A walk in Time... Sightseeing in Dubai

When in Rome, do as the Romans do. When  a tourist do what a tourist would do, touristy things. So did the most touristy thing I could do, visit the Dubai Museum. A literal walk in time, to see Dubai from its evolution, it evolving in time, and its quite fascinating journey. 

So you mingled with the tourist out there admiring the displays, seeing how life used to be back then, in the days of yore, in the ciraca of God knows when. Damn I even spotted a Dalda ghee ka dabba and was quite fascinated by the discovery (more than any other discovery in that museum), and later on I would discover packets of Parle G in Lulu (yep that’s the name of a local chain of supermarkets, you could call it their version of Big Bazar and DMart).

Like all other places in Dubai, this was a literal melting pot of people of all ethnicity, people of all cultures, but in it all you could make out us Indian, we have our way of standing out in the crowd, especially a sea of South East Asian people, who can drown out a crowd, giving competition even to the loudest Gujju. And then you had the Marathi Manoos, who you could make out from the pude ya, saral ubhi raha, which in a way so reassuring, hearing something familiar so far way from home.

Later on, walking down the streets and the narrow bylanes  of Al Fahidi, felt like taking a walk back time. It felt like walking down streets that time didn’t touch. The structures and architecture that modernisation hadn’t yet gotten hold of. So you were walking on streets steeped in history. Each turn more fascinating, each structure a story to tell. Ok maybe not quite the story, but they sure were fascinating. 

You had a creek separating the old from the new, a kind of line of control that protected the old from the new, not letting each overlap but letting them coexist in harmony. Fascinating that you have two aspects of time coexisting together. 

So in the end it was a day well spent, a bit of a history lesson, a bit of sightseeing, a time well spent reconnecting with family, a  walk in time.