There are few things I find more stressful than crowded shopping malls, and I immediately felt on edge when we entered the massive Mall of Dubai back in March. My sense of direction evaporated and trying to keep track of our location inside one of the world’s biggest malls seemed like a hopeless task. 

The Dubai Mall has plenty of attractions designed to keep you there the whole day, including an aquarium, a skating rink, a haunted house, a VR park, and a fossil of a diplodocus.

We were intrigued by the aquarium, but were put off by the $45 ticket price. Ralph was only seven months old, so we thought that most of it would have been lost on him. Thankfully there is one multistory tank that can be viewed for free, although even this was hard to find in the endless halls. We spent 15 minutes observing all the animals swimming (including people!) before moving on. Jessica also (secretly) wanted to buy a new pair of Birkenstocks, and thankfully we stumbled upon the small Birkenstocks store which saved us from a painful search. 

Another major attraction of the Dubai Mall is the outdoor dancing fountain and its evening show, but there isn’t much to see in the day. While we walked around the water we saw an amusingly fancy Tim Horton’s with a prime view of the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building.

It was a hot afternoon so we opted for the indoor food court for lunch. We were looking for something we couldn’t get in Cairo, and were immediately intrigued by Al Baik, which by far had the longest line. Al Baik, which was founded in 1974 in Jeddah, is the most popular fast food chain in Saudi Arabia, and it had only come to Dubai the previous summer. Jessica had a spicy chicken sandwich and I had spicy fish nuggets, and it was pretty tasty and unlike much of Dubai was quite cheap. 

Dubai detractors like to say that the city itself is one giant mall, and I have friends who have dismissively said that the city feels fake and lacks both culture and history.

The United Arab Emirates is undeniably an autocracy where civil and political rights are extremely limited. This is especially true for the millions of workers from abroad who have no path to citizenship and often work in precarious and dangerous conditions. I understand the hesitancy of some people to visit places like Dubai that have such poor human rights records,  as well as the counter argument that avoiding such countries can actually hurt the very people already suffering at the hands of a regime. 

This is obviously a complex question, but for the purposes of this post I want to put it aside and instead focus more narrowly on my ambivalence about visiting malls while travelling. Do the homogenizing forces of global capitalism make malls the same everywhere? Or are they the premier places to better understand the local middle-class consumption culture? I don’t have a definite answer, but my relationship to malls while traveling has certainly shifted over the years.

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I grew up across the street from a shopping centre, and as a teenager I also spent lots of time at other malls around Ottawa. For me malls were places to buy CDs, go to the movies, and hang out with friends, but I never thought of them as a place to visit as a tourist. 

When I was 20, I studied in Istanbul for a year, and I can only remember two trips to a mall: once so that I could purchase as many jars of pasta sauce as I could carry from Carrefour, and a second time to an upscale mall for the premiere of a romantic comedy film written by my roommate.

When Jessica and I moved to Geneva in our mid-twenties most of our mall visits revolved around going to the cinema. Jessica and a friend were fond of arriving a few minutes before showtime, stuffing themselves with McDonald’s hamburgers and fries, and then sneaking in a Mcflurry. Although this would all cost upwards of 40 dollars a person, it was still one of the cheapest nights out you could have in Geneva. We also did have a memorable night at the mall arcade when we discovered that Jessica is quite an amazing whack-a-mole player. 

While living in Geneva I competed in badminton at the United Nations Inter Agency Games in Malaga, and from there Jessica and I took a bus to Tarfa and then a ferry to Tangiers for a week in Morocco. We didn’t have any plans once we arrived in Tangiers, and as we walked around the town we stumbled upon a mall and we decided to have dinner in the food court and then stuck around for the people-watching. 

We only spent one night in Tangiers, and then we split the rest of the trip between Fes, Essaioura, and Marrakech. We were disappointed overall with Fes and Marrakech. In both cities we limited ourselves mostly to the historical centres, which were interesting but also somewhat touristy and full of hasslers which made things somewhat unpleasant. In hindsight we wished we had ventured out to see a bit more of the modern cities, where the majority of the urban population lives, and our time at the mall in Tangiers ended up being one of the most memorable parts of the trip and something we wanted to replicate in the future. This was a bit of a shift in our thinking, and we started to view malls as interesting places to visit in themselves while traveling. 

Later that year we found ourselves in Yerevan for three months. The city had a few relatively new malls that we visited many times, mostly for the movies. The English-language screenings were limited, but we didn’t have any friends and so we contented ourselves with whatever was playing. This meant subjecting ourseles to some pretty terrible movies, but it also allowed us to discover Office Christmas Party, a ridiculous comedy that has become an annual tradition. The Yerevan malls had only a few Western chains that we recognized which made them more interesting for us, and we would go for a stroll around and stop at the food court before the movie. 

We have become much more acquainted with the megamall since living in Cairo, as several massive and quite fancy malls have been built in the desert periphery of the city over the past twenty years. 

In our first few months in the city we found it quite fascinating to visit these malls, and we were particularly drawn to the malls which had nice outdoor restaurants. But after more than three there are definitely diminishing returns in visiting the Cairo malls. They all basically have the same stores and restaurants, and the cinemas show the same movies. We still end up visiting sometimes, especially in the summer when they offer one of the few places you can easily walk around with a stroller and hide in the air conditioning.  

When we visited Bangkok in January 2020 with my wife’s sister and her husband, we spent lots of time wandering around and visiting open-air markets, but we also visited Iconsiam, a fancy mall that opened on the edge of the Chao Phraya river in 2018. We told ourselves the usual story, that going to this mall would be a way of understanding an aspect of local culture (and practically speaking it provided a free clean bathroom!).

The mall was extravagant and full of designer stores which would have been out of reach for most of the population. We didn’t do any shopping, but we did have this crazy dessert. 

The mall had an indoor ‘floating market’, which was incredibly tacky, just like the replica souqs that I have seen at malls in both Dubai and Cairo. This floating market seemed designed so that tourists could skip the real floating markets and still check it off their list in a climate-controlled environment. Later during the trip we went on a fascinating tour of Chinatown with Bangkok Vanguards, and the tour guide spoke critically of the mall and the surrounding development, saying that it was built for tourists instead of the needs of local residents, and then I felt guilty and didn’t even want to admit we had already visited.

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The longer I have lived in Cairo the more negative I feel toward the city’s malls. They may be built for a local audience instead of exclusively for tourists, but they are part of an overall approach to urban development that privileges controlled consumption and which completely disregards the need for public space. 

And yet, I think people who come to Cairo and just visit the pyramids and Khan-El-Khalili are not seeing a full picture of the city, just as our time in Morocco was too focused on historical districts to the detriment of our understanding of the contemporary city. 

After many years of travelling around Europe, I feel that people often make a similar mistake in European cities. People often stay in the city centre close to the main sights, but then fail to make it outside of a small radius. 

In my experience, European city centres can also feel similar to malls, often with the same shops on the high streets and the same types of restaurants serving whatever ‘authentic’ food tourists expect to eat in that location.

This is why I have become increasingly drawn to visiting the neighborhoods that are a bit outside of the centre but not as far out as the suburban malls. In my experience these areas reward curiosity give you an opportunity experience the city in a more spontaneous way than the most touristy areas.  

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I may feel ambivalent about malls while travelling, but the best way to justify a visit is by having lunch at Din Tai Fung

On our last day in Dubai, after spending a final morning at the Dubai World Expo, we took the metro to the Mall of the Emirates and its famous indoor ski hill. Even this frankly ridiculous attraction wasn’t novel to us, as there is also an indoor ski hill built by the same company at the Mall of Egypt in Cairo. 

But what Cairo lacks is a location of Din Tai Fung, the Taiwanese restaurant most famous for its xiaolongbao soup dumplings. We had previously had an amazing meal at the original location in Taipei, and we also had to stop for some dumplings when we saw a location in Bangkok even though we had already eaten lunch. This time in Dubai, we once again loved the food, even if there was no pork. Jessica was so impressed with the peanut Dan Dan Noodles that she immediately ordered a second bowl after we had finished everything else, and no she did not share. Ralph also kindly sat calmly in the high chair even if we didn’t offer him anything to eat (those days are unfortunately over). 

We also did lots of interesting non-mall activities in Dubai, including the Dubai World Expo, but I will save those for the next posts. 

Editor’s note from Jessica: From my personal experience, there is also a gendered dimension to entering a mall in some of the cities we have visited, especially in Cairo. There are often many more women and families inside malls than in other spaces, such as crowded, male-dominated downtown streets and cafes. The mall can feel like a respite from overwhelming and unfamiliar (to me) places and somewhere where I can exhale and worry less about sexual harassment and staring/attention as a foreigner. This is a feeling with a lot to unpack, but the different experiences with malls depending on gender, class, and ethnicity also have to be considered.