[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Dubai Is for Flamingos

[Bill Totten]

by Negar Azimi

Harper's Magazine Notebook (June 2009)


The flamingos at Dubai International Airport had been in quarantine for
five days and nobody knew what to do with them. Their handlers had gone
missing, I heard, and there was great bewilderment about how to tend to
their needs: what exactly they ate, the temperature to which they were
accustomed. People said the birds were unhappy, fluffing their feathers
and gravitating toward the edges of the enclosure like sulking children,
or erupting into great fits of squawking that sent the airport personnel
scurrying away. Natives of the Great Rift Valley, they were destined for
The Lagoons, a seventy-million-square-foot development of residences,
shopping centers, and offices set on seven interconnected islands of
finely cultivated marsh ecology in the middle of the city. But the
construction of The Lagoons, along with many other extravagant projects in
Dubai, had been put "on hold", maybe for good. The story I heard - and
Dubai is full of stories these days - was that the primary developer on
the project was in jail, held on multiple charges of corruption and
bribery. The long-legged waterfowl, dyed a deep mauve color for dramatic
effect, waited in awkward limbo.


Since the coming of the plunge, the Persian Gulf city of Dubai has been
subjected to a windfall of press coverage chronicling its dramatic
decline. Cocktail-party chatter once celebrated the spectacular rise of
this "global hub", its multicultural can-do spirit and liberal-leaning
ways. Now  conversations over artfully carved  morsels of cheese dwell on
hubris and the inevitability of imploding bubbles. "It just had to end",
one hears. "It was too big, too much, too fast". Heads nod in unison.
Earlier this year, the Australian feminist and sometime Marxist Germaine
Greer deplaned at Dubai International Airport for all of a four hour
layover. Boarding one of Dubai's hokey green double-decker tourist buses,
she traveled a typical route that took her from the tallest building in
the world (the Burj Dubai) to a hotel shaped like a sailing ship (the Burj
Al Arab) to a handful of malls, and proceeded swiftly to eviscerate the
place. "For all its extravagant novelties and its masses of petunias,
Dubai is a city with neither charm nor character", she wrote in a February
issue of the Guardian. Some weeks later, her colleague Simon Jenkins
described flying over Dubai in an airplane. He was no more generous,
dismissing the city as "a festival of egotism with humanity denied", and
concluding ominously, "The towers of Dubai will become casualties not of
human greed but of architectural folly. Their lifts and services,
expensive to maintain, will collapse. Their colossal facades will shed
glass. Sand will drift round their trunkless legs. Animals will inhabit
their basements." Animals! Imagine that. In part, Dubai invites such
hysterical interpretations because it is nearly impossible to verify
anything there. When the New York Times published accounts of 3,000 cars
abandoned at the airport by panicked debt-ridden foreigners, officials
insisted that the number was more modest: eleven. Three thousand or
eleven? Who knows? The cars are but one example. No one seems to be
collecting statistics in any systematic way. What is offered instead is a
stream of perennially sunny press releases ("UAE Protects Workers'
Rights", announced a piece in the Gulf News last year in response to a
report by Human Rights Watch on the dire situation of laborers). And
although rumors have always had a magical currency here, these days they
have become Dubai's chief commodity. A cursory sampling: Thousands of
businessmen have been locked up in prison for bad debts; come the end of
the school year, half the expatriate population will abandon their
strenuously air-conditioned palaces; the United Arab Emirates, famously
tax-free, will soon impose an income tax on all its residents; neighboring
Abu Dhabi will shift its border into Dubai in exchange for a $20 billion
"bailout"; the posh Atlantis Hotel, perched on the tip of a man-made
island shaped like a palm tree, has shut an entire wing due to low
occupancy; the ruler of Dubai is dead; judging from the city's ubiquitous
security cameras, there have never been so many people weeping in
elevators; there are thirty-two purple flamingos languishing in Terminal 3
of the Dubai International Airport. "It's all lies", an acquaintance from
the Executive Office, the ruler's consulting circle, told me defensively
as we sat at a Starbucks in the Emirates Towers. "It is all coming from
Abu Dhabi", said another EO employee, referring to the emirate's oil-rich
cousin next door. And although I knew these individuals were unreliable
narrators, I wondered if there weren't also glimmers of promise out there
in the vast desert expanse that the journalist Jenkins had so happily left
for dead. Long before the indoor ski slopes and marathon shopping
festivals that made Dubai both a business-school case study and an
inspired tourist trap, this spur of land was part of a vast trading empire
that stretched from the ports of Zanzibar to China. Whatever it may have
lost in consumer confidence, Dubai remains uniquely situated at the
crossroads of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. And so I set out to talk
to Dubai's residents, the little people who haven't yet headed for the
hills, to see what they thought about the impending apocalypse.


"Most of the England has been purchased by Iranians", says Mr Nouri, a
thickly lashed sixty-something seated in the management office of
International City, a sprawling housing development on the edge of central
Dubai. We are in China - aptly, the most populous of the developments,
which also include France, Greece, Italy, Morocco, Persia, and Spain. Mr
Nouri, who works for an Iranian oil company and is shaped like a sweet
potato, is suspicious of me and my queries. I have suggested that I am in
the market to buy an apartment in England (whose architectural flourishes
have all the character of a Ramada Inn), though I am also seriously
considering Morocco. "Four years ago there was no one here. And the prices
were almost twice as high. Now there are no parking spaces in the
England." He seems satisfied with himself. Eventually he discloses that he
is also an owner: "I bought myself and my daughters a second home here at
a bargain". However, he concedes, "sometimes it smells in the England. But
only when there is a strong breeze." As it happens, England is situated
alongside a massive sewage-processing plant, a fact that has inspired more
than a handful of persons to refer to this Olympic village as
"International Shitty". "But it is getting better", he assures me. "They
are working on it. Soon, the smell will be gone". At Mr Nouri's urging, I
spend several hours after we part ways wandering around in the sun looking
for an Iranian restaurant in China. (International City boasts an Afghan
grocery in Greece, an Indian restaurant in Persia, and a dumpling cafe in
Italy that is owned by an Iraqi. Still, cosmopolitanism has its limits:
Dubai's large population of South Asians notwithstanding, there is no
India.) It turns out China is vast. I settle on kebab in Turkey. Later,
while strolling through the finely palazzoed streets of Italy, I find that
a cup of sweet melon juice is the same price as my entire Chinese meal.
That same day, I meet Mohsin, a Pakistani man with severely pomaded hair
who runs a one-man real estate business in Dubai's Deira neighborhood and
does a swift trade in homes in International City. A sort of Naipaulian
antihero, he left his wife and children behind in Torrance, California,
and seems to be plotting out a sweet enough existence in Dubai, where he
caters to Nigerians and Iranians in the market for a second home. In spite
of the general real estate downturn, he tells me, the Nigerians and
Iranians, whose respective economies have been slower to feel the effects
of the global crisis, are still buying in droves. As a result, he made
more money in the first few months of this year than in the past five
years put together. "Big money", he says, insisting on the "g". He holds
up his hands as if indicating a fish yea big. "It's a buyer's market, so
for me business is good. Dubai will bounce back. You wait and see".


"We are the Burj AI Arab of chocolate", says Martin van Almsick.
 
Just off the road to El Ain, a few kilometers from the densely zigzagging
skyline that marks "downtown Dubai", is the world's first producer of
camel-milk chocolate. Al Nassma, aptly located on a patch of desert where
the only colors in sight are various shades of light brown, operates under
the patronage of Sheikh Mohamed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai
and the vice president of the UAE, and houses 3,000 of the finest camels
from around the world. Van Almsick, the general manager of the farm, is a
German-born chocolatier who once served as director of Cologne's chocolate
museum. He is a sprightly, energetic man who fell in love with the East
while reading Karl May novels as a kid. Like a box of Cracker Jacks in
reverse, all the pocket editions of May's oriental tales, he tells me, had
a bar of chocolate inserted within. "The newspapers write about Iraq and
Afghanistan and all these sufferings, but people have had enough. They
need chocolate! We all need it. It is something related to our
childhoods", he says, biting into a piece of chocolate shaped like a
camel. "And camel's milk has higher-than-average levels of vitamins B and
C - iron, too". Al Nassma's flavors, all of which have a distinctly
mineral flavor, include cocoa, date, macadamia nut and orange zest, and,
the company's flagship, "Arabia" - a blend of honey, cardamom, and other
spices. It is 10:30 am and I am certain this is not his first chocolate of
the day. He continues, "What goes through your head when you hear the
words 'goat milk'? Nothing, right? But say the word 'camel' and people's
eyes light up. They are the most charming animals! And what's more, they
are part of the local heritage. They have three sets of eyelids, you know.
Because of the sand." Al Nassma, like International City, is faring well.
Since its launch last October, van Almsick has attracted many customers,
among them several luxury hotels in the region and the Saudi royal family.
Soon you will be able to buy his chocolates from Harrods, in London. By
now, we are sipping cups of camelicious cappuccino, a prototype in early
stages. "This is a story that can only happen here", he tells me, a
perfect halo of sunlight having suddenly illuminated his head of golden
locks. "Chocolate is recession-proof. Maybe people can't afford big cars
or yachts anymore, but these little pleasures are forever. There has never
been a better time to eat chocolate."

It is true that many people are leaving Dubai. The offices of Aries
International immigration services are on the second floor of the Emirates
Bank Building in Karama, a residential neighborhood - one of the city's
oldest - along the Dubai Creek and filled with members of the city's
white-collar South Asian community. The Aries reception area is a small,
wincingly fluorescent-lit room, a perfect square, with a potted fern, four
red plastic chairs, and a stack of faded oversized coffee-table books
about Australia. I spy Australia: Images of a Timeless Land. Seated behind
a desk surrounded by a plastic barrier is Aby, a petite Filipino woman
wearing a complicated bright-green top and chatting away on the phone
through an earpiece. She has one hand wrapped around a can of diet soda
and the other poised for AIM chat. Seated before her are two men from
Pakistan. Aby, who once dreamed of being a television newscaster like
Christiane Amanpour, is very good at her job, which involves receiving
visitors, answering phones, making appointments, and collecting heaps of
CVs from people hoping to get work visas in Canada and Australia. Given
the spike in layoffs these past months, demand for Aries's services has
never been greater. Aby gets off the phone to address the two men standing
before her. "You are both clients, right?" Blank stares. "Do you have file
numbers?" More blank stares. "Mr Sumesh, Mr Ritesh, my name is Aby. I want
to help you, but I need to know if you are already in our system."
Finally, Mr Ritesh speaks up - in flawless, albeit non-sequitur, English.
"I want to move to Canada". "Do you have a file number?" "Canada", he
repeats. Another man comes in, looking vaguely expectant. 
"Who are you?" he asks Aby.
 
"My name is Aby. A-B-Y. Please sit down and wait for your turn, sir". The
queue is growing longer by the minute. 
Aby, who came to Dubai nine months ago from Manila, found her receptionist
job on the Internet. "All they required was knowing how to use a
computer!" She works eleven-hour days, seven days a week, but is happy
simply to have a job. She even received a raise last month - in fact,
everyone in this busy office did - bringing her salary to 3,000 dirhams a
month. "I tell my colleagues we are so lucky. Things are bad here for many
people. I heard they are capturing more jaywalkers on the streets just to
make money. Maybe they will come and get me for saying these things. They
will say, 'You are saying Dubai is going down'." She corrects herself,
"But you know what? They are visionaries here."


The Dubai World Cup, touted as the world's richest horse race, goes on as
scheduled. Each year on a Saturday in the spring, thousands of people
descend upon this patch, of grass in the desert to watch horses circle a
magnificently fancy track. In the public section, where admission is free,
the Sudanese, most of them northerners, turn out in the biggest numbers,
followed by the Pakistanis, the Indians, and assorted others; together
they partake of a Woodstock-sized group picnic. In what is referred to as
the Apron View section, where tickets go for several thousand dirhams,
droves of drunken expats, beet-colored from the sun and abundant booze,
stumble about the lawns in pointy heels and hats shaped like birds and
paisley suits and watch anything but the races. There is a champagne bar
called The Bubble Lounge, a Style Arena in which an elaborate ladies'
fashion competition is staged, and much slurred enunciation and giddy
gyration to very bad house music. This year's race, I soon learn, should
be tight, with a front-runner named Albertus Maximus and his closest
competitor, an Argentine-bred horse named Asiatic Boy. I lean across a
gaggle of Sudanese men in the public section, one of whom asks to borrow
my pen. They are hunched over a red betting slip for which the winning
prize is 60,000 dirhams. As the pen passes through twelve sets of hands, I
ask them why they have come to the day's event. "We came for the lottery
money", Hassan tells me. "The view", says Saeed. "To see the foreigners in
their clothes", offers Magid. Later that evening, a locally owned and
trained horse, jockeyed by a local man named Ahmad Ajtebi, races to a
first-place finish. This has never happened before, and the cover of the
Gulf News shows the wiry jockey, his arm outstretched in a victorious
pose, with the headline: "Ajtebi The New Role Model for UAE Kids". A hero
is born.


On one of my last days in Dubai, I drive past The Lagoons, its entrance
blocked by security and the scenic marshlands visible only from the
adjacent highway. I have been thinking about the flamingos again. How long
will they remain in the middle of delirious Dubai, locked in by the busy
Sheikh Zayed Road on the one side and skyscrapers on the other? Will they
ever go home? I call up Sama Dubai, the stateowned development firm that
was in charge of The Lagoons project before it all came to a screeching
halt. I am eventually referred to Kevin Hyland, a British-born flamingo
specialist at Dubai's Wildlife Protection Office, who confirms that the
real estate venture was supposed to have included flamingos, though
they've never set foot in an airport. They're local birds - about 1,000 of
them - and Hyland has been tending them since the 1990s, at their home in
the Ras Al Khor Wildlife Sanctuary, which was to be one of The Lagoons'
premier attractions. Nor have they been dyed purple but are instead a
standard shade of pink. And if the new, grand lodgings envisioned for them
fail to materialize, at least they are not in jail, where several
executives of Sama Dubai have, in fact, been obliged to take up residence.
Like flamingos everywhere, they cluck, squawk, and flutter, but these are
not necessarily noises of complaint. I've come to think of them as stoic,
strutting under the sun as they weather the interminable downturn.

_____

Negar Azimi is a senior editor of Bidoun magazine.


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