In and up in Paris and Dubai
A travelogue
Last month, I went to Paris and Dubai with one of my partners, Katja Grace1. Katja sometimes travels to conferences as part of her work as an AI forecaster, and I happily accompany her as a big strong boy (I carry our luggage).
Paris is excellent—If I had a community there, I'd love it. The housing is dense and visually coherent. The food is lovely, and the city is beautiful, maybe even more so than London. At night, the light has a warm yellow hue, making it a pleasure to walk around2.
For some reason the French always seem switch to English no matter how hard I try. My French is pretty decent and I can talk slowly about most topics. But I rarely get the chance. I am very fond of France and the French and sometimes the old rivalry gets in the way of noting they have a beautiful country and we have a lot in common3.
The Eiffel Tower is now walled off and one has to go through turnstiles to walk underneath it. I don’t remember this being the case when I was a teenager. It is a shame that public trust has fallen to such an extent. As far as museums and public monuments, it feels like the cheap damaging actions of a few cause large costs to the rest of us. Personally I’d prefer more surveillance than endless turnstiles.
Regarding travel, the Eurostar can be stressful. Traveling between similar economies like the UK and France should be easier, I don't see why full security is necessary for trains. If I don’t need my bags scanned between London and Birmingham, why London and Paris?
Our transfer via Lebanon was hairier still. We could fairly easily have accidentally cleared immigration without seeing the small arrow, the unassuming desk and the narrow passage for transfers. As the gospel writer says, narrow is the gate that leads to Dubai, but broad is the path that leads to Lebanon4.
But onto Dubai.
I think the core takeaway from discussing Dubai is how they transformed a flat seashore into a city with impressive buildings. My dad grew up around the Middle East and visited Dubai when there were no tall buildings on those beaches5. It is amazing that in (half) his lifetime, they have built all that is there today.
So I will say it again. It is bloody impressive how much Dubai has built and it seems a lot better than what was there before. There are many places with somewhat dubious human rights records and lots of oil. Most of them aren’t building cities where people choose to live and work6.
That said, what's Dubai actually like? Everything is very big, and it has a grand feel, but it doesn't seem to have much depth. The buildings don’t have the coherence or grandeur of London or Paris nor does it screech with San Francisco’s entrepreneurial energy.
I have described Dubai as Disneyland without the cartoons. It is beautiful but in sort of a thin way, everything is accessible, but costly. Honestly, it reminded me more of a resort in Kenya with its big rooms and exceedingly polite staff, than of smaller older Western hotels.
This feels like a kind of snobbery, but I don’t think it entirely is. The Middle East has much beautiful art and sculpture. The prohibition on depictions of people has led to geometric art which I love. But then a posh hotel will throw a giant golden Rubik’s cube in the lobby. Or a huge shiny balloon dog made of smaller balloon dogs. Why? So much of the art is NFT-level in its crassness. Like someone walked in and said “make this place look more expensive”. I’m sorry, I am too middle class for that to work. Even gold-covered opulence would be better than this.
Late one night our taxi was level with a high powered sports car. As I looked inside I realised a woman was driving. She saw me looking and floored it. There was something cyberpunk and contradictory there.
The Burj Khalifa is very good. There is something wonderful about a building so tall. It’s a bit pricey, but I recommend the premium package so you don’t spend all day queuing. You can see all that is going on. We had to rush off, but I really wanted to stay for sunset, which I think would have been wonderful.
But when Dubai actually gets a concept, it can be wonderful. On the last night Katja and I ate at a much fancier hotel than the one we were staying in. It was built like an old Islamic fort and had artificial canals between the rooms and restaurants. After food, we were taken around the whole site on a sort of motorised gondola. It was wonderful. The darkness and sound of the water. One expected a musician to appear on an overlooking balcony.
Katja had her Time AI 100 dinner. I feel somewhat constrained in what I can say here. I mainly focused on telling people how great Katja is and trying to help her network. Later we talked about why the different people were there. Time (who have covered AI pretty well, in my opinion) want to be seen to be on top of a growing issue. The Emirates want to share the status that Time has. The guests were either AI people who wanted a fancy awards dinner or local folks who wanted to network with cool AI people. And so the event is fun, but strange, obviously about networking, but not built to make networking easy.
I am not really one for travel. I find planning extremely stressful, always worrying there might be some other thing to fit in. But when there is some event I can go to, like a wedding or one of Katja’s conferences, I usually say yes. I haven’t regretted it so far.
I don’t intend to talk about polyamory often on this blog, but I like accuracy, and Katja is one of my partners.
A friend quipped that Paris is too lovely—one can’t get any work done.
This is a wonderful french musical joke by Bill Bailey.
This is a riff on Matthew 7:13-14 “strait and narrow”. Note that it’s “strait” not “straight”, like the straits of Gibraltar. So really it’s “narrow and narrow”. He's on the narrow and narrow
According to family legend my aunt and uncle were the first recorded white children born in the UAE, though my uncle has never managed to get Emirati citizenship out of it. My grandmother’s memoirs are quite the read. She was born in Maine, became a missionary in the Middle East where she met my grandfather, an Irish former boxer. If you want a copy, message me. If enough do, perhaps I’ll try and get Amazon to print some.
And many poor people do choose to work there. It’s very easy to disparage this from one of the richest countries in the world, but what are the alternatives for these people? I imagine they know the risks and do it anyway. If we want to improve their lives we should present other options not solely disparage the options they repeatedly choose. Dubai seems better than a random petrostate.
Lovely! Thanks for sharing
> Katja is one of my partners
congrats on getting multiple partners, I guess!