I don’t think you realize just how much you take walking for granted until you’re forced to sit for more than 14 hours in a cramped airplane seat.
When I began my long trek through the Dubai International Airport, my legs sighed in gratitude while my arms groaned in protest of the overweight bag. Maybe I shouldn’t have packed four novels. Yet everything else ceased to matter when I saw my beaming parents for the first time in five months.
I was born and raised in Cumberland until age 11, when my family abruptly moved from a small American town to a bustling international city. After seeing a Rolls-Royce, a Bentley and Ferrari in the short 20-minute drive to my new house, it finally hit me: I’m not in Cumberland anymore. I traded in my school uniform of jeans and a t-shirt for an actual uniform of slacks and ties. I waved farewell to the cold and snow and said hello to the only temperature in Dubai: hot.
Instead of spending our winter breaks huddled around the fireplace with hot chocolate, we would drink cold lemonade by the beach. I mean, it did go down to 70 degrees in December, which is pretty cold. The only time school was cancelled because of weather was during a thunderstorm because that’s the only “extreme weather” Dubai experiences.
Walking became a sacred activity since there was almost nowhere to walk in the city and the roads were full of people who were used to driving in different countries (aka accident zone waiting to happen). It didn’t really help the road situation when we had had camel crossings instead of deer crossings.
The main activity in Dubai is, without a doubt, shopping. There are more than 10 malls within the city, yet each one is unique. There’s the Mall of Emirates, with the indoor ski slope and amusement park. The Ibn Battuta Mall, the world’s largest themed mall, divided into six different sections designed to look like a specific country. The most famous mall, though, is also the world’s largest, the Dubai Mall.
There are hundreds of shops and restaurants, an indoor ice skating rink, an amusement park, aquarium and the world’s largest dancing fountain with water spraying 500 feet high. I think you’re starting to get the idea: Dubai has the “world’s largest” everything.
One of the best things about living in Dubai, though, was I suddenly had friends from all over the world. Even though I went to an American school, I was thrust into this society of “third-culture kids,” in which everyone has lived somewhere else or their parents are of different nationalities, or both.
Instead of school trips to the aquarium, we would travel to the Philippines for a week to learn how to scuba dive. On people’s 18th birthday, they would go skydiving and then get their driving license, since that was the legal age for both. It is a whole different world in Dubai.
College is hard, obviously. But going to college halfway across the world from your home is even harder. Seeing your parents only through Skype, having friends in various time zones and shifting to a completely different lifestyle all take time getting used to. So you can imagine the overwhelming sense of relief I felt returning to “normalcy” in Dubai.
After struggling through a few days of jetlag, I realized just how much the city had changed in the short time I had been away. Returning home, it felt like I was the tourist I was seven years prior – a stranger to my own city. I excitedly took pictures of sights I had seen almost every day, acted like I was on a month-long vacation and was astounded by the sense of luxury oozing out of almost everywhere.
In Dubai, I always used to say that Maryland was my home and that I desperately wanted to return to it. However, as the end of winter break drew near, I couldn’t imagine leaving my family and the city I had unknowingly grown to love during those awkward middle and high school years once again.
From the beaches to the deserts, from the malls to the restaurants – everywhere I looked, I was reminded of yet another fond adolescent memory. Seeing the familiar sights of the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, the Palm Jumeirah, the man-made island in a shape of a palm tree, and the Burj Al Arab, the 7-star sailboat-shaped hotel I had so dearly missed, it dawned on me that Dubai had become just as much my home as this state.
