Dubai

If you ever get too wrapped up in the metaphysics of authenticity, the Dubai Mall Gold Souk wants a word with you. Can a self-conscious recreation of a particular heritage aesthetic, right in the middle of an enormous shopping mall, ever be a “real” example of the kind of thing it’s attempting to recreate?

In North America the answer would be no, go to Tacky Jail for a thousand years. In the Gold Souk, one wonders– okay, if this isn’t the real thing, then what exactly is it? What could possibly make it more “authentic” than it already is? Or rather, what makes things “inauthentic”? If the architecture were made out of cheaper materials than the ones being imitated, perhaps, but clearly no expense has been spared on that front. If it were being used for some purpose other than the one being imitated or by some group other than the ones laying claim to the heritage in question, but in this case it is indeed a place where you can buy gold, precious stones, and perfume for the enrichment of Emirati merchants.

The real purpose of this space seems to be to remind anyone concerned about the authenticity of what they’re viewing: every monument of the ancient world was once an infrastructure project built by a government or individual who wanted to remind you, personally, that sometimes money can in fact buy good taste, or at least buy the ability to determine what good taste is, thank you very much, and hoi polloi are very welcome for the nice place to sit/pray/eat/shop/etc.

Anyway, yesterday we ate breakfast at a place in the middle of it:

And spent a lot of time waiting around in the mall for a place that sold SIM cards to open, before deciding that actually it would be better to just wait out the 24 hour UAE tourist SIM card and then get a longer-term one in Oman. “Waiting around” in the Dubai Mall meant a lot of opportunity to hang out with these guys:

There is an official aquarium tunnel that you can pay to walk through, but the tank is just as visible from the outside of it. We also walked around outside, including to the (outside of the ) opera house; there isn’t anything on at the moment, so this is the closest we could get without paying for a really expensive tour:

Having thoroughly fucked up the get-over-jet-lag-in-Dubai plan by having a four hour nap, we tried to salvage the rest of the day by taking the public transit boat thingy across the creek to Deira:

Dubai was just a short stop on the way to the main purpose of the trip, Oman; we flew to Muscat this morning, then picked up a rental car and drove to Sohar, where we’ll be for the next few days.