Sylvia's Journal

We discovered a wonderful French café, the French Connection, right behind our building. We spent a long quiet morning there in spite of Bat Man showing on the large TV screen. With free wireless internet Axel was able to take care of some business while I made it about halfway through the Elephanta Suite by Paul Theroux, thinking it was an India travelogue, which it isn’t, but a nice read anyways.

In the afternoon Chuck’s brother and wife picked us up for a spin around town. We alighted at a southern California sort of café (Australian really) that served fantasy cakes and shakes. Sitting only a few hundred meters away from the (out of sight) beach, we enjoyed the perfect summer weather looking out over the road that runs along the entire Dubai coastal section called Jumeira. You can be in Jumeira and still be miles away from being in Jumeira as everything along the beach is called that way.

From SoCal we went to the heart of the Indian textile quarter in Bur Dubai when the siesta was over and all the shops that were not on Eid holiday opened. Life starts to pick up around 5 PM as evidenced by the increasiing number of SUVs parked in the city nearby parking lots.

I thought I had seen the fabric-of-all-fabric stores but found a gazillion more. Axel had a field day with his camera, capturing the dazzling colors, while I indulged into buying two lengths of raw silk, and fantasized about dresses and jackets. We hunted for a notion store to find buttons and ribbons but, just as in Kabul, such stores are hard to find, and those we did find were closed for the holidays.

We met up with newfound friends for a lovely Thai seafood meal. We discussed so many serious topics (about art education, the higher education politics of Afghanistan (is there such a thing?), gender issues and what money does to motivation to educate oneself), that I was exhausted after the meal.

We still haven’t heard from Safi Airlines whether we are leaving on Saturday or Sunday but the end of our stay is coming into view, and so is winter. This is hard to imagine as the climate here is as close to perfection as a climate can be.

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Another one of Axel’s fantasies came true today. We celebrated the first day of Eid with the rest of Dubai at the far edge of the Jumeira’s beaches sitting under a palm tree with our books, near a restaurant that served a cold beer with lunch. We had bought ourselves a day pass at the Sheraton Beach resort. Our entrance fee entitled us to all the facilities plus two slatted wooden chaises with a mattress and a large beach towel. We also got the use of a hurricane-grade umbrella that needed to be wheeled in place with a cart.

We decided, maybe for the last time, to take the metro to this paradise. It required lots of walking and took one and a half hour from our apartment to the beach. Public transportation is so inconvenient that it barely competes with the ubiquitous and reasonably priced taxis.

After sunset we walked along ‘The Walk’ which is right up there with ‘The Address,’ ‘The Place,’ and other generic nouns that serve as labels for places that are anything but generic. First we strolled, with numerous Eid revelers, against the traffic jam that consisted of white and silver SUVs filled with turbaned men in their heavily starched dishdashas or women in their gauzy, bejeweled and sometimes titillating black cloaks.

We sat down at the Marina’s waterfront for a mediocre meal in one of Dubai’s many restaurant chains doing more people watching; families that had surfaced from their lamb feasts and walked, ever so slowly, along the promenade – much like the post-Thanksgiving lethargy – except in the US everyone slides in front of the TV. Here the preferred response to such fullness appeared to be smoking the shisha, having fresh fruit juice, coffee or desert.

We joined in the fun, skipping the shisha – there was enough second hand smoke to go around for everyone – with some Yemeni coffee and a concoction made from dates and a little bit of flour that was much better than its Anglosaxon cousin the fruit cake.

And now we are back home watching music videos that feature Indians dressed as Americans in 70s garb, including hairdos and glass styles, singing and teasing each other in rooms that have a matching décor. The only thing that is not in harmony with everything else is the high-pitched screeching of the female singers. It is all part of preparing Axel for our visit to India over Christmas. He’s a little wary about his first visit to the subcontinent, fearful of the intensity of the place which you can experience here in the textile quarter.

And so we will spend our last few days here sticking our toes in the Indian waters so to speak. We are lodged in the middle of where most of Dubai’s Indian population seems to have settled. We will try out a few Indian eating establishments that cater to the locals for little money and then see if Axel still wants to go there next month.