[continued from part 1…]

We arrived at the other side of the creek just as the Friday noontime prayer started. Aside from a few tourists milling around, taking pictures of the same penis-shaped minaret as we were…

…the streets were deserted. We took our usual stroll through a supermarket, marveling at the mishmash of Indian, Arab and Asian products on the shelves.

A man steered us away from the Thai fruit juices, pointing to a can of mango juice made in Abu Dhabi and saying, “From here. Fresh!” with pride.

(Wait, was that a real Emirati?! We didn’t stop to marvel like we should have!)

One back corner of the store was fenced off with a chest freezer, blocking the entrance like a fort. Oh, hey—what’s in there?

Oh, I see. Wait, who are those products for?

But…what if a Muslim wants to buy these things?

Ah. No. Got it. Got it.

Finally, we had lunch at a pretty basic Indian joint, which we chose for the special clatter of stainless-steel plates on stainless-steel tabletops, and the intriguing-looking fish dishes. It wasn’t the most amazing food, but it contributed to our sense that the earth’s center of gravity had shifted.

We were in a world oriented around an ocean we knew only from globes, built on thousand-plus-year-old trade routes that were just dashed lines on a map we’d seen on the endpapers of a book. The United States felt like an irrelevant blip.

In the Dubai that is our future, American culture will exist only as a distant reference point—those people who invented the mall, the megaresort and the musical fountain. (And actually, I’m not even sure about the latter two.)

And in the future, apparently there are no women. Dubai is so reliant on guest workers that they make up about 80 percent of the population. Of those workers, the substantial majority are men. Women work in houses. Or, if they’re Emirati, live in houses and can only be seen in the comfortable confines of the luxury wing of the Dubai Mall.

Another unfortunate loss in the future will be subway etiquette. Despite pamphlets with cartoons urging riders to stand aside and wait for people to exit the train car, it was a vicious scrum every time the doors opened. Peter theorizes that multicultural societies have fewer superficial politenesses like this, because no one quite trusts or knows the standards.

I love me a multicultural society, but Dubai trumped New York City for boneheaded subway behavior, and that’s saying a lot.

It looks harmless, but wait till the doors open.

We avoided that unpleasantness once by splurging on a “gold” ticket on the metro, just because we could, and sitting in padded-seat luxury in the front car. There was even an attendant (a woman!) to inspect our tickets and keep out the interlopers.

In the future, as an American I probably won’t be able to afford this privilege–and that may be the most unsettling aspect of all. Maybe I can find work on a dhow…