24 hours in Dubai - part one
I ended up in Dubai for 24 hours. "How much time do I have?" – About a day. "In Dubai?" - Yes. – Well, then I'm lost. Because spending a day in Dubai and not going anywhere is like being in the fridge and deciding that you're going to eat buckwheat exclusively today. The plane arrived early in the morning. I left the airport with a backpack, a phone, and the completely idiotic belief that it was possible to see the city in 24 hours. I didn't know then that Dubai was a city that looked on the map as if all the interesting places were literally in neighboring blocks, but in reality there might be several kilometers of road, an interchange, another interchange, and, apparently, an interchange that was built specifically to You've never been able to get to the previous one. But I didn't have much time, so I decided not to talk about the scale of the city and went straight to the Burj Khalifa. Burj Khalifa The first time I saw her was from the car and at first I thought, "Well, tall and tall." But as it got closer, that feeling quickly disappeared. The photos do not convey the size of this structure at all: in the picture you see a skyscraper, but in real life you stand next to it and realize that someone seems to have forgotten to reduce the building before placing it in the real world. I tried to take a normal photo for about five minutes, but each time it turned out the same thing: either the tower was in the frame, or my legs were in the frame. She just couldn't fit the whole thing. At some point, I put my phone away and decided that sometimes it's better to just look through my eyes, rather than trying to immediately turn everything I see into a photo. However, I couldn't enjoy the walk for a long time – it was so hot outside that after a few minutes I began to perceive any shadow as a potential place for permanent residence. The walk I overestimated On the map, the next point looked very close. The navigator cheerfully informed me: "15 minutes on foot," and I, as a person who is clearly not familiar enough with the climate of Dubai, decided to take a walk. For the first ten minutes, I felt like a real traveler. Five minutes later, I started looking for the nearest air-conditioned room. Twenty minutes later, he began to treat cars with a completely new respect, and after a few minutes he realized that humanity had not spent so much effort on inventing air conditioners in vain. In the end, I hailed a taxi, got in, and when the cold air blew over me, I felt about the same emotions as a man who had just been rescued from the desert. Old Dubai It was after that that I found myself in Old Dubai, and the most interesting thing happened here. Until that moment, I was looking at the Dubai that is usually shown on the Internet: glass towers, huge shopping malls, expensive cars, perfectly clean streets and the feeling that the whole city is wiped every morning with a special napkin. And then I turned into small streets, and the scenery seemed to have changed. Narrow aisles, small shops, the smell of spices, old buildings, vendors who are calmly talking to customers, someone is in a hurry somewhere, someone is sitting at the store and just watching what is happening. There was no sense of a giant city of the future that was constantly trying to impress you with its scale. And it was here that I became really interested for the first time. Because I began to realize that Dubai is not just about what it has built over the past decades. It has another side, which is easy to overlook if you spend the entire journey between skyscrapers and shopping malls. Boat across the bay There was a bay nearby, and I saw small boats. I didn't have any special plans, so I just boarded one of them. The boat started moving, and after a few minutes I found myself in the middle of the water, looking at two completely different cities at the same time: on the one hand, there were old buildings and small marinas, on the other, modern Dubai was gradually growing, and somewhere far above it all, the Burj Khalifa still towered. I was sitting there thinking about how strangely first impressions work. In the morning, it seemed to me that Dubai is a city of skyscrapers, where everything should be huge and expensive. And now I was sailing on a small boat along the old bay, and I realized that this simple moment might be more memorable to me than half the places I came here for. That's probably the point of traveling: the most memorable things don't always turn out to be the ones you've marked on the map in advance. Market After the boat, I decided to just go wherever I wanted. This is generally my favorite way to travel, because when you have every hour scheduled, you constantly think about the next point, and when there is no route, you can accidentally turn into an alley and discover a place you didn't know anything about. That's how I ended up on the market. I literally went to look, and after a few minutes they offered me sweets, showed me spices and told me something about the goods. At some point, I found myself talking to the seller, even though five minutes ago I wasn't going to buy anything here at all. Of course, I ended up buying something. It is still difficult to explain what exactly it is. When friends ask: – And why did you need it? I answer: — I don't know. And, perhaps, this is the most honest answer that can be given to the question of half of the things bought during travel. 14:00 When I finally looked at my watch, it was already two o'clock in the afternoon. And that's when it got a little unsettling. I had less than half a day left, and the list of things I wanted to see hadn't decreased much. The desert, the sea, Dubai at night, the Marina, the observation deck – and about twenty-seven other places that a normal person would never try to cram into one day. I opened the map, looked at the distances, closed the map, opened it again, and even for a second hoped that the distances had somehow decreased during this time. They have not decreased. And then I decided to do what any reasonable person would do in such a situation. Go to the desert. Because if you have ten hours left in Dubai, it's obvious that you need to get even further away from Dubai. It was from that moment on that my relatively calm one-day itinerary finally stopped being calm. But this is already in the second part.
