Dubai Letter: hustle and commerce in busiest place on Earth

Dubai’s ever-expanding, futuristic airport is a concourse of Babel in the early hours of the morning, when flights from east and west converge. Thousands of bleary-eyed passengers, speaking all the world’s tongues, scan message boards, fill the souqs, sip scalding coffee and spiced tea or join long, snail-paced queues at transit desks to sort out flights missed due to sand storms.

From three to six in the morning the airport is packed. For those hours Dubai is a global hub, a mass crossroads. There is no place to sit. Weary travellers stretch out in the rock garden in concourse B, fill lounge chairs, walk and walk just to do something while they wait. Snacks at fast-food joints are all the same.

Passengers join the duty free queues to buy items they don’t really want. The clerk at the upscale wine shop says they no longer stock Vieux Télégraphe when I ask in a moment of bored devilry, having doubted they would.

He has an entire range of high-end and middle-ranking wines at high and affordable prices. Perhaps I will pass by on my homeward bound leg.

Biggest and best

Dubai seeks to be first in all things, even in airport arrivals. The emirate’s 2008 partial economic meltdown did not dim its ambition, enabling it to rebound. Dubai is the largest city state in the

United Arab Emirates

with a population of more than two million, the largest in the federation. Its ruler, Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, is the visionary behind its drive to be first, biggest and best in all things.

Samira, dressed in sports clothes, her long black hair swinging across her back, and I meet for coffee at Shakespeare and Co in Souq al-Bahar (“the market of the sailor”), a small upscale Arabesque mall at the foot of the shimmering silvery needle, Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. We sit under a wide umbrella on the terrace overlooking Dubai’s iconic fountains playing games with the morning breeze.

Samira is a private banker, working on a team that invests vast sums that pour into Dubai from the rest of the world. She is caustic about some of her Arab clients.

“Lebanese come and put their money in developments,” she says. “Syrians keep it in the banks. They’re only interested in safe-keeping.” Considering the war in their country, this is understandable.

My Indian friends, Sudha, Vinod and Nikhil, insist on a trip to Jumeirah Beach. We drive to Media City, host to hundreds of media and public relations companies, and take a tram that is not really a tram but a graceful, rather slow-moving train.

As we walk along the beach front the wind is kicking up surf and sand, so we opt for a table inside the first Italian place we come to and order pizza and pasta.

We watch hundreds of local couples, women in headscarves and black cloaks, men dressed for the warm day in trousers and short shirtsleeves, foreign men, women and children in shorts and T-shirts or jackets and trousers disporting themselves on the white sand and at the water’s edge. Dubai means to be all things to all manner of men – and women.

Business

We collect the car and drive to Mina A’Salam hotel where I meet Canadian-Iranian Ali Bourhani, a businessman just returned from Tehran who advises foreign firms how to do business in Dubai. Since we have not met before, I describe myself as grey-haired and dressed in black; he retorts, “I have no hair and am dressed in grey.”

We meet in a corner of the lobby where there is laughter from the bar next door as foreign residents enjoy a Friday brunch helped along by alcohol.

Over tea, Ali says that the UAE is “best poised to deal with [global] economic realities: it has hydrocarbons and is diversifying its economy. The city state of Dubai activates the emirates. Dubai provides logistics and services, jobs, travel and tourism. Dubai has turned itself into a destination for talent from around the region, talent who may find a hard time operating in the western world.”

He points out that 65 million people passed through Dubai’s international airport last year.

Back at my Indian friends’ home, I search online for the 2014 arrivals figure: almost 70 million passengers, the largest number on the planet, surpassing London’s Heathrow by almost 2,000. Eleven million spent at least one night in the emirate and were counted as tourists.