THE HAIRY GIRAFFE… IN THE UNITED ARAB EMIRATES
After 10 days in the United Arab Emirates, it’s time to reflect. How did we experience this journey? What were our joys, disappointments, questions, doubts, and discoveries? This is not merely an assessment of a country but rather of a trip—how we perceived it individually and subjectively.
 We are François and Benjamin, Canadian and French giraffe hairstylists and travel enthusiasts. On this blog, discover our travels, tips, moods, and everything you need to become a giraffe hairstylist and embark on travelling the world. An honest blog with photos guaranteed 100% unfiltered and untouched. |
Benjamin’s Travel Reflections
New York was the destination of my first independent trip. I immediately fell in love with the beauty of its architecture, its dynamism, and its unique atmosphere. Having grown up in Bordeaux, where buildings don’t exceed two stories, I became fascinated by the verticality of New York’s architecture. At that time, Dubai was just beginning to construct its most iconic buildings, the Burj al Arab and the Burj Khalifa. A city rising towards the sky was inevitably a place that made me dream.
More than ten years later, I finally discover Dubai. In the meantime, I have had the chance to visit several vertical cities, Tokyo, Seoul, Chicago, and even Sao Paulo. And then, my eagerness to explore Dubai had been diminished by what I had heard about it: Dubai was an artificial city, attracting only influencers, and deserving only a quick stop, perhaps during a layover.
Hence our decision to not just visit Dubai but to take a more in-depth tour of the United Arab Emirates.
The verdict? Indeed, this country can only question our relationship with authenticity. It is the first destination of our round-the-world trip, and I am already a bit disoriented. Touring the United Arab Emirates is discovering a few authentic oases in an ocean of artificiality. On the surface, the mosques rival the Taj Mahal or the Blue Mosque, the orange deserts are enchanting, and the skyscrapers compete with those in New York.
And yet, all of this feels fake. Terribly fake. It lacked a certain emotion, the emotion that cannot be built by exploiting Indian workers or by aligning hundreds of millions of petrodollars. This emotion, felt every time one strolls through the streets of New York, Paris, Athens, or Khiva, can only be created by the passage of time, by the specific history and culture of a place, by the veneer that turns a place into a city and not just a collection of buildings and people.
In the United Arab Emirates, I often felt like I was visiting non-places, spaces with no history, no distinct culture, no specificity. They tirelessly emphasize, on every visit (and the Louvre Abu Dhabi made it the guiding theme of its exhibition), the importance of universalism. However, the risk is then to erase all specificity, all cultural richness.
In the United Arab Emirates, Emiratis represent only 11% of the population, and foreigners, who almost never obtain nationality, are sometimes (new) wealthy Westerners and often South Asian workers exploited by the former. Spatial segregation is striking, especially in Dubai, where each community resides in its own neighborhood, a few kilometers and light-years away from others.
There is also sexual segregation: in Abu Dhabi, men crowd at the back of the bus to, religious obligations dictate, leave the front rows for the far fewer women. Due to a labor migration, there are nearly 2.5 times more men than women in the United Arab Emirates. The country is undeniably a male-dominated society. This feeling is reinforced by religious conservatism, which places women in the home and requires them to be covered if they leave. While Dubai stands out as an exception, in some emirates, women are predominantly veiled, and many wear the niqab. Yet, on the neighboring beach, some tourists lounge in bikinis, giving the impression that the United Arab Emirates have embraced McDonald’s slogan: come as you are.
However, when you look at photographs of the United Arab Emirates on social media, you get the impression that they were taken in the land of a thousand and one nights. This is because everything seems to have been done, thought of, so that the tourist leaves with Instagrammable snapshots. Abu Dhabi’s grand mosque is visited along ‘photo points’ so that everyone can capture the perfect shot and showcase the beauty of the Emirates to the whole world. But this aesthetic perfection does not create an authentic experience.
The cities of the United Arab Emirates are filled with cosmetic surgery clinics. Like a symbol that appearance would be more important there, that the essential is that it shines and sparkles, and it doesn’t matter if it’s not actually gold.
I mentioned earlier some oases of authenticity. Fortunately, the United Arab Emirates offer a bit of diversity, and sometimes, along a road, you come across a carefully restored fort, a cultural museum (I am obviously thinking of the Louvre but also the Museum of Islamic Civilization in Sharjah), or even sand dunes that are not (yet?) covered by the tracks of a 4×4.
I am happy to have started our around-the-world journey in the United Arab Emirates. It’s not only the perfect transition between the West and the East but also a beautiful way to immediately pose the question of the authenticity of a tourist destination, to wonder what one seeks when crossing the planet, what one hopes to find, even though everything has already been discovered, and we are not explorers but simple visitors. A question that will undoubtedly accompany me throughout my journey.
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