The Capital Emirate: Abu Dhabi's Louvre, Palace and Mosque
The 1.5 hour drive between Dubai and Abu Dhabi reveals a vast desert landscape and with a sprinkling of seemingly random corporate headquarters alongside kitschy theme parks. Well, random only until one recalls the free trade zone that entices businesses to lay roots here and the persistent fabricated entertainment that is elemental to the UAE and it all starts to make sense.
Contrary to Dubai, where the city has a cosmopolitan feel and certainly a level of integration of western culture, Abu Dhabi is the conservative capitol sister city. We spent a day driving from sight to sight in 100 degree heat.
The Louvre Abu Dhabi
Last year I had to skip a visit inside of the Musée du Louvre in Paris due to time constraints so the opportunity to visit the brand new Louvre museum in Abu Dhabi, which opened in November of 2017, was a fantastic treat. Besides the French writing scattered about the museum (in addition to Arabic and English) I would not have guessed that the famed and historical museum in France had any relation at all to this modern architectural edifice, doused in white against a cerulean UAE sky.
The collections of the Paris and Abu Dhabi museums seemed dichotomous to my artistic eye. In Paris, one could wander for days in the Louvre, experiencing centuries of art in varying mediums made by the hands of some of the most well known creators. The Louvre Abu Dhabi is more of a walk through history itself.
We entered the museum and, thanks to pre-purchased online tickets, quickly began our experience in the first gallery. The museum's ambitious story begins at the beginning of time itself. Viewers are then threaded through the history of human life on planet earth as each gallery exposes the next period's focus on art and cultural development.
What I found captivating was the juxtaposition of cultures at key points in history. For example, stone sculptures of religious icons created around the world in the same time period but from clearly western or eastern societies.
I find so often in exhibited art that context is lost and this museum apparently challenged itself to present the timelines of the West from which this museum itself came and the East as its new home base. The conflict intrinsic in this attempt is that it becomes a question of what to include. I felt, traversing the galleries, that the curation of the works left many questions to be asked. When we skipped a thousand or so years moving from one gallery to the next, my travel companions unanimously mentioned experiencing a disjointedness in the story arc.
An agreed-upon museum highlight was a room that housed maps, centuries old, exhibiting with pen and paper what the world appeared to be to some of the first travelers, the people who "discovered" our modern world. The era of "New Spain" and "New France" as monikers for many Central and South American locales had us staring at these maps for minutes, deciphering how foreign the earth itself must have seemed back then.
I am a lover of maps, my favorite of which was torn from a fold out of an old National Geographic and has hung on the wall in apartments in Buenos Aires, Paris and New York. A star written in pen denotes the cities I have visited. A threadbare mini Argentine flag has been pinned on its country since 2012 and a tiny silver NYU pin has lived on top of Manhattan since 2014. The star drawn over the Canary Islands and Iceland are favorites for the question, "what is that star over there?" I update my map efficiently upon returning from a new place; it's a way to track my progress and evoke memory. It has been my travel companion itself.
While I wouldn't send a friend to the Louvre Abu Dhabi purely for the artwork, the way I would to perhaps the Reina Sofía in Madrid for the sheer awesomeness that is Picasso's Guernica, I would certainly direct them to the museum for its roof.
The dome-shaped ceiling made from intricately twisted metal reminded me of the hammam I visited in Turkey in 2015, where an octagonal shaped cut-out in the roof of the hammam allowed in warm light that heated the baths beneath it. This roof is the true work of art worth visiting. Like star-shaped puzzle pieces that almost fit together, the roof lets in gleams of light that create shadow play on the walls and floor.
To end our time at the Louvre, we grabbed a sandwich at the museum cafe and sat overlooking the bright blue water that surrounds the building. A few hours in the morning felt like the appropriate time to spend here, taking in the artwork and, more memorably, this uniquely Emirati structure.
Emirates Palace Hotel
I wasn't quite sure what my friends meant when they said we would be visiting the Emirates Palace Hotel in Abu Dhabi. Driving up to the massive building which resembles a castle, we asked the guard politely if we could just take a look around. He gave us a once-over and somewhat reluctantly let us through. After walking around the grounds and the hotel itself, I'm surprised we were allowed in at all without a reservation.
This 7 star hotel, where room prices are on the high upper end of the pricing spectrum, is a city in and of itself. A private beach, pools, several restaurants and shops, and outdoor parks along with domed ceilings, grand staircases, and heaps of gold and marble make this hotel the palace it truly is. It even used to house a gold ATM - an ATM where one could take out actual gold bars - but they had removed it shortly before our visit according to the staff. Several passageways and the beach were off limits to us, reserved for guests only.
To gain entry to the Emirates Palace Hotel is to glimpse how the high society of the UAE elite vacations. For me, the view was the most exciting part of our visit. The looming buildings of Abu Dhabi were situated in plain view of the hotel fountains and we could relax for a moment to take in the city around us.
Sheikh Zayed Mosque
I mentioned that the most disoriented I felt in Dubai was when we were separated from our boyfriends to sit in the women-and-children only car of the Dubai Metro. This separation was unnatural for us and strangely public but I grew used to it as we used the metro system more frequently. In Abu Dhabi, the gender distinction became even more clear.
Entering the Sheikh Zayed Mosque, visitors (of which there are many) are funneled through metal detectors and then evaluated to ensure dress code compliance. For men, this means long pants and a respectable shirt (short sleeves are fine). For women, this means long pants or skirt, long sleeves and a head covering.
As women, we entered a room full of abayas with hoods to cover the hair, all in the same shade of mauve. Joe later shared the strangeness he felt watching all of the women leave the security area looking exactly the same, worried he may not be able to find us. Observing the local customs is imperative here, especially when visiting a place of worship and in retrospect wearing the full covering added to the understanding of Islam that I gained from visiting Sheikh Zayed Mosque.
Sheikh Zayed Mosque was the Sagrada Familia of the Middle East for me. Barcelona's famed Gaudi-designed church appears to be gothic and historical on the outside but, upon stepping inside, visitors are shown meticulous stained glass windows in bright shades that change the color of the inner atrium to rich blues and greens. This coupled with the uber-contemporary columns made to look like trees in a forest give the church the essence of a secular building.
For all of the wardrobe enhancements that went along with gaining entry to this incredible building, it was almost beyond a religious entity and could simply be appreciated for the craftsmanship and clear thoughtfulness that went into its making.
The absolute key to visiting Sheikh Zayed Mosque is to take the free tour. As a patron of free walking tours in the places I visit, we were lucky to arrive when a tour was beginning. We removed our shoes outside the mosque entrance and donned our headphones which magnified the voice of our tour leader, a man who has worked at the mosque for years and was surprisingly open to answering the decidedly western questions that arose.
We were told of the different Arabic scripts used on the domes of the mosque and the painstaking creation of the marble flowers infused in the design of the columns and floor. Taking the tour barefoot in my abaya and focused just on the voice in my headphones was a deeply immersive experience even in the context of a group. The tour also takes you to many sections of the mosque that the average visitor would not be able to see.
Inside the mosque, we saw enormous Swarovski crystal-encrusted chandeliers and the largest carpet in the world, created in Iran and shipped in 9 pieces, along with the artisans that made it, to be reassembled in the mosque. There are raised lines in the carpet itself that guide the thousands of worshipers the mosque can hold on where to stand. We were shown futuristic-looking clocks on a huge wall that delineate the prayer times and told that there is a grace period in which worshipers can pray around these times.
The calls to prayer in the UAE weren't as prominent as the ones I heard in Istanbul, but the UAE does utilize bright lights, usually green, to illuminate mosques at night so they can always be found be the people looking for them.
In Abu Dhabi, there was much more to see than we could accomplish in just one day. That said, I connected to the aspects we were able to experience, particularly the mosque.
In a time when Islam is so frequently misunderstood in the US, it felt like an act of fellowship to gain knowledge about the religion. The openness of our tour guide exposed a truth that only travel could: regardless of where we live, we are all very similar at the core. There are nuances, geographically and socially, but his preparedness to answer outsiders' questions about his religion without judgement showed me that he is a part of a group of people that is trying to be understood and to share the aspects of what makes them great. In the end, who isn't.