Photo by Zosia Korcz on Unsplash
Dubai likes to paint itself as this luxury relaxed place for tourists but there is a seamier side to it if you know where to go. For the ex-pat workers who have to rent cheaper apartments and stretch out their wages to make it pay it is still the easiest going of the Emirates and the other Gulf States, although some of the other states like Bahrain and Qatar have seen the success of Dubai and try to keep up with it’s more liberal side and turn a blind eye to some of the ‘real life’ that goes on in its underbelly.
I have seen many changes there over the past 20 years or so from the days when even bars were allowed. That didn’t last long before some of their Islamic cousins in Saudi leaned on them and the bars all moved indoors to hotels only.
Away from the holiday hotel beaches, the Palm, and Jumeirah, the posh apartment areas around the Marina, there are some more alternative happenings. Over the years I’ve sampled many of those and had great fun, much of which I’ve used in my novels of “The Dream Team” series, certainly in the first book “Face and Justice.” It is where my main character the roguish Barry Parker met his lovers and cohorts Annie the Chinese bar girl and Stella the Nigerian former Madam. As a threesome, they scam a British merchant banker of millions of dollars in a fraud and then have to resort to rough justice to revenge a serious sexual assault on another of their friends.
Many of the scenes in the book I have witnessed in the streets and clubs of Dubai. I came close to being arrested and broke many of their laws with regards to morality, but that is par for the course in daily life there.
In the area of Bur Dubai downtown, I stayed in business hotels and apartments and strolled the shops and malls. Back some 20 years ago walking along a parade of shops around 11.00 pm at night I would have to dodge the Filipina girls who worked as maids in the hotels, who were looking for some extra money hooking unsuspecting guys. It was good that I had played rugby and could jink and twist away as they appeared from behind parked cars, grabbing my arm. Woe betide any guy who allowed 2 of them to get hold of you as they held on to you tightly trying to persuade you to take them to your hotel room. It was quite funny to me, they were always laughing and politely trying to charm their way into your room. For some guys I knew, they found it intimidating, but they were harmless really, just poor people looking to survive.
A few years later China and Russia opened up their countries for travel and the nationalities changed but always in that same area until a police clampdown made it a patrol route. Every now and then a club or bar would open up somewhere and it would be overrun mainly with girls from those 3 countries.
As Dubai grew, with newer building developments, apartment blocks, hotels, the Trade Center, and the area along the Sheik Zayed Road infilled, so did the places to go and so did the nationalities of the street life. As time went on it seemed as if the whole country was a melting pot of almost every nationality going. Hookers from Africa would run out from behind trees to approach cars that pulled up to pick them up, it just got ridiculous. Every now and then the local CID would round them up and deport them.
I know that the views of exploitation and trafficking relate to this issue, but I met, chatted regularly with many who tried to pick me up, and even had some as girlfriends. It was a gradual learning curve for me as a worker there or visiting on leave from another Gulf State, even a short stopover on business trips. I guess for me I just succumbed to the culture of the area I lived.
I found some great nightclubs with some fantastic music. The Filipino cover bands around the middle east and Asia are renowned and as a music lover, I’d go looking for the best of them.
Look up https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh8QRHYAWbs The Marine Club at the Seaview Hotel is where I met Stella. The Club’s Golden Star Band at the time had a following all around the Gulf and I believe has since moved to a hotel in Qatar. Their singer Cherie Garcia has a great voice, masses of hair, and can play a mean guitar, she is a big star. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHmtlpNyGCs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRhRpZjXyXU
At that club I met the character Stella who became my girlfriend, she came to chat, and I explained that I wasn’t in the business for her that night. She laughed and told me that she just liked me, have a dance and a drink and if I liked her company maybe I could give her a tip at the end of the evening. That was all we did, we got on well and I eventually on another occasion took her to dinner, then back to the club before she came to stay.
The real Stella back then
She told me how she had got to Dubai. She was sponsored as a hairdresser to work in Bahrain and her work permit got delayed, so her sponsor sent her to Dubai on a visa run, then disappeared on her. She relied on others of her country to feed and house her, overstayed her visa and she did what so many resorted to, what she called “fishing,” looking for a boyfriend who might keep her for a few days. Eventually, she got work, got sponsored again, and became a legal worker there. Then she saw a business opportunity along with her flatmate and decided to get other girls over from Nigeria. As she put it to me “they need to feed their whole families back home, they can come here and make good money and have some fun at the same time.”
That was how she came to have a half-dozen working girls living with her. They would live together, she would go around the clubs at night looking after them, making sure they were with the right sort of fellow, keeping in touch with text messages if they were away in a hotel or flat somewhere and ok. She paid their airfares, and they would pay that back over time plus a small profit. They would cook together, sleep most of the day until it was time to get up, do all the make-up, hairstyles, even advise on their dress sense. They called her Auntie and if I stopped over they called me Uncle and we had some great parties using the music on my laptop when they came home at around 03.00 am cooking African food and dancing half-naked.
Stella had her own room in the apartment and the girls had a few mattresses in the main lounge.
Where she lived was in the African quarter known as Al Baraha and I had to hide from view down there in case there were cops watching for unmarried couples. If we went out she would phone another illegal private taxi, also a Nigerian illegal immigrant. He would pull up at the entrance to her apartment send a miscall to her phone and open the rear door of the car as we would quickly jump in and keep my head down as he drove out of the area or back.
She was a real entrepreneur, when she went back home on a visa run she would do a buying trip of cheap goods like junk Indian jewelry in the markets, then sell them for a profit in the Lagos market. Her girls loved her, and they would even join us in the room at times and jump me too, they were great fun to be with. Eventually, the girls got caught and deported and she got a legitimate business selling African Hairpieces and styling them for others. Even when they were caught she would make sure they were looked after at the prison, taking them food. When they were due to be flown out, she would meet them at the airport with their luggage. The warders at the prison knew her well and her personality was such that everyone got on with her.
Nowadays she has her own shop there and is an official resident. I’ve met many that have benefitted from the occasional amnesty of overstayers and stayed on to set themselves up in business there. The culture was easy-going and fun, and I learned to never judge any of other people’s life choices.
There were a few African nightclubs that had bands from that continent, but they would not open until midnight and close at 03.00 am. As a white guy, I was a rare sight in those but I made some good friends, even a couple of bodyguards when one evening 2 American black guys came over quite aggressive as the lights went up and asked of the 2 huge Nigerians sitting either side of me, “What is this honky doing here?” The huge African next to me told him in no uncertain terms that I was a friend, and that they didn’t want that sort of talk there. As Stella’s guy I was well respected, she had a reputation for being a tough one, but for me, she was always gentle.
In later years I also became involved with the Chinese community and that was where I got the character of Annie for my books. Another tough woman who had been brought there under false pretenses and stayed on independently. She worked a bar in Bur Dubai only in the afternoons, she would look for tips or USA or European men to take for “short time” sex in rooms nearby that her community rented out to them. There was a network of places with doorkeepers and dormitories, even cooks, that would charge a fee to the working girls. They called themselves “Business Ladies” and would obviously make more than enough money to send home. Annie was a single parent and bought her apartment in China and put her son through university on her profits.
Annie was also very helpful to any of us when either new in town or if we just were part of the crowd that used the bar as our local hangout. She got me my first mobile phone and sim card cheaply for me and if I needed air time topping up she would do it. She would run errands and even invited me back to her apartment and cooked me a very nice Chinese meal and we had dinner together at restaurants nearby after she finished her stint at the bar. She was a great friend and when I later worked in China, came to stay with me for a while. When I changed apartments there and had to go off to work on-site, she cleaned the place from top to bottom and negotiated with my landlady for me.
I have huge respect and love for both my book characters in the novels and in real life also, they are wonderful human beings who’ve fought hard for what they have now and if I hear others who judge them for their early life choices I’d defend them to the hilt. If it wasn’t for the real Dubai and that culture, I’d never have had the privilege to know them. My advice to any traveler is go deeper and don’t stick to the tourist haunts and then you’ll meet real people.
The Author and the real character Annie
