1/23/17
The gold souk (market) is in Old Dubai, a section of town markedly different from the glistening skyscrapers and opulence of places like Internet City Dubai or Burj Khalifia. The series of open air markets is like New York’s Canal Street but much more blatant in the wares being sold. There’s a ton of gold on display, lavish, gaudy, Mr T style items, albeit plenty of other things for sale too. Upon arriving at the gold souk by taxi, I was immediately offered the opportunity to buy a copy Rolex and a Versace bag. And when I say immediately, I mean I had only just opened the door and hadn’t even stepped out of the cab yet. It was awesomely in my face.
But unlike the aggressions I’ve experienced in other cities, such as the grabbing and shoving of hawkers and cab drivers when I first arrived in Cartagena, Colombia, I was only really given a hard sell and made incredibly uncomfortable once. As we strolled through the various knock-off land stalls and marketplace, there did seem to be a standard Gold Souk sales pitch – hawkers would try and sell me Rolex, Tag Hauer, and various other watches; they’d offer Reda hand bags or both of us the chance to “not buy, just feel” the soft pashminas they were selling; and if we begged off saying we were just looking they’d say how good it was to just look in their store, not far, just around the corner. I kept apologizing for not being interested and snapped a few shots of the areas as I went.
The most aggressive pitch came from a guy grabbing me off the street and wrapping my head in a keffiyeh, the Arabic head scarf — “one picture,” he said. I insisted that he get in it then. The lighting is a bit wonky and afterwards I felt obligated to see what he had in his store. Out of curiosity I asked how much the keffiyeh was — 110 dirhams. Reda, the local expert scoffed, but so did I even as a yokel. The price dropped to 100… then 50… and as I was walking away he punched 40 into his calculator to show me. Still no sale… but I suspect the scarf might not have been worth even that. Reda’s take was whatever the initial offer was you needed to get to a third of that for what you’d pay in the shops.
Given the gold wares on display, I was struck by the lack of private security and bars on windows. It reinforced the notion that crime is low in UAE due to an abundance of CCTV and severity of its laws. Even the Guinness World Record holding giant gold nugget had little protection – it wasn’t even encased in glass inside the store. To be fair, the biggest deterrent to its theft might be its weight — tough to pull a smash and grab, quick getaway when hauling that nugget!
For a dirham apiece, we rode the water taxi to the other side of the waterfront. A kid was throwing bread into the water and it was like a scene out of a Hitchcock movie. Birds swooped in and chased the boat in search of the food supply. But though they came close, they never landed on the boat – whether that was through conditioning at being shooed away previously I couldn’t ascertain. But I thought this series of shots summed up the experience nicely. I posted one to Facebook that didn’t feature Reda as I never quite got a read on her take on photos on social media. But I’m including them here as when I looked at them later I thought her genuine terror reaction shots in a few of my oblivious selfies are hilarious. Mainly because at the time I must not have known how freaked she was… and how kinda freaked I would be.
After a long walk wandering through Old Dubai, including visits to a museum chronicling the founding and development of the city over time… and how some things to me sadly never really changed…
…we took a cab to Ilona’s friend’s restaurant. Dwayne Krisko is the executive chef at Pullmans and gave us a chef’s selection dinner at the Medley Restaurant. Overwhelming food options and all quite tasty. He’s an ex-pat who has chef’d in Beirut and all over the Middle East for close to a decade. As I said in my Facebook post – Reda sometimes runs marathons with me but she apparently always runs with the in crowd in real life! I was underdressed, outclassed, but definitely NOT underfed.
It was a fine way to cap my trip to Dubai… and oh, man, now it’s off to Oman for Friday’s Muscat Marathon.
Note – I’m gonna keep making that “Oh, man / Oman” joke. It’s the new “Oprah / Uma!”