Dubai, Arab Emirates, December 8, 2013, Sunday
Once again,
it didn’t feel like Sunday. We completed
our formalities aboard ship. I had to
give the reception another credit card to cover incidentals because the German
bank that had issued the first card doesn’t deal in abstractions and won’t
commit to paying for transactions that might occur in the future as of the time
you want to use their card as collateral.
We had a leisurely last breakfast in the sun on the outdoor deck of the
Terrace Café, our favorite on-board restaurant.
We debarked about 10 a.m. and found our bags exactly where they were
supposed to be. One can’t refuse a hustling
young baggage handler, and we didn’t. He
found a taxi, and we asked the driver to take us to the Sheraton Four Points in
the Bur Dubai section. For twenty
seconds the driver made noises indicating that he thought we might be confused
and that we wanted to be taken to another Sheraton a few miles away from the
Sheraton we wanted, and of course he would then have to drive us to the
Sheraton Bur Dubai for added fare, which is what we had asked for in the first
place. As they say, ah, the mysterious
Near East. I quickly handed him a piece
of paper with the name of the correct hotel, however, so he took us where we
wanted to go forthwith. We saw signs of
rampant, contemporary consumerism:
And then the masterpiece, the Burj al Arab Hotel, of which
more later:
It goes
without saying that our room was not ready.
We were directed to a serious young man at a desk a few feet away, and
we asked him about how we could get aboard an on-off bus. He was pleased to sell us tickets to the Big
Red Bus, which we assumed was the only on-off bus in town, except it wasn’t. He sort of told us how to get to the bus
stop, i.e., go down the street to “the corner” and turn right. Eventually the corner, which appeared from
our hotel entrance to be 50 yards down the street, turned out to be about 300
yards away, and then we weren’t sure it was the corner. You must understand that the sun was so
bright we could hardly see, and heavy traffic was whizzing by on a four-lane
street without interruption.
When we
turned right, the building where the Big Red Bus representatives were supposed
to be was, naturally, being gutted for renovation, but thankfully a young
Filipino lady who worked for a rival on-off bus company pointed us further down
the street where, she said, we would find the Big Red Bus stand. We started down the street for about a
hundred yards to no avail and returned with shoulders beginning to droop to
tell the young woman that she must have been mistaken. No, no, she said. You must walk past the construction
site. Well, the construction site
extended for what seemed like 300 yards, and the sun on our backs made it feel
as though the temperature was rising at the rate of one degree every five
minutes. Finally we saw the sidewalk
stand for the Big Red Bus, but we had to wait another interminable twenty
minutes before the bus stopped. Only
then did we learn, to our mild irritation, that the Big Red Bus made the rounds
only of the older part of the city and that what we really wanted was its
sister, the Big Blue Bus, if we wanted to see the new, glitzy part of town,
which we did. We had to transfer at the
next stop, which was only about three miles away. I report this only to convey that trying to
tour an Arab metropolis on foot and on the cheap is not a pastime for sissies.
We changed
buses and were soon speeding on a quasi-freeway toward a spot on the fifty or so
miles of beach that surrounds Dubai. We
passed innumerable, luxury apartments and pods of office buildings. Our destination was the new development known
as the Palm Islands. If you are
unfamiliar with this development, please look it up in Wikipedia and on Google
Maps. My problem was that I was upstairs
on the open deck of the bus snapping pictures, my sky blue Joe Momma’s Coffee
Shop, Avila Beach, baseball cap had blown off my head and on to the street, and
I was not listening to the canned tour presentation on the headphones to know
where I was. After all, one does not
need a bus blurb in Glasgow or Munich. The
bus seemed to be on a strange roadway at the beach, the famed Dubai monorail
was arcing down to its terminus, and the bus suddenly entered an underpass that
appeared headed toward open water. I had
no idea where we were, except that when we surfaced we had ended up at a
gorgeous luxury hotel, the Anantura Dubai.
The bus made a circuit around it and headed back several miles toward
what the map promised would be one of the principal business centers. I had no idea I had been on the famous Palm
Island until Dare told me when we got off the bus. The Palm Island is a scenic wonder from the air. At ground and water level I simply found it
weird.
Where to
get off the bus was another purely guesswork decision because we could not tell
from the bus company’s map where the heck we were, and the bus was going 50
miles per hour. We wanted to take the
bus to the business area of the world-famous landmark, the 166-story skyscraper
Burj al Khalifa (“burj” means tower).
We got off
in the innards of a large shopping center, expecting to find the skyscraper
momentarily. By now it was clear to us
that we were experiencing mental difficulties, but by concentrating hard we
tried to memorize where in that enormous labyrinth we could get back on the
bus. We entered the mall and were blown
away at the size of the place. We were
hungry, but soon realized that contrary to the practice of American and European
malls, there were no eateries to be had, possibly because the rents must be
astronomic and partly because the Arabs have always grouped stores in like
clusters, or so I surmised. We walked
through two wide mall aisles, all inside, past luxury store after luxury
store.
Finally we found an informal
restaurant, a “Paul” of the famous “Pauls” around Paris. We ordered and ate a simple, inexpensive and
excellent lunch. A blond lady and her
young son sat down at the next table.
The lady said that she lived half the year in Boston and the other half
in Dubai. We were beginning to realize
that this was not unusual. We asked her
about the Burj, and she replied that it was about five miles away. She wasn’t kidding. We were in the Mall of the Emirates, which
has a stunning three-story interior waterfall, but we needed to go next to the
Dubai Mall.
Luckily we had successfully memorized
the obscure exit from the second story of the mall, and we soon boarded a Big
Blue Bus for the Dubai Mall. We saw
signs for the celebration of Dubai’s 42d National Day everywhere:
The Dubai
Mall doesn’t kid around. We entered on
to a quiet and discreet oval space that measured about 50 by 100 feet. Around the oval and radiating away from the
oval were the salesrooms of every luxury Swiss watch you have ever heard of,
and each store was plush with gold, mahogany and glass and featured sales
personnel who had been trained in mortuaries.
Beyond that space the stores appeared even larger and more
luxurious. The clientele surely comes
from all over the world.
Because we
wanted to walk to the Burj al Khalifa and could not find our way out of the
mall, with some temerity we walked into the lobby of the luxury hotel that is
attached to the Mall that is known simply as “The Address.” Tres spiffy, with a lot of guys standing
around that looked as though they had arrived in sports cars. Our very casual dress (I looked awful) must
have set off a silent alarm, because immediately we stepped into the lobby an
official young lady of indeterminate ethnicity clad in an elegant little black
dress that somehow spelled uniform appeared from nowhere to take us in
hand. When she learned where we wanted
to go, she gave us directions in a most correct manner, but at the same time
she was giving directions she was briskly escorting us out of the lobby and
through an adjacent hall without taking a lot of trouble to conceal that she
wanted to make sure that we left the hotel as abruptly as we had come in. At that, upon searching, the room rates are
comparable to a similar hotel in Manhattan.
We walked out of the rear entrance of the Mall into a large open area of
pools and fountains. A dazzling fountain
show was promised but not until 8 p.m. that evening.
We were close to the Burj al Khalifa (166 stories high), and
Dare had the stamina and desire to walk to the building which seemed to be
about 300 yards away, but I felt exhausted and was worried about getting back
to our hotel to shower and dress for our fabulous, upcoming evening. Dare was grumbling something uncomplimentary
about me as we got in a taxi and returned to our hotel.
The
fabulous evening: We had been pondering
how to tour Dubai’s ultra-luxurious Burj al Arab Hotel. This is the hotel you see in the signature
photograph of the new Dubai, the elegant building just off the beach that is
shaped like the sail of a dhow, the traditional sailing vessel of the Arab
pearl divers of long ago. Hundreds and
probably thousands of pictures of the hotel are available on multiple web sites. No one is allowed to enter the hotel without
a reservation for something. Oceania had
offered a ridiculously priced tour (or so we then thought) for high tea on the
13th floor. We spurned that, but that
morning we weakened. It was do or die,
now or never, and so this siren/frog at the travel desk of the Sheraton sold us
a three-course dinner on the top floor of the hotel. He warned us that only the three courses were
included and that drinks were extra.
Hell, it was on a credit card anyway, so why not? Besides, it was almost Christmas, and in
Dubai they celebrate everything:
At about
8:30 a guide and driver showed up. What
we had bought was a tour of the hotel that included dinner. It was a good fifteen-minute drive to the
Jumeira section on the beach. We were
held up only briefly by the fifteen or so security guards at the end of the
causeway leading to the hotel. Our
guide, a fast-talking, hyper-kinetic Moslem from India (not Pakistan, India)
grabbed us by our elbows and commenced a veritable whirlwind tour of the hotel,
from the lush Christmas decorations of the 100 hundred foot long, 35 foot high
lobby, past the several dazzling jewelry and clothing stores, the most
prominent being a plush a la mode establishment called “Rodeo Drive,” as though
they didn’t want us to be homesick, and through lounges and bars, each more
outre’ than the last. Glass, gold and
mirrors were all around us. The guide
literally grabbed our Canon Gx1 and made us strike Vogue/Town and Country poses
in every room. The combination of the
over-the-top guide and the plush and gorgeous décor left me pleasantly
giddy. The décor was outlandish, but the
quality of the design and the materials was so high that it all worked. I felt that I had deserved this richness and
Topkapi-plus environment all my life, and that I had finally arrived.
At an exact
but undeclared moment the guide suddenly pushed us into an elevator, and we
began our climb in a glass enclosure, overlooking the dark sea to the top
floor. We were seated, and I scanned the
room. The diners were all chic and sleek. Dare kind of fit in; I didn’t. No matter.
The first course was a 1/16th by one by three inches slab of pate’ de
foie gras. It was a risk, but we
allowed our eyebrows to knit ever so slightly.
What the pate’ lacked in volume, however, it made up for in taste. It was simply the best pate’ we had ever
tasted. The sea bass and dessert were
perfect. Two glasses of wine were also
perfect, notwithstanding that the bill for the wine and two small bottles of
mineral water cost as much as Dare spends at Whole Foods over a seven to ten
day period. O well. A splurge is a splurge. We figured the rest of the trip had been a
financial disaster, so why stop now.
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