The Madina(t) al-Jumeirah mall on Jumeirah Rd. is frightful in its consumeristic decadence. It is down the street from the Burj al-Arab, the great vertically elongated dhow sail-shaped skyscraper, the sign of Dubai's affluence. I followed M. in his Hertz rent-a-car to get there, marvelling at the length of Jumeirah road since the days I was here more than ten years ago when the road skirted a public beach which has, during the interim, been developed. We were coming from Al Mamzar beach where recently in the Gulf News there was an article and photos of the beached baleen whale
http://archive.gulfnews.com/articles/06/01/20/10012897.html discovered just about the time we were on the beach facing the skyline of Sharjah in calmer waters, no one on the beach facing the Gulf which was being pommeled by breakers as a result of the Shamal that has been affecting the weather to make it cool lately. Jumeirah Rd. has been under construction to widen it so I had to thread my way in my lane between the cones and traffic in the inside lane. By the time we arrived at the Burj al-Arab it was dark, its palm trees out front wrapped in strings of white lights looped the entire length of their trunks. It took at least half an hour from the time we reached Jumeirah Rd to reach the Burj al-Arab, and fifteen minutes from there to the Madina(t) al-Jumeirah, a Medieval looking castle on the outside, a facade. The Burj al-Arab looked smaller than I had imagined, the illusion one gets from approaching a mountain from a long way off and ineluctably drawn into its embrace that makes you feel smaller and smaller, telescoped into an ant. However, I could not feel the full effect since I was inside my Honda and was passing it at a speed of at least 80 kms. per hour. I only have the impression of the white lights and the deep aquamarine blue reflected in its windows. Dusk falls quickly in the desert.
The Madina(t) al-Jumeirah is as its name in Arabic means, Jumeirah City, my putting the 't' in parentheses not only to show off my knowledge of Arabic grammar and particularly the phonemics of the concealed feminine ending of 'ta-marbuta' revealing itself in a pronounced 't' but to correct M.'s interpretation of its meaning a diminutive of city, or a miniature city. M. did not turn at the turn-in to the mall for some reason, perhaps because this was his first time there and he did not know he had reached it. So, as we waited for the light to change at the multi-lane intersection we gaped up at the Medieval castle facade perched on an incline sloping upward with a line of taxis in waiting. It decidedly did not give the impression of the long perspective of reaching it after a walk from the parking lot that you experience at a typical mall in the midwestern United States, beckoning in the distance. You approached this mall as if you were driving up to a luxury hotel entrance before you suddenly find yourself turning into the maws of an interior parking garage and an Indian in blue directing you with hand signals to either go right or left at a t-junction. I followed M. to the right automatically though the Indian had indicated left. I wanted to park near M.'s car, not knowing that only one empty space offered itself to me as well as a deadend or cul de sac, and that that space I could hardly fit my Honda MR-V in. I started to back up only to be stopped by another car coming in to find a space. Fortunately, an SUV type vehicle was leaving a space, and I was able to squeeze mine in though leaving my wife to manage for herself, getting out of the Honda from the driver's side. M. and I shook our heads at one example of the typical plunders western expats joke about when I pointed out to M. a car parked at an angle in one space in a parking lot where the spaces are for the least amount of room to maneouver. It brought back to memory my brother's painstaking parking maneouvers in parking garages in Sydney. Often expats revel at the lack of what could be a simple practice of civility and consideration for one's fellow human being. But, having said that, I admire the lack of the existentialist regime here, in which each individual plays a distinctly defined role, where one is exasperated by seemingly no one ever playing a role that would lead to the efficient accomplishment of things, doing one's job in other words. The Indian in blue was not fulfilling his job of directing traffic, though I must admit I did not heed his hand signal and if I had, would not have found myself in that position of having to back out. But, whoever designed the parking garage in the first place did not know what he was doing in making it possible to reach a deadend. Hence, the necessity of an Indian in blue to play a role that distinctly was not a traffic director or ticket taker. What was his role then if not merely to fill a uniform? I was only a bit flustered, and not at all embarrassed as I otherwise would have been if I were in the U.S. where masculinity is equated with know-how and nearsighted pragmatism. Here you act impetuous and stupid, for stupidity is no reason to feel self-conscious, everyone puts himself in a compromising situation of stupidity when things are not set up with pragmatism in mind and roles well-defined.
There was no cellular lift or elevator to get you to the mall. Flush with the squeaky cement floor of the parking garage, doors led to escalators that took you up or down. Mary had remarked earlier that we were going to a souk, not a mall per se. Into a curved hallway we stepped, and I noticed that the info signs were high up, just below the dim vaults of the high arched ceiling. It was not a typical brightly lit mall. M. was looking for the toilet, which we soon found. Opposite the toilets was, to my surprise, a bar with the logo, BAR ZAR, the two words, one on top of the other and the two letters 'A' in red in the form of an upside-down 'V'. I immediately relished the elaborate pun on 'bazaar' and 'bizarre'. Either Jacko had already begun his consulting in "entertainment content" for the tourist industry of Dubai
http://archive.gulfnews.com/articles/06/01/16/10011944.html, or one clever logo designer was halfway literate. We were in a modern souk or Oriental bazar and it was strange to have a bar in a mall in the Middle East, but then this was Dubai, a much more open emirate than the one I hail from, Abu Dhabi. As I waited for M. outside the toilets I glanced into the entry of the bar and stepped back because I was still in disbelief and a bit shy-shocked and withdrawn from having entered this posh, "upscale", as we called it, mall. Colors were subdued because of the brown background of the wood and so my eyeballs were not strained by the usual bright assault of fluorescent mall lights on my iris sphinters that left me with a feeling of being exposed, as if there was no door to the stall I was taking a dump in. I felt more comfortable and relished the anticipation of inviting M. to have a drink. I watched as a few expats walked casually out of the bar, one young Britt couple actually holding hands, which you rarely see in public here. Another glance informed me that it was rather empty for a bar, which in a bar-restaurant in a mall in the States would be full of customers at booths feeding their faces with fatty foods that fed the cholesterol content of their capillary systems and clogged them for future seizures of painful cardiac ecstasy. (It brings to mind a phrase coined by an expat I knew many years ago who would refer to getting something to eat as a "food fuck".)
M. finally came out of the toilet and I declared that we were going to have a drink while they shopped, the wives and kids. I knew that M., being German, must be a seasoned tipsiologist, for I knew him as not having refused a can of beer one time chez moi and if his stomach muscles had the opalescent rigidity of a clam shell it was not revealed under the fleshy roundness below his chest.
So, after we handed over some cash in dirhams to the wives we stepped into the bar. Only to the left inside the door was there a table with customers around its unglossy black roundness. It was indeed like entering Hemingway's "a clean, well-lighted place", though the light was aesthetically diffuse and dim. To the left behind the table was the bar with its liquors and spirits behind it which faced a large rectangular bar in the middle of the floor without barstools. We gravitated towards it like children attracted to the first familiar thing in the immediate environment, only to discover as we peered over the top of it that it was open to a bar with liquors and spirits directly below us. A two-storied bar! We immediately found the stairs in the corner which led to it and scampered down them. To the left at the bottom of the steps was a small bandstand. Perhaps, since it was only around half past six, there were so few customers. The Filipino behind the bar told us that the barstools were taken away on a Thursday night (probably because of the anticipated crowd?). M. asked the proverbial happy hour question and the Filipino told us happy hour was on Tuesday. In further adventuresome spirit we turned to look out on the vista presenting itself to us, the rear of the castle facade we gaped at from the front of the madina(t). The space opened into a delta-shaped room with a few pillars and tables that looked out on a small artificial lagoon with three model dhows strung with beads of white lights floating in the water. We sat at a table that raised us off the ground high enough to allow us to step down to the floor. A waitress approached us from the dark spaces near the wall behind us. We ordered Guiness and were promptly brought two Guinesses in Foster glasses, not the usual Guiness glass with bulbous neck that slightly narrowed into the stem. I broached the motif of the night during which we were plied with drinks that the beer did not have the bite it should have had. The Guiness seemed to be weak to me, though Mike did not really agree or disagree. It seemed flat compared to the Guiness at the Horse & Jockey pub in Al Ain. Nevertheless we toasted and drank. A low table in line with ours had two Arabs sitting at it. Otherwise we were alone and the bar was definitely sparsely populated with tables, there being none between ours and the bar behind us. And there was no distinctly marked dance floor either. We waited in anticipation of the bar filling up over the course of the night because we felt assured that we would be there for a while while the wives shopped. I was hoping to see for the first time the legendary Russian whores of Dubai, whom M. told me were actually largely Ukrainians. But to no avail, dear reader, they did not come out to the BAR ZAR, it being as M. observed a spot catering to the tourist crowd.
Two of the waitresses began to fiddle with the large pillar shaped gas heater near our table. Obviously they were not the usually expected Filipina waitresses you find in the Emirates since they were speaking Russian, as M. guessed, to each other while they tried a number of times before they successfully ignited the gas with the trigger mechanism inside the metal pillar at the top of which the flames finally manifested themselves, festooning the top of the pillar with a crown of tiny blue flames tipped with white and yellow. The waitresses wore black pants and polo shirts with two phrases in two dull orange swatches across the front of their polo shirts, 'come as' and 'you are'. This was a sign that this place catered to tourists as it was not obviously in the business of titillating Arabs and expats with a seraglio of slave girls from the Gems of the East dressed in short skirts. All the waitresses looked like typical waitresses insofar as their hair was pulled back and tied neatly behind the head. They did not smile either when they went about their business and receded to the wall to stand like carytids with hands folded discreetly in front when not busy.
The bar began gradually to fill up, and M.'s assessment that it was a tourist bar was corroborated by the number of young Britt tourists, the men with brilliantined stand-up hair and the women exposing shoulders and back and wearing those low slung tight jeans with a wide belt whose buckle is located just above the mons Venus, vaguely reminiscent of the lock on a chastity belt. Three female muscians appeared and began to sing and play electric guitars to create a subdued tableau of pleasure in the brown light of a Vermeer painting. I was expecting a Filipino band, which is the usual fare in the Emirates. You could cut the thickness of the anomie with a knife, the happy festive air given by Filipinos was so lacking. However, M. and I enjoyed ourselves at our island table as we gazed at the bar and bandstand where most of M.'s so-called tourists had gathered, facing inward, away from the vista with the dhows strung with lights.
After the two Guinesses I wanted a less potent beer and listened while the waitress went through the litany of beers on tap including Stella and a German beer I had never heard of, something like 'Schweivahr', a beer M. knew. Again they were served in Foster glasses, and M. categorically said upon tasting the beer that it was not Schweivahr. This confirmed my suspicion that the Guiness was watered down. M. launched into an oral disquisition on the short staying power of beer's freshness, especially when, perhaps, the beer had been left too long out in the open on a dock in Dubai, who knows what really goes on in "these places" where the gloss of the signs of consumerism does not belie what lurks beneath the surface of a society heavily reliant on expats from every corner of the globe, virtually a Babel of languages that saves the appearances of mute, monocultural affluence, especially in the desert where there are few signs of history or even nature. In other words, expat dock workers, most of whom were probably Hindu or Muslim of one nationality or another could have cared less about making sure the container of beer on the dock was expeditiously taken care of for its eventual arrival at our table. M. then fantasized about German beer and explained to me the almost magician-like status of the brew master in Germany who was the only one in any one brewery who knew the recipe for the beer, the special concoction of malt, hops and pure water in the correct proportions of his particular brand.
Since the wives had called, we finished our fish and chips, the fish rather pale and turdly round, served with a sauce that I could only describe as tasting like pea soup. The fries served in a glass were much better, being lightly sprinkled in spices. Each of us had consumed four pints of beer and were very satisfied, the only contact with the other customers being when a woman requested our empty chair to take away and a brief parting exchange with two Britt couples who asked for our soon-to-be vacated table and asked if we'd lived in the Emirates long. So, there weren't all tourists in the bar as M. had supposed.
