Chapter 19: Winter(?) In Dubai

Let’s continue catching up.

We spent the winter in Dubai. As mentioned prior, short-term housing prices proved this to be a bad idea, but we made the most of it: sunny and 75 for three straight months isn’t a bad weather forecast. (On New Year’s Eve we actually got rain, a rarity causing people to peep out of their apartments to film the downpour on their phones.)

Our new apartment backed up to the Burj Khalifa, and our bedroom looked south towards Business Bay.

Unlike our first month’s rental, this one actually had chairs on its balcony, where we could sit and watch the sunrise.

The Burj is one of my favorite buildings, and the holder of many records: tallest building, tallest structure, highest restaurant, most stories, longest elevator, and, sadly unverified by me, world’s highest toilet.

In the evenings, we could walk down to the promenade of the Dubai Mall (most-visited, and second-largest, mall in the world) at the foot of the Burj, and watch the nightly fountain and light show.

Christmas isn’t officially celebrated in the predominantly-Muslim UAE, but Dubai hosts enough expats and tourists to kowtow slightly to the season. My company gave me a week off for the holidays, and Rachel and I decorated our apartment festively.

Ok, maybe not so festively. We got a late start, and the only Christmas tree we saw for sale in the Dubai Mall was $400 – no, thank you.

On the morning of Christmas Eve, we got up at 5:00 a.m. to watch the sunrise from the top (well, 125th floor out of 140-something) of the Burj Khalifa.

Now, let’s talk about brunch. Brunch is nearly a religion in Dubai, and Friday brunches are notoriously extravagant displays of gluttony and partying. But their timing is a bit off. My office overlooked a hotel patio with a notoriously rowdy outdoor brunch, and late one Friday morning I asked my coworker why they weren’t doing brunch that day. He looked at me strangely and said, “It’s only 11:00 now, they won’t start for a few hours.”

So, these hotels will throw two “brunches” on Friday and Saturday, one about 1:00 p.m. to 5:00, and a subsequent one from 7:00 p.m. until midnight or so. Of course, calling it a brunch at 7:00 p.m. on a Saturday night doesn’t make any sense, but the word has been co-opted in Dubai to mean any all-you-can-eat, all-you-can-drink, ludicrously debaucherous affair.

Rachel and I attended one such episode during our first month in the city, which turned out to cater to the younger and hipper crowd, a coterie which Dubai has increasingly hammered home does not even remotely include us. We drank prosecco and ate sushi and watched the crowd begin to dance in the aisles and heard the DJ spin louder and louder, until we devolved into texting because we couldn’t hear each other’s voices across the narrow table. We left when we looked around and couldn’t see anyone else over 25, and we when got home we decided both that a.) that was kinda fun, and b.) we didn’t want to do it again.

As an aside, in January 2022 the UAE government officially switched from a Friday-Saturday weekend to a Saturday-Sunday one in order to coincide with Western businesses. This caused no small consternation among the local Muslim population, as Friday is the holy day when they attend mosque for weekly prayers. The more prosaic worry among the international ex-pat population was: what would happen to Friday brunch?

Anyway, after the top-of-the-Burj sunrise experience, we went to a more sophisticated Christmas Eve brunch at a Brazilian steakhouse in the financial district.

It turns out that drinking champagne and eating vast quantities of Brazilian beef had a decidedly soporific effect, so the three of us lazily napped the afternoon away.

On Christmas Day we relaxed and cooked foods that reminded us of home, but the 80-degree sunshine made it difficult to envisage snow sleds and red cheeks.

Boy oh boy, New Year’s Eve is a big deal in Dubai. People come from all over the world to see fireworks at the Burj Khalifa (world’s highest fireworks show; most fireworks launched per minute; largest pyrotechnic display), which happened to be just a few hundred yards from our apartment.

Restaurants in the area were charging up to $2,000 per person for tables for the night with direct views of the fireworks, but we walked a half-mile away to a seafood restaurant for a more laid-back experience, away from the throngs jostling through downtown. Security was tight, and before leaving our apartment we had to register with a few different apps for QR codes to allow us access back into the downtown area.

The restaurant was elegantly decorated in silver and gold, and we chowed on a spread of steak, oysters, lobster, and pasta as 2022 approached.

Just before midnight, everyone walked out to the patio to view the fireworks show.

We shuffled back inside to sing Auld Lang Syne and eat brownies a la mode. Somewhere around this time the relatively sedate environment inside the restaurant turned into a high-stepping conga line, and I think it goes without saying that Rachel and I napped for most of January 1.