Pages

June 10, 2012

The Lifestyle

This weekend was my birthday, so like any good recently single girl, I had to go out and party. Which meant a trip to Dubai for me and a few of my friends. It's slightly more difficult to go out in Dubai for us, being from Abu Dhabi and therefore clueless. Mostly it just involves a lot of travel between the different venues that we do know or want to try. We tried to go to one club, but that night there was a cover of 150 dirhams per person. (Roughly $50USD) Certain clubs also have things like "Indian Night," and if you're the wrong ethnicity, you don't usually have fun. (Although I totally enjoyed the bit when we stumbled into an Indian Night.)

We also went to dinner at JBR Walk. It's a strip of a restaurants on a wee street where people drive their fancy cars so that everyone can see them. And our food was fine, but not necessarily worth the price we paid, just like the cars. (The restaurants aren't actually that showy - there's a Chili's, for example - but still overpriced.)

Here in Abu Dhabi people also try to live "the lifestyle." The lifestyle of spending all of your money on fun, constantly, with no regard for tomorrow or the substance of what you're spending the money on. The slogan of Abu Dhabi Mall is actually "It's a lifestyle," which I find sadly un-self-aware. (The marketing in this country as a whole is really odd to me and my acclimatization to America's perfected marketing. It's like they don't know that there's a science behind it here.)

And there are times that I really get sick of the superficiality of it all, like 5am on my birthday when I am drunkenly calling my ex-boyfriend because he seems so much more real than the dude I was just talking to, who stole his entire appearance from LMFAO and didn't even flinch about buying all of my friends their drinks.

But then the next day, soberly, the lifestyle can be salvation. Going to the insanely huge mall for breakfast and window shopping was a wonderfully effective distraction from my guilt over my slip up.

5 comments:

  1. Happy Birthday.!....Have plans of taking the family there two years from now.( Dubai )

    ReplyDelete
  2. Happy Birthday! I'm glad that you got to go out and party. I guess that there's probably less opportunity for that in the Middle East?

    I know that I've made so many comments like this one by now, but I'm surprised that that type of lifestyle isn't illegal where you are! I have been wrong on so many counts...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. In Abu Dhabi and Dubai, there are plenty of opportunities to party. I maybe don't talk about it on here, but we do in fact go out every single weekend, haha. The birthday weekend just happened to be in Dubai, which is more... showy and clubs. Here in Abu Dhabi we mostly just go to pubs that have dancing.

      Delete
  3. Happy birthday! :)

    In my head, places like Dubai have always been synonymous with "the lifestyle" and extreme excess.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Belated happy birthday!

    ReplyDelete