The author is a retired school administrator (formerly superintendent of schools in Potsdam and in Albemarle County, Va.) who now lives in Saratoga Springs and Sarasota, Fla. He and his wife, Ruth Kellogg, former Capital Region BOCES District Superintendent, recently traveled to Dubai and Abu Dhabi as part of a Saratoga County Chamber of Commerce cultural exchange trip.
Recently, a small group from Upstate New York visited The United Arab Emirates as part of a fact finding and goodwill effort aimed at understanding a part of the world about which most of us in America are ill informed, but with which there are growing connections in business, industry and cultural matters.
The Saratoga County Chamber of Commerce sponsored the journey mainly so that its member and friends could begin to forge a relationship of understanding with the place that has invested in GlobalFoundries, whose influence is already making its mark on business and real estate markets locally.
GlobalFoundries is an investment in America by an international investment company headquartered in the United Arab Emirates known as ATIC or Advanced Technology Investment Company. ATIC is part of the Mubadala Corporation, which is the investing arm for the Abu Dhabi government. The ruler of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who is also the president of the UAE has recently announced a plan to change the ratio of a 70 percent reliance on oil revenues and a 30 percent reliance of all other revenues, to the reverse of that by 2030.
The area of the Emirates is roughly 32,000 square miles, slightly smaller than New York state. The population is just over 8 million, up from 4 million in 2005. Fewer than one in five are native citizens; the majority comes from over 160 countries seeking jobs in the fast growing local economy.
Our American contingent consisted of 39 folks from our Capital Region ranging in age from young to 87. It can safely be stated that we were, to a person, astounded by the sheer magnificence of the Dubai urban area where we spent the majority of our time.
Our concentration was in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Abu Dhabi is the largest of the Emirates in area and has much unoccupied desert area in addition to its modern city, which has to rank among the unique cities of the world in terms of architectural variety and the sheer size of the buildings. It is the location of ATIC, which is housed in a modernistic building shaped like a wafer or computer chip standing a few hundred feet high. But nothing we saw in Abu Dhabi compares with the city of Dubai about an hour away to the northwest.
Dubai is obsessed with size and revels in the fact that it has many attractions which rank first in the Guinness Book of World Records. It has the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa (formerly known as the Burj Dubai) standing half a mile high, or nearly two-and-a-half times the size of the Empire State Building. The Khalifa houses the world’s fastest elevator; it carried us from the ground to the 138th floor observatory (a bit more than half way up the building) in mere seconds with no sense of movement except in ear pressure. It also has five of the world’s tallest buildings; the largest golf course (designed by Tiger Woods); the most magnificent horse racing track featuring an inside-the-oval 400 room hotel, each room of which looks out onto the track; as well as the world’s largest shopping mall; the world’s largest hotel (The Burj Arab); and the world’s only seven star hotel, The Atlantis. One is simply stunned by turning to the next vista, just down the street or around the next corner.
“It’s like China on steroids!” remarked one traveler, “not as huge or extensive, but not to be outdone for the biggest or the best.”
To western hemisphere dwellers, as we are, the cultural and religious differences to which we are exposed in an Arab nation are huge. All visitors and ex-pats are expected to be respectful of one another in public. Public displays of affection are not encouraged and things such as public drunkenness are not allowed. But there is a double standard in that ex-pats and tourists are held to a different, more lenient, standard than are the Muslim Arab natives. Unlike Saudi Arabia, a neighbor, the UAE is moderate in its view of religion and the punishment for perceived infractions is done by courts and not with Ayatollah-like fierceness.
Our trip perhaps is the beginning, for us, in releasing the cultural biases which separate us and which make understanding difficult. Tourism in the Emirates is now bringing in well over 20 million visitors yearly. Dubai alone has more than 70,000 hotel rooms. Mutual knowledge will grow and our differences will shrink. In 2020, Dubai is planning to host the World Expo. Perhaps you should sign on now. Just pick your hotel carefully; don’t get caught in a place called The Address in downtown Dubai, purportedly the world’s most expensive hotel, with over 100 floors of rooms and suites, all occupied and all costing upwards of a few thousand per night!