Searching for authenticity in Dubai

One of the secret, subtle joys of traveling alone is sitting, eating meals in restaurants and eavesdropping on the conversations of one's surrounding diners. I have heard the desperate promises of those attempting seduction, ridiculous business scams promoted that I could not believe weren't being seen through, political discourse of varying degrees of illogic, and when unlucky, of course, the most mundane talk ever uttered in the world. ("I like Coke Zero better than diet Coke, I don't know why, I think it's because it has more bubbles" for example.)

At one meal in Dubai, I overhead an American telling his companions he was insulted that they had insisted upon having their meal in the Dubai Mall. He was telling them they were not experiencing the authentic Dubai and accusing them, therefore, of being inauthentic themselves.

While I did not like his haughty tone, my overheard conversation got me thinking. Where was the authentic Dubai and was I like this man's friends, an inauthentic fraud, unable to find that in the universe that is true and genuine?

I was eating this meal in Eataly, the oh-so-clever name of an establishment in the Mall that is owned by the Illy Company, a purveyor of excellent Italian coffees. As I ate my impeccable spinach salad laced with the highest quality balsamic vinegar of Modena and hand-crafted gorgonzola cheese, I realized that this was certainly not authentic Dubai. Yet, having lived twice in Italy for over three years cumulatively, I also realized I was having a more authentic Italian meal than I often would consume when eating in the restaurants in the tourist sections of my Florentine home where foreigners were exploited by being served frozen pizzas made in Germany. Inauthentic culinary experiences in Florence mere meters from the grand statue of David, but authentic ones in Dubai thousands of kilometers away. This search for authenticity is not as straightforward as my haughty American lecturer on authenticity would have us believe.

As I sat eating, I realized that my gnocchi with veal ragu was startlingly authentic Italian cuisine as well. And I also realized that authenticity might not always be the ideal. When I lived in Arkansas, I experienced a whole range of Arkansan authenticity, from the rants of my racist barber to the cruel poverty I witnessed when visiting a family living in misery deep in the mountains. Were these experiences better, because they were more authentic, than the lovely handmade tacos I purchased from the kind Mexican man at the food truck near the apartment where I lived?

I decided that I must leave the mall to find the authentic Dubai that the haughty American claimed was ready to be discovered if only one would try.

Where else could authenticity be found but in the old town of Dubai? I took a taxi there the next day and found a place that wasn't gleaming and modern and where no spinach salads with gorgonzola were served. The gold market and the spice market and the perfume market were interesting, yet tourists were crawling all over the place there too. If I was there, how could the place be authentic after all? Besides, when I thought about it, although it was far less glitzy than the Dubai Mall, wasn't this part of town devoted to exactly what the mall was? Commerce and selling! How many dozen watches did people try to sell me in the authentic old town? About as many as in the mall. Just not as much air conditioning.

I also considered the possibility that what is authentic can be difficult to determine. Which is the authentic experience I have had in the current town where I live: the kind welcome I have received from much of the populace or other, more unsettling, reactions to my existence there? Or both?

Discouraged by my lack of authentic experience, I returned to my hotel, a trendy place, fantastically comfortable and pleasant, yet authentic to what I did not know, except the perfected and crafted world of marketers and MBAs. I entered my room and stared for a time at the zen-ish slogan painted on the wall above my bed: THIS IS WHERE I AM.

That's when I realized where authenticity resides: where one is. What one experiences at any specific place during that moment in time is what is authentic.

There is no place in Dubai that is authentic, yet every inch I saw of Dubai was totally authentic in that moment. Rather than searching for what is authentic as the haughty American would have us do, instead it might be best to be more concerned about our personal response to the places where we find ourselves in the world and the people we encounter. It is in how we interact with our surroundings that defines our authenticity as humans and it is our capacity to be real and to be compassionate and to be empathetic that is the authentic response to what the universe presents us. It is a search for that form of authenticity that should occupy our minds, whether we are eating an Italian meal in Dubai, or conducting German Club on a Kyrgyz campus, or eating tacos in Arkansas. Because THIS IS WHERE WE ARE.