Was planning to poke around Dubai yesterday but the ‘sleeping’ pill Rachel gave me knocked me out for 24 hours. Went to bed at like 10 PM and woke up at 10 the next evening, having no idea what was going on. I also passed out during Goldfinger, which was too bad. I have now checked out of my hotel and have to kill time before going to the airport. I have no impression of Dubai, other than that there is construction everywhere (that being the 2 mile strip between here and the airport). Coming in all you see is cranes, and looking out the window I see a bunch of brown people building another money-dump hotel.
I have been watching an obscene amount of TV, seeing as I’m only awake at night. Al Jazeera is interesting and very professional looking. Condi visiting, some Israelis breaking things, people in head cloth talking. Nothing too offensive, but I can’t understand what they’re saying. Saudi Arabian TV, on the other hand, is offensively bad. It’s like watching someone slowly and laboriously click thru a website. Just text of the latest news, scrolling through. They also showed an explanation of the hijab (veil) like 40 times. There was also some scary ass Koran verse about liars and all being struck down by the viccitudes of the righteous and all. Saudi 1 is mainly the Royal Family’s photo album, gladhanding suits and doing ceremonial stuff. On another channel some dude was offering advice on when to let your children out of the house.
I’d have to say that, on the whole, my impression of the middle east is generally sour. I see all these Arab princes and princess on TV and in the airports, but all I see around here are brown people working everywhere. However,
Dubai is unusual in that its population comprises mainly expatriates, with UAE nationals (Emiratis) constituting the minority. The vast majority of these expatriates come from South Asia and the Philippines. The UAE government does not allow any form of naturalization or permanent residence to expatriates. Children born in the country to foreign workers are not granted citizenship.
It is common practice for employers to retain employees’ passports for the duration of the employment contract to prevent expatriate employees from changing jobs. This is an illegal practice and is not enforced by the government. On termination of an employment contract, certain categories of expatriates are banned from obtaining a work permit in the country for six months.
The United States Department of State has cited widespread instances of blue collar labor abuse within the city and in the general context of the United Arab Emirates [6] (http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2004/41734.htm).
The government has been criticized by human rights agencies such as Human Rights Watch for its inaction in addressing the discrimination against Asian workers in the emirate. Salary structures based on nationality, sex, age, and race rather than on qualification are common (Wikipedia)
The country is obviously developing, it’s just weird that nobody new can truly take part, even if they’re born there. Dubai is probably actually a good example, however. Only 5% of its income comes from Oil and the economy looks pretty diversified. Emirates actually owns Sri Lankan Airlines. The internal population situation is actually more odd than I thought, covered in more detail on a Bahrani blog.
In the United Arab Emirates as a whole, foreigners outnumber nationals 7 to 1. As of 2001, the population in the UAE was 2.5 million people with 1.2 million Indians, 600,000 Pakistanis, 100,000 Iranians, 50,000 Britons and dozens of other nations represented. Within Dubai, the second largest of the seven emirates in the UAE behind Abu Dhabi, the ratio of foreigners to nationals is estimated to be between 5 to 1 and 12½ to 1. The bulk of Dubai’s population is comprised of Asians (650,000), Arabs (130,000) and Westerners (40,000) who have emigrated to the city in the United Arab Emirates mainly because of the discovery of oil and Dubai’s free market economy. In a profile of the city’s demographics, a May 2004 article in The Economist characterized each population group, “In the business world, Brits, Indians, Iranians and Lebanese are prominent, while for the grunt work of building artificial islands there are plenty of job-hungry Indians and Pakistanis from across the ocean.”(USC, via datadubai)
Right now there are exactly zero Arabs in this Internet Cafe. I’ve seen maybe 4 since I got here, though I have been passed out in a hotel most of the time. It’s strange that a country could look so diverse, and yet be politically controlled by so few. Or, maybe not. The world is more feudal than I ever thought it could be. Going out to get my ticket stamped, find a copy of this Muslim erotic novel (inshallah), and look around before the heat gets to me.
you may not see locals working on construction sites, but you will definitely see them if you go to any government department, mall, bank, organization – you will also see them often in pubs (rarely in their national dress though), at cinemas, shisha places and cafes. and you see brown people working everywhere because they are cheap labor…that is the case all over the world actually (with all the IT jobs being outsourced to india or taken over by indians). it’s a bit of a pain, to be honest. a lot of people come here from all over the world and demand a decent wage but the ‘brown’ people make it very difficult, because while a non-brown person might want 6000 dirhams to take up a job as a designer (for example), the brownie will happily do it for 3k or less. it works well for organizations, because they can cut costs, but it doesn’t do much for the ones that want to live well.
also, i doubt you found the erotic novel – they are big on censorship here (which is THE most annoying thing about dubai).
Hi Indi!
good to see you tourin’ the mid east :) Sad to know you got a bad taste of the region, however, i’d bet you your ‘sour’ experience would change once you pop over to Bahrain for a visit. One of the best places in the gulf, ok it’s not Dubai i know, but atleast it’s got some sorta’ sense for expats, human rights are being enforced now and when did you ever hear of employers getting jailed for mistreating their employees in the gulf? Well all that ahppens in Bahrain.
I was born in Bahrain and grew up here but got Sri Lankan roots, studied in Canada for a while and then headed back to ‘my’ country in the Fall of 2003, everything’s changed in Bahrain, there’s a F1 circuit here and democracy is creeping in because the King has basically started democratic reforms and the like. Human rights is huge over here, and then you ppl using rights as an excuse to lash back at the governement then and now. :-D
Chanad (the name means fish -coomon seas food dish here, grew up in Bahrain and is South Asian too, has been blogging since last April 2004) is one of the best bloggers we got on the island, he covers everything from asian factory workers being unfairly dismissed and domestic helpers abused to the country’s plate of political demonstrations and cutlural identities.
It is true that in Bahrain we have our own load of censorship problems and the like, however, i’m sure it’s pretty much the same anywhere else. You should come over and check out Bahrain for yourself, it doesn’t do any justice for me to just blog it on here.
Other bloggers you might be interested in checking out are Mahmood Al yousif who runs Mahmood’s Den (mahmood.tv), Silly Bahraini Girl whos a news editor for one of the 2 main local english daily news papers(sillybahrainigirl.blogspot.com) and other fellow bloggers listed on chanad’s site.
We’re holding our 9th Bahrain Bloggers Meetup tomorrow, and again next month during the first week, would love to have you here in the country and at the meetup, if you can’t make it for tomorrow (am not sure if you still in Dubai) then theres always next month.
There are two things i’d like to say:
Dubai is a great place for business but Bahrain is a great place to live in the mid east.
cheers,
Strav.
I’m sure that the Middle East is nice, I was just there involuntarily and I’m an ass. The food, certainly, can be good. I’ve also noticed that cities can be very different depending on who you’re there with. I noticed some of the Bahrani bloggers and they were interesting, keep it up.