Do Buy
🗓 posted Sep 10, 2025 by Josh Erb🔢 570 words
🏷 #travel #dubai
A couple weekends ago, my family popped over to Dubai for a long weekend. Monsoon season had felt long and depressing. We were close, direct flights were affordable, an abundance of travel rewards meant we could get a good deal on a downtown hotel.
Dubai, the small slice we experienced, was hard to put my finger on. There's an uncanny feeling to visiting it. I've never been to Las Vegas, but I've been to The Villages in Florida, and I've read some Baudrillard. There is definitely something of the hyperreal in Dubai.
As our flight touched down, the pilot informed us that the outside temperature was 108° F. We learned, shortly after disembarking, that Dubai also has a pollution season and we had come in the middle of it. The air was a familiar smudged, pastel haze outside every window we looked through. We weren't too concerned, given the desert temperatures we hadn't planned to spend much time outside.
U.S. citizens enjoy visas issued at point of entry. So we passed through checks quickly. The officer who stamped our passports slipped in a complimentary eSIM card before handing them back. He seemed bored, long since disinterested in all of the people who were coming to see his home country. Aware, perhaps, that the city and the country existed on disparate planes. We were entering the city, but we would learn nothing about its history or culture.
I've had never thought describe a place as "overdeveloped" before coming to Dubai. Highways, metro, a half a dozen sky scrapers all with the same realty company name on them. You get the sense that every material thing you come into contact with is an asset in a developer's portfolio. The rough edges of life have been sanded off, the dirt has been cleared away to ensure a good experience for the customer.
Maybe that's what you are when you visit Dubai for a weekend. Not a tourist, but a customer.
This impression might be colored by the fact that we didn't plan any activities outside of the Dubai Mall. In Borges's short story, The Library of Babel, he describes a universe in the form of a library that contains all possible books. The Dubai Mall is Capitalism's version of this. A place in which all possible consumer brands have storefronts. Any sellable item can be found if you wander through the corridors long enough.
The first day were in the city, we walked from our hotel to the mall in an air-conditioned pedestrian walk way. We used a self-checkout stall to buy a burger at Shake Shack without having to to talk to anyone. In the middle of the mall there is a three-story tall aquarium. After we ate, we wandered across the vast valley of consumption to it. The Burj Khalifa watched over us through a well-placed skylight.
As we watched the activity in the water, two scuba divers swam across the expanse of the aquarium with an ad banner in their hands. I looked at the hundreds of fish, rays, and sharks swimming around as a frenzied crowd took pictures and pointed. And I thought about the mind-boggling amount of human labor, logistics, and engineering it takes to put a fish in the middle of the desert and keep him alive.
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