In certain social settings, admitting to having never visited a nightclub or bar in Dubai in 13 months here is more shameful than the lesser confession of not owning a car. At certain times in my life I’ve been clubbing quite a lot, but in Ivory Coast there was a definite shift away from clubbing around the time I got married, which coincided with me disconnecting slightly from the expat scene. It is also true that night clubs tend to be viewed in Ivorian moral society as dens of iniquity, and attendance is highly frowned on. My experience in the Western church is that providing your behaviour in such places is godly, I’ve never heard outright condemnation of them as physical places.
For me, I don’t think I’ve quite resolved the question of whether, if you’re not wanting to get drunk or pick up members of the opposite sex, nightclubs are places worth going to. I think I’d still tentatively answer yes, and my justification would be that it’s good to be spending time with friends, and music and dance are often creative and good activities, which are hard to experience in the same way elsewhere. My wife would say that I should instead be dancing in church, though a) that doesn’t really take place in churches I go to outside of Africa, and b) I find it hard to dance to church because I worry that the ‘feel good factor’ comes from the simple act of dancing, and not necessarily some sort of response to God.
Anyway, that’s all a typically long-winded introduction to say that I went to a nightclub for the first time on Thursday night. And it happened to apparently be one of Dubai’s most exclusive. The newly opened White’s is at the racecourse grandstand complex, and being slightly away from the main city, has a great view over the Burj Khalifa and surrounding skyline. The parking lot was the most impressive I think I’ve ever seen – Lamborghini, Ferrari, Porsche, Bentley and a half gold Bugatti Veyron (without a normal license plate but simply the three Arabic letters that spell out ‘important’, a friend told me).
Prestige nightclubs have a common tactic – try to make you feel as lucky as possible that they actually let you in. As a man you feel decidedly like a second class citizen, and as part of a group that was heavily weighted to the male end of the scale, we had long delays getting various friends in, which rather broke up in the evening. The club is on the top floor, and exposed to the elements (not sure what happens in the hot and humid summers). The place was designed as a large bowl with walls of screens around the outside. The bar area was in the centre with occasional lycra-clad trapeze dancers climbing up to large rings that hung from the ceiling. The place was packed by around 1am, with a good mix of nationalities – wealthy Arabs, Indians and Russians seemed present in large numbers.
These are not the sort of places that do much to affirm you – if you’re a man, you’re already a lesser being, and without Hollywood-looks or buckets of cash you can never be much more than a fly on the wall. A couple of men in our group gave me a melancholy talk on how materialistic they said all girls become after just a few months in Dubai, and that keeping a girlfriend requires having a large bank balance (‘you pay, they stay’). I’ve never seen a club with such a large staff, eager to stop people getting out of their zones. Given we hadn’t paid for a place at the bar or a table (incredible prices that I can’t remember), we were left in the sort of corridor area around the central bar, and people were constantly passing by and shuffling through. Make the mistake of placing your drink momentarily on the bar, and you were quickly clamped down on.
The overall feeling was one of celebrity and one-up-manship rather than decadence – there were plenty of couples, but I only saw one couple kissing (something that in other parts of the city could get you thrown in prison). But I understand other clubs in the city more closely resemble a student night at a UK university town. I usually enjoy the music at clubs, be it rnb, rap, funk, dance or pop, but this place didn’t quite hit the mark for me. Where DJs in Ivory Coast might be constantly name-calling the big cheeses in the house, here the equivalent seemed to be ordering a round of drinks that came replete with fireworks to draw everyone’s eyes to the order. In one case, champagne bottle about a metre high was held aloft and transported in a blaze of fire crackers.
To finish on a positive note, it was fun to be out with friends, and the night finished with a quick stop in a Lebanese fast food place that agreed to serve us despite closing down for the night. Within the club, there was a lot of (alcohol-fuelled) warmth between strangers than I’ve seen elsewhere in the city, and there was a certain camaraderie. One friend seemed to really enjoy the mix of cultures all enjoying themselves.