After venturing to the Jumeriah Mosque and the Ocean seaside, we headed towards Diera, home to the 14 kilometer long Dubai Creek, and the hustle and bustle of old Dubai (the part of the city that hasn’t fallen victim to the building boom and hyper luxury). Dubai creek is a creek about twi
ce the width of the Rideau canal and runs through the north a
nd south side of Dubai. The north side is called Diera and the south side is called Bur Dubai. The creek itself is filled with lots of different types of boats from multimillion dollar yachts to Iranian, Indian and Omani traders boats called Dhows, and tiny open sided ‘boat tax
is’ called Abras (see the photo?). The best way to get across the creek is to take the 1 durum ride on an Abras, which carry as many a
s 40 000 passengers everyday! The boats themselves
are wooden motor powered and can carry about 20 people on each trip. It was pretty
cool riding them as they look and drive like normal boats, only they don’t have any sides. It was pretty interesting to watch the driver navigate the thing with all the people on it....but besides the rather large run in with the docking station, it was a pretty smooth ride.
Crossing from Bur Dubai over to Diera led us to the traditional
Dubai Souqs. A souq is a merchant market selling everything from electronics, to clothes, to spices, food, and gold. The Diera souqs
are organised by type of goods. There is a spice souq, a gold souq, a perfume souq and a covered souq (which sells clothes, primarily imported from India). We started at the spice souq, which was pretty small but fantastic! I have never seen such a large volume to spices in my life. There were dozens of coffee bag sized bags of Iranian Limes, Saffron, dried roses, cumin, red, white and black pepper, menthol crystals, cloves, cardamom, cinnamon, frankincense and myrrh (which one guy kept repeating ‘like the three wise men’). The gold was in the other souq.
It is imposs
ible to walk through any of the souqs without being bombarded by all shops
owners asking if I wanted to buy something, while I was taking some pictures max started talking to one of the shop keepers...when I showed up I realised they were talking in German, really because it’s pretty hard to travel anywhere without running into some who speaks German---especially if you are traveling with one with a radar. Then we switched t
o English and gave us some samples of camel chocolates and chocolate covered dates, and smells of vanilla pods, Iranian saffron, and menthol. We found out that he was a spice trader from an Iranian father and a Turkish Mother who has spent time in Germany and can also speak English......well sort off.
...at one point he asked max ‘where he found this cheese’. Both max and I looked incredibly confused because there was no cheese in sight.....we looked at him again...when he repeated the word ‘cheese’, it sounded more like ‘she’. So he was asking ‘how did you find she’.....we inferred that what he meant was how did you guys meet......lol..
.it was pretty funny... in total, the man spent about 20 minutes showing us around his tiny shop(which was probably the size for a garage of a golf cart), we didn’t buy any spices as well, we aren’t headed home just yet....BUT, he gave us his card, and I will for sure head back there on the way back......
The gold souq was slightly overwhelming as by this point I was getting annoyed at the constant badgering for me to ‘come and buy beautiful things’....
gone are the days of being completely ignored while shopping in Hungary..... I did stop in one shop to look at a sea pearl....it was a beauty....a greeny-grey coloured pearl on a bed of diamonds.....for the price of 1800 Durums it would have been mine (sans bartering)....but....it left it in the safe hands of the shop keeper as I did not have the money, nor the necessity for a sea pearl necklace....it
was still nice though....very nice....
At the end of the Gold Souq there was a couple of cloths shops, which we stopped at to look at. Again, it was actually pretty hard just to ‘browse’ around or touch anything without a pestering shop keeper coming up to you and pushing goods on you....it was 33 degrees outside and I was hot...so when we walked by a shop selling long skirts we stopped I found two different skirts that I liked.....and the shop keeper said they cost 310 dirhams.....which is about 85 bucks....they were nice skirts but not that nice... This was my first experience in bartering and it was quite interesting.... back and forth and back and forth..... a lot of ‘but my friends this is high quality’ from the merchant and a ‘but that is way too much for me, and it’s not worth that price you can buy it somewhere else cheaper’ we ended up getting the price down to 180 dirhams.....which is about 50 bucks....still a little high but taking the advice of a friend....I paid what I thought it was worth to me. On a complete side note, one of the skirts was so long that I wore it the next day as a dress! Success!!!
We stopped for a Turkish Coffee and a melon
Sheeshaa on the creek, then called it a day!
(the picture below is an Iranian spice trader's boat)
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