In many ways, this brunch was like a million others I'd had before: poached eggs with hollandaise sauce, fresh orange juice, coffee, buttered toast. The sun was glowing somewhere over the comfy outdoor sofas, and no one seemed in a hurry to finish up and get home.
But here at Shakespeare and Company, a cozy cafe in Dubai's Village Mall, there were a few vital differences from my usual Sunday-morning routine. First of all, it was Friday, the Muslim Sabbath in the United Arab Emirates. Second, on a nearby couch, a mustachioed, white-robed Emirati man and a woman (in black garb that concealed everything but her gorgeous face) were on a date, chatting and flirting far from the eyes of their families — a testament to Dubai's liberal attitudes. Finally, there was the sand. A dust storm had been kicking all day, blowing grit in from the desert just a few miles away. It coated my hollandaise like finely ground black pepper.
But even in the world of Friday brunches, Shakespeare and Company's stood out — because it was cheap. My friend Samira Mesbahi, a curly-haired actress from Paris, and I had spent just 113.12 dirhams, or US$30.82 at a fixed exchange rate of 3.67 dirhams to the US dollar.
The typical Dubai brunch, by contrast, is an affair of ritualistic excess, held in the restaurant of a five-star hotel, with an all-you-can-eat buffet of gravlax, coddled eggs, a foie gras bar, and tuna belly sliced by an eighth-generation sushi chef from Osaka. Such indulgence can easily run 300 dirhams a person, not including the unlimited-champagne surcharge.
Of course, this shouldn't surprise anyone who's ever heard the word Dubai. The emirate is synonymous with over-the-top artifice: the "seven-star" hotel, the skyscrapers rising from what moments before had seemed to be only tracts of sand, the man-made island chains, the indoor ski area. Frankly, I wondered how I'd afford anything at all. My wallet held only US$500, or 1,835 dirhams, for the weekend, and while a host of budget options — easyHotels, a low-cost-airline terminal — are set to open in the near future, none had broken ground by mid-March, when I visited. Even the cheapest stopover deals offered by Emirates, the flag carrier, would have eaten up more than half my budget.
But searching the Web, I found a fabulous deal: Villa 08. Owned by a pair of European expatriates, the three-bedroom house is in Arabian Ranches, a gated community on the distant southern edge of Dubai. On one side of the fence are swimming pools, a supermarket, a country club and rows of nearly identical villas in the style of Arabian forts. On the other side, the vast desert and burgeoning dust storm.
Villa 08's cheapest room was US$60 a night.
From Shakespeare and Company, Mesbahi and I drove my sand-colored Toyota Echo along Jumeira Road — a thoroughfare that reminded me of the strip-mall-saturated outskirts of Albuquerque — to Bur Dubai, the ancient heart of the city. It was here, on the banks of the Dubai Creek, that the city grew from a tiny Persian Gulf trading hub into a megalopolis fed by the idea that human beings, whatever their religion, will put aside their differences in pursuit of profit.
My destination was the Dubai Museum, housed in an 18th-century fort with tall, square "wind towers" that channel breezes to cool the interior. Three dirhams bought me entry to a series of dioramas about life in old Dubai: mannequins selling diamonds; mannequins building a dhow, the traditional Arab boat; mannequins studying the Koran. An exhibit on Bedouins blandly proclaimed that the nomads "love good deeds and hate evil." Surrounded by simulacra, I wondered: Where was Jean Baudrillard when I needed him?
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