead to furious investors suing them as the tree houses went from hyper-exclusive hideouts for the ultra rich to ghettofied Florida ‘burbs. And then the waters surrounding the fronds turned stagnant and putrid as the tide breaker that enclosed them proved altogether too efficient at keeping the waters calm.  

On the other hand, “the World” ran into trouble as the financial crisis hit the world (the real one, not the islands) in 2008, and so remains largely undevelopped. On top of that the islands are slowly eroding, and are thus literally sinking into the sea – the owners of the amusement park and hotel complex Atlantis on one of the Palms are presumably following this development with particularly keen interest…

The world according to Al Shor-Ziteed.

If constructing big and sumptuous buildings is one particular trait of the Emirates, then luxury consumption is the other defining characteristic. With so much money around this is perhaps not entirely surprising, but the sheer devotion to spending is still staggering. The main attractions in Dubai are shopping malls!

We visit the Dubai Mall with its 3,000 shops. It has a giant indoor aquarium, home to tiger sharks and huge mantas, a three story waterfall indoors, a fountain display that is more than a rival to the ones in Vegas, and many other wonders besides, but really it is just a temple to Mammon and consumerism. It makes me feel trapped in a Housewives of Hollywood-type nightmare – if it weren’t for the many men wearing sheik-y attire and women sporting black drapes and curtains I could be in Beverly Hills. 

So the glitterati Emirati have all the accoutrements of the nouveau riche, and all their inherent sense of insecurity, too; Numerous times we come upon displays of Arabic accomplishments, often dating back to the 13th century, like the replica of a water clock in the shape of an elephant (scale 1:1), that we come across in the Ibn Battuta Mall. It must have been enormously impressive back then. Today, on display in a shopping centre, not so much. 

Swatch it!

These showcases are always accompanied by a comment along the lines of the one we find next to an ancient astrolabe. I don’t remember it verbatim, but the gist was something like “When Al Bundi met western astrologists in 1269 he was amazed at how piddly their puny equipment was compared to his mighty tower of star gazing, El Schalong.”

With a chip on their shoulder the size of a boulder, it’s small wonder the Emirates are going all-in to wow the world during their World Expo in 2020, but at what cost? Lives are cheap in Dubai. The Indian taxi driver that takes us back to the airport at the end of the week sums it up quite neatly. He works 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, but it is much better than working in construction, he says. 

We pass the foundations of the world’s next tallest building. It’s five o’clock in the morning, and the work is in full swing on what is already the size of a small city. And maybe that is a good metaphor for this strange place: A society built on medieval values, with too much money and a deeply seated minority complex, trying to make its mark in the contemporary world. What could possibly go wrong?