The last few weeks saw the the news that Expo 2020 Dubai, the mega event world fair that was due to open in October, is to be postponed. As far as the international press is concerned, a one-year delay is a done deal, but the local press are saying a postponement is at the proposal stage.
But I'm not bitter.
Anyway.
You can read in my old blog post, linked above, and here again, how Him Indoors and I looked at each other and sighed wearily when the winning bid was announced, because we knew that it would mean another spike in rental prices, and that we would be turfed out of our apartment by another unscrupulous landlord keen to get round rental increase caps of 20 per cent and find tenants willing to pay more.
It is also very easy to be cynical about Expo as the world now is unimaginably different from the one that saw the first World's Fair, which took place back in dear old Blighty in 1851. If you'll pardon me stating the bleedin' obvious: back then, if you wanted to see great innovations and inventions, the only real way to do so was to travel to see them in real life, whereas today you can of course see anything you like at the swipe of a smartphone without leaving the comfort of your armchair.
But, hosting the expo is a great source of national pride for the UAE. It is the first time an event of its kind has ever been held anywhere in the region, and the country has made a huge investment in creating a purpose-built expo site to the south of the city, and of course there is the small matter of the claims that the event will bring 25 million visitors to the UAE during its six month duration.
With the airport currently closed except for a fraction of its usually scheduled flights, entry suspended even for pre-existing visa holders, and the emirate of Dubai living with some of the tightest restrictions to prevent the spread of Covid-19, it was of course inevitable that it would be postponed. Talk of a vaccine for this miserable disease is apparently a long way off, and it seems unlikely it will be ready for widespread use by October this year, so it would be a kind of madness for it to go ahead.
While its cancellation may not have the same global impact as that of the Tokyo Olympics, it is big news for the UAE, and for those who livelihoods depend on it going ahead in October. It is not for nothing that the event was being marketed earlier this year as the world's greatest show.
On broader level, there are many millions of us, Him Indoors and I included, whose livelihoods depend on things returning to some kind of normality at some point soon. But, I remember saying to him in the early stages of the outbreak as it began to spread from country to country: "Can't people just stop s***ing all over the world?" And surely that will have to be the case if a vaccine is not identified, will it not? Perhaps regular air travel will once again become the preserve of the super rich. If Greta Thunberg is not enough to convince the great and the good that burning tons of fossil fuel for the sake of attending a meeting or a conference that could easily take place online, or for the sake of "winter sun" or having a place to drink beer at a third of the price of one's homeland on a stag night, then maybe the risk of contracting a potentially fatal strain of viral pneumonia, or passing it on to a vulnerable loved one, is.
Maybe we are about to see the last of these global events. After all, many of us who were told, no, it is simply not possible for you to work from home, found that suddenly, when there is no other option, it is perfectly possible after all, albeit with the help of the dreaded Zoom. And my inbox is stuffed full of press releases about events and conferences that are being cancelled and hastily reconvened online.
There is no doubt that when the expo does eventually go ahead, it will be enormous, brash, bursting to the seams with the evidence of hefty quantities spent on staging it. But perhaps, in its efforts to host the expo to host all expos, the UAE has inadvertently done just that. Perhaps when the new normal is not getting on a plane at the drop of a hat, experiencing the wonders of an expo is purely something that will take place virtually, and these in real life experiences will be the a thing of the past.
For some context for those of you who have never set foot in the UAE, I wrote about the announcement of Dubai's winning bid, at what was a very different time in my life, and not just because there wasn't a global pandemic at the time. We were pre-kids, we were still running half marathons, we were living in a high-rise flat in Downtown, which was the venue for some corking new year parties thanks to a killer view of the Burj Khalifa and its gigantic new year fireworks display.
 |
| My shaky Blackberry shot of the Burj Khalifa, the night the winning Expo 2020 bid was announced, taken from our apartment in 8 Boulevard Walk. You would not be able to take a similar shot today as Emaar built several more towers in the gap between our old building and the Burj since then. |
I was in the midst of a short-lived semi-career change, working in-house as a copywriter for a real estate agency. My time there mirrored many in Dubai's experience in the run-up to and aftermath of the Expo bid. I was hired just after the win, there was an inevitable surge in interest in real estate, in both residential and commercial sectors, and then in June, the usual summer slowdown was not the usual slowdown, but a bit of a slump, and by November, I was seven months pregnant with DB1, and "made redundant" from my job. I say "made redundant", because they brought in a younger, distinctly more male person, while I was still working there, to do my job, which is another story, connected to the fact that employee rights are not exactly top of the agenda for many.
But I'm not bitter.
Anyway.
You can read in my old blog post, linked above, and here again, how Him Indoors and I looked at each other and sighed wearily when the winning bid was announced, because we knew that it would mean another spike in rental prices, and that we would be turfed out of our apartment by another unscrupulous landlord keen to get round rental increase caps of 20 per cent and find tenants willing to pay more.
It is also very easy to be cynical about Expo as the world now is unimaginably different from the one that saw the first World's Fair, which took place back in dear old Blighty in 1851. If you'll pardon me stating the bleedin' obvious: back then, if you wanted to see great innovations and inventions, the only real way to do so was to travel to see them in real life, whereas today you can of course see anything you like at the swipe of a smartphone without leaving the comfort of your armchair.
But, hosting the expo is a great source of national pride for the UAE. It is the first time an event of its kind has ever been held anywhere in the region, and the country has made a huge investment in creating a purpose-built expo site to the south of the city, and of course there is the small matter of the claims that the event will bring 25 million visitors to the UAE during its six month duration.
With the airport currently closed except for a fraction of its usually scheduled flights, entry suspended even for pre-existing visa holders, and the emirate of Dubai living with some of the tightest restrictions to prevent the spread of Covid-19, it was of course inevitable that it would be postponed. Talk of a vaccine for this miserable disease is apparently a long way off, and it seems unlikely it will be ready for widespread use by October this year, so it would be a kind of madness for it to go ahead.
While its cancellation may not have the same global impact as that of the Tokyo Olympics, it is big news for the UAE, and for those who livelihoods depend on it going ahead in October. It is not for nothing that the event was being marketed earlier this year as the world's greatest show.
On broader level, there are many millions of us, Him Indoors and I included, whose livelihoods depend on things returning to some kind of normality at some point soon. But, I remember saying to him in the early stages of the outbreak as it began to spread from country to country: "Can't people just stop s***ing all over the world?" And surely that will have to be the case if a vaccine is not identified, will it not? Perhaps regular air travel will once again become the preserve of the super rich. If Greta Thunberg is not enough to convince the great and the good that burning tons of fossil fuel for the sake of attending a meeting or a conference that could easily take place online, or for the sake of "winter sun" or having a place to drink beer at a third of the price of one's homeland on a stag night, then maybe the risk of contracting a potentially fatal strain of viral pneumonia, or passing it on to a vulnerable loved one, is.
Maybe we are about to see the last of these global events. After all, many of us who were told, no, it is simply not possible for you to work from home, found that suddenly, when there is no other option, it is perfectly possible after all, albeit with the help of the dreaded Zoom. And my inbox is stuffed full of press releases about events and conferences that are being cancelled and hastily reconvened online.
There is no doubt that when the expo does eventually go ahead, it will be enormous, brash, bursting to the seams with the evidence of hefty quantities spent on staging it. But perhaps, in its efforts to host the expo to host all expos, the UAE has inadvertently done just that. Perhaps when the new normal is not getting on a plane at the drop of a hat, experiencing the wonders of an expo is purely something that will take place virtually, and these in real life experiences will be the a thing of the past.
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