The Opening Ceremony of the Burj Dubai was to take place at 8pm on January 4th. I had been hearing from the always-consistent, sometimes-reliable Dubai rumor mill that the masses would so crowd the malls and courtyards surrounding the tower for the festivities that it was vital to get to the scene by 5pm. I tried to verify the validity of all this, only to get vague responses like, “You know, that’s Dubai Time for ya!”. When I asked what that meant, I got an even vaguer, “Who knows? Sometimes its on time but other times something stupid happens”. Regardless, we decided to heed the warnings and managed to get out of the house by 5ish (which is pretty admirable by general Middle Eastern standards). We had called for a taxi, but when it didn’t show, my dad came up with an abrupt and messy plan which called for all of us to stand at different points along the stretch of road and make independent taxi-hailing efforts. Despite all logic, this worked and we were soon on our way. The taxi driver had a strange laugh and my father looked at him as though insulted by his audacity. <!–more–>
The roads weren’t as crowded as the lack of taxis or my brother’s phoned in ‘2-million-people-at-the-Dubai-Mall-already’ report would have indicated. Looking over my shoulder, I caught the silhouette of the city’s previous trophy wife, the Burj Al Arab, who’s shape now reminded me of a pregnant lady in contrast to the Burj Dubai’s slender, leggy sexiness. I was forsaking one for the other, and what made it worse was that they shared a name. I felt strangely guilty, but this is Dubai and in Dubai, we move on to bigger and better things.
Looking forward, I caught a glimpse of the guest of honor, the Burj Dubai. A gleaming reverse icicle rumored to be based on the structure of a desert flower, the tower is in a word, beautiful. I’ve often thought that if I had to design the world’s largest tower, this is what I would design. This is not significant because I am an architect (because I am not), but because I feel very strongly about myself. Other people always seem to say that it reminds them of the tower from the Lord of the Rings, but I don’t know how to process that information because I haven’t seen the movie.

After a fairly smooth 20 minute taxi ride (my dad eventually gave up on trying to subconsciously regulate the driver’s laughter), we pulled up to the entrance of the Dubai Mall and caught the first hints of Burj Fever. The arriving automobile cue was lit up by intermittent red brake lights as it vomited passengers onto the curb and into the growing madness. The interior foyer of the mall (if you can call it that) was draped in appropriately nationalistic dressing and all the megatron screens were playing either images of the Burj or other images of the Burj. As crowded as the place was, it lacked the requisite sense of urgency. The giant aquarium was no less popular than any other day and the shops were being patronized in a non-recessionary manner. It was a classic Dubai crowd; they were there, but they were not in a hurry.

By the time we got to the escalators, the multi-level human bunching was beginning to take form and I had a sudden flashback of a day in the early 80’s when a visit from Muhammed Ali (in promotion for powdered milk company Nido, I believe) had jam-packed Dubai’s Al Ghurair Centre. That was almost 30 years ago now, and the two crowds were very similar, sharing the same sincerity and enthusiasm. We have always been a spectacle-loving people around these parts; the spectacles have just accelerated along with the expectations we have of them. There’s something that binds Dubai’s drastically diverse Diaspora and days like these make me realize that the distinction is in their deliberate embrace of the extraordinary.

We inched our way out of the mall exit that poured people out around the Dubai Fountain, a man-made lake that is positioned exactly where a giant puddle would be if the Burj was, in fact, a reverse icicle. It was much more crowded outside than I had expected. The density of bodies was at the level where you internally curse people who brought babies with them, and you don’t bend over to tie your shoe laces if they come undone. Despite the numbers though, the crowd demeanor was calm and cautious, almost out of respectful obedience to the behemoth that towered over all of us. Heads were tilted at unnatural angles and outstretched arms dangled digital cameras that struggled to fit the entire structure in an LCD screen that was not designed with these things in mind.

We were supposed to meet some friends at Shakespeare & Co., a restaurant across the water with an outdoor terrace that looked out onto the Burj. This required crossing a bridge which normally posed no challenge greater than being asked to take a semi-romantic photograph of a newly wed couple who found the combination of water, bridge and building too good of a backdrop to pass up. Today though, the bridge looked like a photo taken right before a disaster. My normally risk-averse parents remarkably plowed ahead despite my warnings and joined an inert group of people that seemed permanently lodged into the infrastructure of the bridge. I considered following them so that we could all die together and save on funeral costs, but a kandura-clad security dude next to me started yelling into his walkie-talkie, “We need VERY security, PLEASE!”. His tone was of the variety that you only hear on recorded emergency calls replayed in the wake of a great tragedy, so I backed off and chose life. I took one last picture of my parents’ barely visible heads (just in case).
Before we embarked on the alternate route, I turned and glanced at the Burj as a plane with a trail of smoke (turned hot pink by the sunset) flew by, and I foolishly said “wow”, breaking the seal on a word that I would be grossly overusing all night. Our new mission was to walk all the way around the lake, up around The Address Hotel and around the outside of the Souq-Al-Bahar. People were scattered everywhere, aggressively filling up memory cards with identical photos of the same thing, as if it was the most natural reaction to seeing something incomprehensible. You could almost see them calculating how much of the cost of their digital cameras they were earning back just by being there. As we swung around the outside of the souq, we saw an entire promenade of palm trees draped in amazing, glittering lights. This light drenched walkway was a perfect symbolic tribute to a city that presumes that as good as nature is, there’s still room for improvement.
When we finally got to the restaurant, we joined our party on a full but reasonably civil outdoor terrace. A standing row of people had already locked down the balcony area which overlooked the Burj and lake, with their torsos pressed against the railings as if they suspected the tower might moonwalk. For its part, the Burj was dark and silent, as if it were entranced in a pre-game locker room ritual. I imagined it wearing headphones listening to “Eye of the Tiger”. Ironically, at this point noone really knew what we were actually waiting for, but whatever it was we knew it wouldn’t be underwhelming. It was still an hour to showtime, but if there’s anything we know how to do in Dubai it’s kill time. We ate zaatar, smoke shisha and took pictures of one another.
At 8pm sharp, the water jets of the Dubai Fountain stirred and gave life to swaying streams that shot up rhythmically to the sounds of the majestic national anthem of the UAE. When we were kids, they would play that music at the start of the limited daily television programming on Dubai Channel 33 that started around 4pm. To us, it was a signal that the cartoons were about to start. This felt very much the same. The excitement was building, and the crowds hugged the concrete barriers a little tighter, finalizing their desired positions for what could be a life highlight. Everyone loves cartoons, after all.

In the silence after the anthem, random crowd murmurs faded to the backdrop as my best friend announced, “They changed the name to Burj Khalifa”, tilting his iPhone screen towards me as if I wouldn’t believe him otherwise. People started chiming in with opinions and projected motives, offenses and defenses, “I heard”s and “I knew it”s. It seemed only polite to have invited the Dubai rumor mill to the Burj’s grand opening. As if on cue, our distraction was broken by the sounds of fireworks from around the Dubai Mall area off to the right. I ran back far enough to catch a glimpse, and caught a few final seconds of an impressive but very regular firework show. It was as if the organizers were reminding us what a normal pyrotechnic display looked like before they blew our minds. This was the control experiment.
“Is that it?”, “That can’t be it, right?”. Suddenly, the lights went on in the tower. The top was glittering and each balcony partition below it was illuminated and smoke poured out of each of them like hot breath against the pitch black of the cool night. There was dead silence And then it began. Within seconds, the world’s largest tower exploded into a insane barrage of fireworks that shot off of its surface and out into the sky, running up and down the steel frame with perfect timing. It was one of those situations where you barely have time to register how amazed you were at what happened a second ago before the amazement doubles up and knocks you over again. And then that keeps happening over and over again until you’re making faces that are reserved for rollercoasters and bedrooms. In that moment, I realized how much the cost of overcoming my cynicism was, and I knew I’d probably never be able to afford it again.

After what seemed like every 4th of July celebration since 1776 compressed into a 20 minute span ended, the crowd was already ecstatic. The people, having first been overwhelmed, eventually regained composure and started cheering the tower on, realizing that we were all on the same team and that this victory could and should belong to us too. Applause rang out as the cracking of fireworks fell silent and the tower stood there in its own afterglow, surrounded in smoke, beaming colorful lights in every direction and almost heaving with pride.
Everyone rejoined their groups and excitedly recounted their own personal experiences of the event, as if there was more than one way to have an architectural orgasm. They compared photos that looked remarkably similar to one and other, stealing some of the building’s glory with self-centered boasts like “Dude, I really got an amazing shot of this part, see?”. We sat under the wooden slatted roof as the myriad floodlights shot out from the Burj and swung around in a display that embarrassed the 20th Century Fox logo and looked like a hundred helicopters pursuing a hundred escaped felons.
My parents who had left the scene immediately when the show had ended called me an hour later from the taxi line, not having left the premises yet. My father (an accountant by education but not in excitable times like these), estimated 5,000 people in line behind him and 2,000 people in front of him. (He also estimated that there were at least 4,000 people total in line). We decided to stick around a little longer and wait for the streets to clear up, no matter how fuzzy the fuzzy math was.
We headed to a swank waterside bar around the corner to get some drinks. Our outdoor seats were so close to the tower that you could only comfortably see its first 20 stories from where we were sitting. By the time the second round of drinks had come out, we grew tired of telling Burj stories and the conversation had shifted to global politics. By the time they announced the last call for drinks, we had practically forgotten we were sitting next to the biggest thing mankind had ever built. We got in a cab at 2am and called it a night, wondering what we should do tomorrow.