DESERT FANTASIES - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 126

• • •
As the rest of the world struggled to recover from the Great Recession of 2008, tourism in
Dubai was up within two years, with 4 million passengers flying into Dubai in one month
alone. So what do all those millions of tourists do on vacation in Dubai?
First, they shop.
Leaving the airport for the city itself is part of the experience. Bill and I rented a car
with a driver and headed to the city. In daylight shops beckoned you at every corner. I
brought along one of the standard tour guides, Footprint Dubai by Zee Gilmore, an expat-
riate who was born in Dubai and raised in England. She gushes: “Is there anywhere else
on earth that can claim to be so attuned to the whims of tourists, so wholly dedicated to the
entertainment of its guests and so completely accomplished in the pursuit of pleasure?”
I vote NO —Dubai wins by a mile.
Driving down Sheikh Zayed Road, we passed ever-larger shopping malls with glamor-
ous names I recognized from glossy magazines. This is the Middle East's version of Beverly
Hills' Rodeo Drive, London's Oxford Street, New York's Fifth Avenue and Paris's Aven-
ue Montaigne. This is why deposed rulers of Pakistan, an exiled former prime minister
of Thailand and Saudi princes make Dubai their home away from home. We opted for
the famous Mall of the Emirates, where “shopping is just the beginning,” and the newer
Dubai Mall.
The expanse of parking lots rivaled those at a professional football stadium; we worried
about getting lost. This wasn't a shopping mall, it was a city. In the desert heat of Dubai,
shopping malls substitute for town squares or public parks. Locals meet their friends and
families at the mall, and walk around in large circles in a mall version of a Spanish paseo,
stopping for a meal, then catching a movie, all under the same roof. For tourists, these
air-conditioned shopping malls are often the closest they get to meeting locals. We passed
young girls eating ice-cream cones with their cell phones glued to their ears. Emirati
families crowded in front of a floor-to-ceiling aquarium, the children screaming when a
shark swam by. Mostly we saw foreigners. Soon we were picking out the European lan-
guages—French, Spanish, German—and judging from a woman's robes and scarves, fig-
uring out the different Muslim nationals represented in the shopping frenzy.
And they were shopping. Over 450 clothing stores were listed in the directory. I was
dizzy writing down the names of all the designer shopping bags looped like bracelets on
these ladies' arms: DKNY, Cerrutti, Hugo Boss, Ralph Lauren, Missoni, Fendi. This is one
of the planet's “hottest shopping spots.”
We took a break at one of the 75 restaurants and cafés listed in this one mall. Our
choice was Le Pain Quotidien, a Brussels-based chain, comparing the sandwich to our fa-
vorites at the outlet in our Washington, D.C., neighborhood; nearly the same taste. If we
had wanted, we could have picked up a snack at one of the pricey grocery stores, too. En-