Every winter, somewhere along the long stretch of Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed Road, an entire planet rises out of the desert and stays open until well past your bedtime. Global Village, for the uninitiated, is Dubai’s annual open-air cultural park where roughly ninety countries set up shop in elaborately themed pavilions, each one a kind of architectural caricature of the nation it represents. There are minarets, pagodas, windmills, longhouses, and at least one structure that I am fairly certain was meant to evoke a castle but ended up resembling a tiered wedding cake. Visitors come for the food, the shopping, the nightly fireworks, and the perfectly reasonable feeling that one could, with enough discipline and the right pair of shoes, see all of it in a single evening.
I went in believing I was that visitor. I left with a hand-drawn checklist half-filled, three plastic bags of items I did not need, and a profound new respect for both my feet and the concept of jet lag without ever boarding a plane. What follows is the story of a quest that began with a printed map and ended with me eating Turkish ice cream on a curb, quietly conceding that I had perhaps misunderstood the entire enterprise.
The Plan, Such As It Was
Before setting off, I had done what any reasonable person would do, which was to draw up a strategy. Beginning from the main entrance, I would proceed clockwise around the grounds, allocating no more than three minutes per pavilion, with brief allowances for photographs and the occasional brisk negotiation over a wooden camel. By my calculations, ninety pavilions at three minutes each came to four and a half hours, which still left a generous buffer for fireworks, queueing, and the inevitable trip to the bathroom. In theory, this was airtight. In practice, I had failed to account for the existence of food, the existence of crowds, and the existence of my own personality.
The first sign that the plan was already in trouble came at the entrance itself, where a procession of families with strollers, teenagers in matching tracksuits, and at least one extended family pushing a grandmother in a wheelchair moved at the leisurely pace of a Sunday afternoon. I, meanwhile, had a clipboard energy that did not suit the environment at all.
Africa, or: The First Hour of Naive Optimism
I began, sensibly enough, with the African pavilions, where I quickly discovered that “three minutes per country” was a deeply unserious figure. Egypt alone contained perhaps two hundred stalls selling perfumes, papyrus prints, alabaster pyramids of every conceivable size, and a man who insisted on writing my name in hieroglyphics whether I wanted him to or not. By the time I emerged, I had been inside for nineteen minutes and was carrying a small jar of something that smelled vaguely like a hotel lobby in 1996.
Morocco followed, then Tunisia, then Yemen, and somewhere in the middle of all this I began to grasp the structural problem with my plan. Each pavilion was not a country so much as a small bazaar pretending to be one, and bazaars, by their very nature, are not designed to be passed through in three minutes. They are designed to slow you down, to draw your eye sideways, to make you wonder whether you do, in fact, need a brass coffee pot. By the end of the first hour, I had visited seven countries and was already running approximately two hours behind schedule.
The Food Stalls, Where Time Goes to Die
The trouble truly began when I crossed into the food district, because the food district at Global Village is not really a section of the park so much as an event horizon. One moment I was walking purposefully past a stand selling Hyderabadi biryani, and the next I had somehow consumed an entire plate of it while standing up, followed by a Turkish gözleme, followed by something the vendor described only as “Filipino sweet” which I am still unable to identify. Each stall presented itself with the urgency of a final opportunity. Each smelled better than the last. Resistance, it turned out, was not so much futile as completely beside the point.
In fairness to myself, the original plan had not forbidden eating. It had simply not anticipated that eating would become the plan. By the time I rejoined my route, I had been at Global Village for two and a half hours and had visited exactly nine pavilions. The math, even to a generous observer, was not working.
The Asia Vortex
Asia is where the wheels came fully off. The Asian section is enormous, partly because Asia itself is enormous and partly because every pavilion within it appears to be selling things you genuinely want. Thailand had elephant-print trousers in sixteen patterns. Vietnam had conical hats stacked into a pyramid that defied the ordinary laws of stacking. India had so many pavilions, sub-pavilions, and themed corners that I am fairly sure I visited the same one twice without realising it. China, meanwhile, presented an entire tea ceremony to a captive audience that briefly included me, although I cannot tell you how I ended up sitting down.
It was somewhere between Pakistan and the Philippines that I gave up on the clipboard energy entirely and began to drift, which is, in retrospect, the only correct way to experience the place. The countries blurred. The music from neighbouring pavilions overlapped into a kind of global mash up that no self-respecting DJ would ever attempt. I bought a leather wallet I did not need. I declined a free henna design and then, ten minutes later, accepted one from someone else for reasons I cannot reconstruct.
Europe, Briefly
By the time I reached the European section, my watch was telling me things I had decided to ignore. France had a small Eiffel Tower. Italy had what appeared to be a gondola, parked indoors. Germany had pretzels the size of dinner plates and a beer hall whose atmosphere was committed enough that the absence of actual beer felt, frankly, academic. I passed through all of them in something resembling a fugue state, my brain having quietly opted out of registering any new visual information. I have a photograph from inside the Spain pavilion that, had you told me was taken in Lebanon, I would have believed you without question.
The Final Reckoning
When the fireworks went off at the end of the evening, I was sitting on a bench near the lake with a checklist that said I had visited thirty-one pavilions, a stomach that said I had visited considerably more, and a vague sense that the rest of the world was somewhere behind me, unvisited and unbothered. A family next to me was unpacking a thermos of tea and what looked like an entire dinner from home, which struck me as both the height of practicality and the only sane way to do this.
The truth, which took me an entire evening to arrive at, is that Global Village is not really a competition between you and ninety countries. It is a slow, sprawling, half chaotic celebration that punishes anyone who tries to grid it. The people who looked happiest were the ones who had clearly come with no plan at all, who were content to wander into one pavilion, eat something from another, watch a performance they could not understand, and call it a night well spent. I had treated it like a race. They had treated it like an evening out. They were, of course, entirely correct.
What I Would Do Differently
If I were to attempt this again, and I confess I might, I would abandon the map entirely. I would arrive late, with an empty stomach and a quiet sense of surrender. I would pick perhaps a dozen countries on a vague theme, everywhere with good bread, everywhere I have been, everywhere whose flag I cannot reliably draw, and I would let the rest of the world wait until next year. And I would, under no circumstances, bring a clipboard.
