At the Mall

We spent the day at the Dubai Mall. The place is enormous. I thought the Pavilion in KL was big, this is super big. The Dubai Mall must have been 10 times bigger. May be a bit exaggerating there.

There were so much spaces between the shops in the mall as if you are walking on an actual high street. We could not imagine how much it takes to cool the whole place, Faris keep on questioning whether the owner is eco-friendly and care about the environment!

One thing that we noticed immediately in the Mall is that as if we were in the middle of Manila. Almost all the workers and shop attendants are Filipinos. Imagine each shop has 10 of them and there are over a thousands shops. The Filipinos do not only have a language advantage but there are millions of them willing to fill the labour market here. Only the upmarket shops like perfumes and watches are manned by Indians and Arabs. Whereas the house maids are mainly Indonesians and Sri Lankans taking care of the kids while the masters are hopping from one shop to the other.

Our kids were asking what are the locals actually earning on. I guess most of them are white-collar workers or filling government jobs.

The Mall itself is a great place to spend the whole day. There are all sort of facilities. The water fountain show outside and adjacent to the tallest building in the world is on after 6 pm. The Mall has an ice rink, a huge fish aquarium, food courts and so on. The prices here are reasonable although European goods are a bit pricey compare to back in Europe. One nice thing as well is the number of toilets and suraus. The toilets are super clean, manned all the time by cleaners. The suraus are every where and large and always quite busy. It is such a contrast to Istanbul where the Muslim's attitude are different. In Istanbul people claim to be proud of their Islamic heritage and not really wanting to be part of Europe and yet mosque are quite empty except to be visited by older generations. Here the Arabs are embracing fully the concept of modernisation and westernisation and yet the call of each prayer is something not to be compromised where ever there are.

We ended up spending 10 hours in the Mall. We were taking our time - spending time at the Kinokuniya, the food courts, the water fountains, the Arab Souks and so on. But then we probably only covered a quarter of the massive complex.