Outdoors in Dubai

The idea of public space is very alive in the emirates. It is common to see people sleeping, praying and picnicking on what are essentially grassy traffic islands. The people own public space in a way that has become pretty alien in the West. Despite the many restaurants and cafes available, numerous families still opt to load up a bag with food and hit the streets, sitting together on straw mats watching the sun slowly submerse himself into the loving waters of the Persian Gulf. This appeared a little strange to me initially, as sitting on a street or at the side of a motorway in the UK is synonymous with homelessness, mental health, and skateboarding gothic types.

This outdoors culture appears to be more than just a symptom of the emirate’s proximity to the equator. For example, I was recently invited by one of the “ex-pats” to a picnic at one of Sharjah’s many public parks. To my honest surprise there were actually queues to get into the park. I surmised that the congestion must be as a result of some fading B-list celebrity performing a free concert; but no, the people had turned out in their thousands just to see the sun, sky and each other – weird. It’s a shame there were no CCTV cameras to capture this outbreak of public serenity.

The parks in the emirates are well used and very well kept. In the UK the park is typically a nature reserve, a bit of nature that has not been tarmac-ed over and built on; yet. By contrast the parks in the emirates are bits of desert, the natural landscape, that have been forced into bloom and had turf and flower beds laid over them, in short, unnaturally beautiful, and high maintenance, kind of like a fading B-List celebrity. More naturally beautiful are the beaches especially those on the Indian Ocean. The one stretch of shore line that struck me as particularly beautiful is called Kal-ba. According to one local narration the name Kalba derives from the 14th century explorer Ibn Battuta’s description of this particular piece of shore line as being B shaped, in Arabic Kal = ‘like the’ and ba = ‘the letter B’). The dark brown sands of this B shaped strip of shore line embrace the gentle blue green waters of the Indian Ocean. Sun blackened fisherman toil with nets all along this glorious shore bringing in all manner of exotica from beneath the Ocean’s surface. The shoreline is also alive with the everyday people, families, friends, lovers, heroic youth and wizened elders, sitting, talking, walking and just contemplating. At Kalba the sunsets behind the mountains and the moon rises over the Ocean. Watching the moon get high over the Indian Ocean was a first for me and a sight I will never forget. Initially as the moon rose above the horizon a long thin white line illuminated the ocean’s reflective surface from horizon to shore, once the moon reached her zenith the white line disappeared and the ocean reflected a brilliant ball of moonlight which it’s self was a veiled reflection of the sun’s light – smoke and mirrors but magical none the less.