Bumble 1/17/08

Reality or Fiction, that is the question…

It is always scary when coming into a class that begins asking the question, what is reality? Or is there in fact reality? Is there actually a way to define what is real or not real? When pondering the concepts of a film like, The Matrix, it blurs the boundaries the world as we know it, and makes one think, are we really here or are we created through our minds or in someone else’s mind.

It is clear that “Reality ain’t what it used to be.”

I took particular interest in the quest for defining reality because of my backwards and twisted trip to visit my family over winter break. My family just moved to Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, a place that undoubtedly can only be defined by absurdity!!

Did I really just step off of a 14 and a half hour direct flight into Disney land? I had to make sure that I had in fact landed in the Dubai International Airport. From the second you land into this desert, you realize that this could in fact be a journey into the Disney production of Aladdin or even better Las Vegas. The only thing is you are right along the Arabian gulf and surrounded by Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Oman. Everything is fake. Buildings are made to look like Aladdin, but they are made for tourists so you are not sure if you are actually in Disney world or the middle-east.

After spending a month there, living in this desert it was only natural to ask what exactly about Dubai is real, and what about it is artificial? How do we even know? I came to the conclusion that my entire experience was surreal, and quite post modern.

Placed in the middle of a desert, where water is scarce and people wander with camels, is a metropolis. Dubai is the cutting edge Mecca center of the Universe. With construction taking place around the clock, endless beach resorts, and the tallest building in the world, how can this city be squat in the middle of a desert? The Sheiks and other political power decided that there simply was not enough sand to develop into these corporate office buildings and race tracks. So, they decided to blast in sand to the bottom of the Arabian Gulf to create new land, new islands, only this time they chose to make the land in the shape of palm trees and of the globe. From the ground you can not even notice that Jumeirah Palm Islands looks like a palm tree. It is for the airplanes flying above, so what purpose do they actually serve being in this shape? It is absurd. Post modernism is about controlling our environment, or rather ruining it.

How can it be “real” to live on a golf course with actual grass in a land where there is no grass? It can’t be, in fact it only rains about twice a year. Who would have believed that my parent’s water bill could infinitely surpass the electric bill? A simple task of flushing a toilet is so taken for granted in Western societies, but when there is no water, it actually becomes a difficult task to make a toilet flush. Again I have to ask how do they irrigate their land, the golf course, every single day? Who decided that this would be the best way to spend the country’s money.

Even further into our artificially created world is Ski Dubai. My parents call me at 11 o’clock at night while I am at school and tell me, “It has finally cooled down to 110 degrees from 120 degrees with 100% humidity!” In a land where the temperature is so high that it is dangerous to be outside, they have generated enough power to create an indoor ski slope, oh and it is right in the mall. Right next to the movie theatre, the starbucks coffee in Arabic, and the mosque, there is a slope with a ski lift! On the inside it feels like you are a penguin on the inside of Sea World with thousands of people glaring at you inside this glass cage. How bizarre? It is surreal, because it is snow, but is it really since it was artificially constructed?

About 80% of this country is expatriates and the rest are natives. Running along the lines of the explosion of language in the post modern world, every person there speaks English as the common language. Arabic was only recently made the official language of Dubai; in fact 30 years ago it was Urdu because there were so many people from India who migrated there. Due to fear of losing the Muslim heritage, they created a Muslim heritage. Now, everywhere you go Islam is infused into everyday life. Mosques are EVERYWHERE, including the water parks.

Dubai. Is it real or not real? Hard to define what real actually is.