A Whirlwind Tour Through the Middle East – Abu Dhabi

It came time to say goodbye finally.  The tour group boarded the plane to fly back to Dubai.  Yang, a fellow tour member, invited me to her home in Abu Dhabi.  We arrived late night after an hour and a half of driving from Dubai.  Her house was enormous.  She had three daughters and the daughters’ room itself was larger than an average flat in Hong Kong.

Abu Dhabi is the capital city of the UAE.  Being Chinese, we drew comparisons with the Chinese cities.  Abu Dhabi is like Beijing, which is the political center of the country.  Dubai is more like Shanghai, which is more commercially-oriented.  The rivalry between these cities are similar as well.

The next day, we went to the Palace Hotel.  As a six-star hotel, it stood lavishly with glistening gold under the sun.  We sat down at the café and sipped coffee sprinkled with real gold flakes.  That would be the most luxurious coffee I have ever had in my life.  A group of black women sang a chorus outside the hotel.  They looked like an American sorority to me.

The skyline of Abu Dhabi, like that of Dubai, stood proudly as architectural innovations.  The most outstanding building was the Great Mosque of Seikh Zayed.  It is the heart of religious worship within the UAE.  It was really too bad that I went on a Friday and did not get to visit the Great Mosque because it was closed to tourists during the prayer day.

The afternoon was a markedly different experience from a view of the Great Mosque.  We headed to the Ferrari Theme Park for the fastest roller coaster in the world.  At 220 km/h, this ride was so thrilling that I was too overwhelmed to even scream before it all ended within two minutes.  I then realized that perhaps I was a bit too old for this type of excitement.

At the evening we had a great dinner together at the mall.  The mall at the Ferrari Theme Park easily emulates any significant mall in the United States.  Stores like Victoria’s Secret and Starbucks stood proudly as the testament to UAE’s effort to welcome western and local consumers alike.

It was perhaps the competitive spirit of the Middle Easterners that drove what looked to me a contradiction, the way that western culture was rejected and yet embraced at the same time.   The mall was so glamorous I thought it was grander than the Bloomingdale’s in Los Angeles.