Holler! Yesterday went and did some less touristic voyaging around older (you younger people might use thrift store terms like, vintage, rare, hard to find) Dubai - sarcasm if you get my drift… That started off with going to a mall that makes the island of Manhattan look small. It is the mall with 100,000 visitors every freakin day - no joke. Also the same mall in which you can ski - yes, snow ski - listen to awesome German techno, and watch a “shoe fashion show” which I did watch, and laughed. The Mall of The Emirates also has two full sized grocery stores, like five hotels (one of which is a chalet facing the ski area) and endless amounts of fine dining fancy cuisine restaurants. After that we had the unfortunate deal of getting in some sketchy cab and he drove us 45 minutes out of our way just to go about 5 kilometers. He would basically point out everything that I didn’t care to see… “on the left is the Dubai Creek Hilton, there’s the Marriott and the Hyatt Dubai, on the right is some other massive mall, and up ahead is another mall…” After making it clear to him that I wanted to go to the textile and gold souk and the shipping port in center city and the Dubai Creek (River), he finally said that he understood what I’m talking about. So finally I made it to what I imagine old Dubai to be 30 years ago before the crazy mass construction process began. Desert-ish, little market souk type alley ways all mazed together to finally dump you out into kinda way lower income less fortunate part of town than the new Dubai. Way less crowded than the Moroccan souk but also way different products being sold. Way less touristy (which seems more sketchy as a white American) but way more authentic and “real.” But the shipping dock area was unbelievable - so janky and a mess of crap everywhere - everything being loaded onto these boats like cars, car tires, AC units, jars of mayonnaise, etc. - but somehow these dudes were organized and on top of it.
Overall, people are very friendly, as expected, but there have been semi weird vibes between the older Muslim men looking at my buddy Mike like he’s Ansel freakin Adams nature photographer with his crazy 50,000mm lens (looks like a fucking telescope from NASA). Kinda funny to see them look at him. I might go a bit more unnoticed, compared to Mike - not sure why, but I feel like he’s been getting vibed way harder than I have. Do you ever get vibed? Anyways, been trying to find falafel and it’s near impossible. Finally found a place today in Al Satwa and walk in this restaurant around noon and the guy tells us falafel isn’t served until 5pm. What? I fully understand that it’s unlawful to look at women too long, but no falafel until 5pm? You serious? It’s like saying I can’t have a bagel in Brooklyn until after midnight. Oh well. So finally decided that we’re not driving up the coast of U.A.E. and into Oman until Wednesday. Probably coming back Saturday or Sunday to Dubai and then we’ll have more time to experience more of what Dubai is known for, shopping malls, shopping in general, massive buildings, and Starbucks of course.
As you can see from reading this, I like these punctuation marks a lot ( ) - , which makes for great run on sentences.
So far, so good though. Really enjoying it. Time to adventure out again.
Til next time, with camera in hand, from Jumeirah Beach, Dubai.
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