Dubai by night

We stayed up all night to find out what happens in Dubai Discuss this article

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What’s everyone doing up so late? It’s a question many expats ask themselves on any nocturnal journey through this city. Take JBR at 3am on a winter’s evening – it’s packed with Emirati families (probably the largest concentration of dishdashas you’ll see outside the malls), strolling along The Walk in a flurry of nose-touching and coffee swigging.

Our nocturnal odyssey was inspired by this scene and by a single Arabic word, samar, which translates loosely as ‘conversations in the night’. We wanted to find out who stays up way past sundown in Dubai, and talk to them.

On one side, we found a city that never sleeps – papers to be wrapped, fish hauled in. And, of course, there’s the relentless beating drum of construction. But we also found a more languid side to our samar, with shisha cafés that come alive after 3am, populated by people who seem oblivious it’s the dead of night.

But one image stays with us. At 4.45am on Al Rigga Road, we found a Pakistani man sitting beside a flowerbed, reading in the light from a streetlamp. As we slowed to see what he was reading, he closed the book and ran – a ghostly figure in a salwar kameez running down the street. Dubai becomes a strange place once the sun goes down.