This is Dubai

Dubai is a city of extremes and wealth has a lot to do with it. On one hand: rich Emirati kids driving their Lamborghinis to university. On the other: hundreds of low wage workers queuing at the Bur Dubai bus station on a Friday evening, being beaten back by the crowd controllers. That's putting things too simply, but how else would you?

In my part of town, people pay rent that realistically exceeds the salaries of South Asian workers by five, ten times. It's comfortable, these suburbs of affluence and familiarity that recreates life in any faceless, Western city: clean apartments and villas, manicured gardens, perfect neighbours. I should know: I live — and work — in those places.

But in two weeks here I'm still trying to figure out this city, and what I feel about it — I think I love it and I hate it. My clothes and shoes are perpetually sandy. And it's really.. much too hot. It's not as expensive as I feared. I love what I do and wouldn't trade it for the world. In a place where everyone's foreign, and relatively new, it's hard to feel too alone or too out of place.

Jumeirah, Marina, Umm Suqueim, and that part of town — clean and new and developed. There's the air of ambition and aspiration one expects of a city full of young professionals who are driven and motivated, whether by money or by career prospects, and it's rather infectious. But a little lifeless, unless you count hobnobbing with other expats in far too expensive (for what you get) surrounds as some kind of recreation. With no shortage of things to do for the (fat) salaried yuppie expat, this can be the place.

I needed more from this city: I needed it to be genuine, real, maybe just a bit gritty. So I took a bus to Deira, the other side of town. And found that I liked the beat it marched to when I found a Pakistani chai shop where I was the only woman around for miles, a little foolishly pushing my way into a men's-only tea shop (I badly needed a cup of tea), sitting outside a tea shop in a spice souk with random, Yemeni journalists, just thinking: this is great. I took a bus home in the Friday evening crush, with hundreds, maybe even thousands, of South Asian workers in line at the bus station and found that this city marches to a familiar, homely beat, one that makes me feel quite right at home, and the plastic, new, white, bits of 'new' Dubai and its gaudy hotels and restaurants have nothing to do with it, not one hoot at all.