The Dubai Museum was the most succinct lesson in the emirate’s history I saw anywhere in Dubai. There were lots of neat dioramas, but one of my favorite features was the architectural parallelism implied by the spiral ramp I walked down to get to the museum, and the spiral ramp I walked up to get down.
The spiral down focuses on a mobile of seagulls over an inlet–Dubai before people lived there. It’s quiet, cool, a little desolate and a little shabby.
The spiral up is out of the gift-shop, past a hundred or more tourists talking a babel of languages (I heard tours in Japanese, German and Arabic, and chatting in Hindi and English).
The gift-shop sold Petrushka dolls of Emiratis in cultural dress, jingling bead necklaces, and stuffy-camels. This is my favorite:
I could probably make the video upright, but don’t you ever feel like the world is sideways?
Inspirational Quote:
“God never tells us in advance whether the course we are to follow is the correct one.” Albert Einstein
