The first thing the taxi driver told me about Dubai on my way to Dom’s place is “Dubai has two faces. At night everything is changing”.

I can’t say I have seen a lot of Dubai. If you come from Europe like me, you will be really confused by the size of the city and the fact that you can’t really walk there. Motorways and big roads are crossing the city from South to North. In 10 years, buildings appeared like gigantic mushroom. Somebody explained to me that even the old city is new! Cars and cabs are mainly the way to travel from a point A to a point B. It gave me a strange sensation of emptiness and vertigo as you can’t really see a lot of people when you observe the city from a balcony. You imagine that million of persons live and work in the thousands of gigantic buildings erected to the sky and you can deduce that a lot of people are going from a place to another by watching all the cars moving, but all you can see really is just the effects of the presence of humans here. I guess the weather doesn’t invite you to have a little walk outside. What’s the point of building pavements in a new city when you know that exposing your skin outside for more than 10 minutes transform you into a dry mummy? A good day is when it’s under 45 degrees celsius…

Dubai should be the place to be if you are into contemporary architecture. I’m not an expert but I had a strange sensation of repetition while in a cab direction home, I was watching the side of the road. Dubai could be an utopian city, everything is bright an shiny, people looks heathy, rich… Happy? Is there any homeless in Dubai? We ordered some food online to take away and the company inform us at the end that they were nicely giving 10% of the benefits to an association to help the homeless of Dubai. At this point I’ve had not been yet to the Souk but I really doubt there were any people living in the streets here.

It is a multicultural city but if you are searching for “culture”, you should wait a little bit more before visiting Dubai. It’s growing, slowly… But the locals still tend to buy art abroad. I saw some little galleries but not much.
Instead, if you are here to do shopping, please don’t forget to send a postcard to your mum before entering one of the malls. You’ll probably get lost and repair in ten month or so, the bank account as empty as there is water in the desert!
For sure, Dubai is the paradise for shopaholics.

Kisses in public (even in bars) are completely prohibited. If you can’t suffer not being affectionate with your “dulciné” in public, please my dear, I warned you, you’ll end up paying a huge penalty or put in a plane direction home. You are easily deported if you do something wrong. In some hotels, you’ll be ask to show your wedding certificate if you share your bedroom with a person of the other gender.

To go to the Souk, I’ve took the metro. The shiny, bright, comfortable metro. Composed of few carriages like back in the days in Paris: the gold class, the second one and even the woman and children carriage. Wait… What? I had to try. I entered inside and it was full of… Guess what? Women! It was really funny and a bit strange I felt like I was in another world… Showing too much is not recommended here and I guess that if this kind of things exist it’s because you could be annoyed by a man right? Dom told me that the condition of the woman here was good. Of course like everywhere in the world, exists some horrible persons but mostly, woman were considered like queens. It would be strange to have these kind of wagon in Europe I think. And anyway, I’m the kind of annoying european girl that you better educate your son to respect human being and not educate your daughter to dress up like everybody wants her to. Bloody me!
Men are proper gentle;en here. I think I didn’t open a door myself in two days. At the same time, I’ve never felt so exposed even with my long dress and my long sleeves inside. My boobs have never been so watched and I promise they are pretty normal! Pretty disturbing…

Alcohol seems hard to find anywhere which is not connected to an hotel. There is strict rules about when and how to drink. Some of my friends in London could have declare that this place is like hell (I love you my apricot girls) but in a conservative country to tend to open its doors to western countries, I think you’ll have to keep some laws if you would like to keep your main values.

And be careful about what you say in public. Secret police is everywhere! When I’ve been visiting the city on my own I felt like the heroin of a James Bond movie. Is the garbage man watching me? Am I doing something wrong? I bet the young girl who sat next to me in the metro is reading what I’m writing…
On the other hand, Dubai is really safe. Wanna fight? Are you doing a scene? Dear drama queens, think twice before shouting at somebody. These kind of scenes ends up usually in a police station!
As Dubai tends to be an important city internationally, people here are doing a lot of efforts to show that they care for human rights. I don’t know what is the reality but I’ve heard this story of a rich local being filmed insulting, humiliating and slapping a poor indian taxi driver. Well he had to do public excuses and pay penalties.

Dom is my lovely hostess for these few days. I probably not had a good opinion on a city like Dubai at first but I was ready to change a little bit of my mind and more than ever, the reason of my visit was to see her of course. She has a lot of friends around there and while she was working, she was still taking care of me by calling a friend or two to help me visiting Dubai. That’s how I met Rara. He nicely invited me to spend some time on his private beach on the Palm (YES I KNOW, PRIVATE BEACH). The Palm is totally artificial. Thousand of tonnes of sand has been driven here to create this extra point of earth on the sea. While I was walking direction the sea for my first bath, I tried to be conscious about how crazy this project was.

I’ve not been astonished by this consuming society where everything who matters the most looks like to be bought or sold, where every little thing is calculate to look beautiful, new and impressive. Instead I’ve been touched by the hospitality of my friend and her friends, all the things that I’ve learned about the culture and the values and the fact that if you look closely, on each glass of the buildings, on each corner of the paved streets, the little and thin layer of white dust reminds you that you are in a desert…

Dom’s flat is facing the tallest tower ever built. Every night, while I sat on the little sofa with a cup of tea, removing the dusty sand on my toes, I remembered a biblical story… and I told myself that I’m not in Dubai anymore, I’m in the old and crazy city of Babylon.

Thank you so much for everything my dear friend. You are so precious to me… I love you Dom!