Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Centre for Cultural Understanding

This Monday we have a special breakfast: we booked a "Cultural Breakfast" at the Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Centre for Cultural Understanding. Touted as a great way to 'meet the locals', we're mainly going because my girlfriend might use the event for one of her articles. (She's a journalist, which is the reason why we're in Dubai in the first place.)

The centre is close to the old town of Dubai, next to Dubai Creek. It's in an area that boasts the only remaining traditional architecture in Dubai, although the buildings are all new and renovated, so that it feels more like a Disneyland version of an old emirati medina than something really genuine. Indeed, if you look through the windows of some of the old reed and mudbrick houses, you'll find that the walls are made of plastic from the inside.

Be that as it may, the Centre itself is housed in a beatiful building. We're received in its courtyard, where a woman welcomes us in flawless English with a delightfully strong Arab accents. She will host today's breakfast, together with a man who behaves much more shyly and speaks only a few words in American English. Both are dressed traditionally, he in the well known Arab white robe called dishdasha, she in a modern black and white version of the black abaya commonly worn by Emirati women.

We are promised that during the question and answer session that will take place after the breakfast, we can ask anything we want. This is stressed several times: anything we want. In the meantime, coffee is served. The woman explains that 'in the old times', coffee was the most special drink in the house - in fact, the only special drink. As she puts it, 'it was our wine, our red bull and our coca cola'. It was therefore considered rude to refuse coffee, but she stresses that this rule doesn't apply today. The coffee is of the Gulf variety: a not very strong blend of coffee made of unroasted beans, flavoured with cardamon and saffran. It's an acquired taste. Personally, I prefer Turkish coffee, although I love it when there's cardamom in the bled. (Which isn't very Turkish, but they still call it Turkish coffee here if it's prepared in the Turkish way: i.e. the water is boiled slowly together with sugar and the ground coffee in a small pot and taken off and put back on the fire several times after it has reached boiling point.) It's the one thing I wish Tunisia would take over from the Middle East: coffee with cardamom.

After the coffee, dates are handed out and the woman talks about the significance of the date in Arab culture, explaining that 'in the old times' it was the only fruit and therefore an important part of the diet. Rihanna Gaga finds it difficult to remain quiet. She's full of energy today: we travelled by metro and it took quite a long time to get here, so she's tired of just sitting around. She's fascinated by the little packs of water that are stacked everywhere for the visitors. She plays quietly with them for a while, but then manages to fall on them, causing a splash of water all over the carpet.

Then, breakfast is served in the form of huge piles of pancakes, a kind of waffles, a kind of sweet dumplings, thick yoghurt, dates, syrup, sweet vermicelli and chickpeas with peppers: we're told that all of this is typical Emirati food. Rihanna Gaga is mainly interested in the sweet vermicelli, of which she starts eating handfuls straight from my plate the moment I sit down next to her. The food is quite tasty, especially for those with a sweet tooth.

When the question and answer session starts, I am still eating because I had to change Rihanna Gaga's nappy. Rihanna Gaga is bored by all this talking and looks around for somehting to do. She's fascinated by the prayer room in front of which we are sitting - we're sitting in the gallery instead of in the courtyard where most of the people sit and where the breakfast is served. She repeatedly tries to enter the prayer room, not because of a sudden interest in Islam, but because this is where some children are playing. However, two of them, a brother and sister, try to prevent her from doing so. At a certain moment, the little boy even shuts the door when she tries to climb the treshold, almost crushing her fingers which are clasped around the door frame. Because of the nasty smile on the boy's face and the fact that he looks at her hand while he closes the door, I suspect he's quite aware of what he's doing and my protective instincts kick in. I manage to hide my anger, however, and calmly tell the boy not to close the door: it's dangerous. His mother is not so forgiving. She jumps in and scolds him, telling him she's often warned him not to play with doors. Rihanna Gaga is completely oblivious to what is going on, and luckily she soon finds someone to play with: a girl of about seven years old, who is here with her older sister and parents. Both girls are extremely well behaved and quite happily take Rihanna Gaga under their wing, helping her to draw with pencils distributed by the centre and when this bores here, to build small towers with the same pencils.

Meanwhile the question and answer session has been narrowed down - as could be expected - to the treatment of women in Emirati culture and Islam. The woman answers all questions very skillfully, managing to combine a certain amount of self-awareness (explaining, for instance, that there is nothing Islamic about the covering of hair and face of women, but that this is cultural) with a mostly apologetic message explaining how Islam provides women with many rights. She, of course, dodges the question why religion needs to provide women with rights while men are apparently born with them and also uses a Men are from Mars, Women from Venus discourse that makes me cringe, but which is very well received by the other members of the audience. (One really has to admire her rhetoric skill when she first asks the men of the audience how long they need to do their hair - only a few minutes - and then the women - much longer, obviously - after which she triumphantically says: 'you see, that's why women need to cover their hair when they pray, because we have to do so five times a day and if we'd have to do our hair everytime before wo go out to the mosque, we'd never get there.) Meanwhile, a volunteer from the audience is dressed up like a Gulf woman, and the different items that are put on her are explained.

All in all, I do think this cultural breakfast is a great initiative: the Emirati are such a small minority and Emirati culture is quite closed, so that if it weren't for events like this, one could live for years in their country without ever meeting an emirati. And if you look beyond the woman's slightly smug nationalism vis à vis Kuwait ('first they didn't want to be in our union because they were richer, now they beg us to be in our union but we don't need them anymore') and foreigners living in Dubai ('first we offered them to become Emirati but they refused, now they want our nationality but we won't give it anymore') I suppose the information she is willing to give is actually pretty interesting for many people and she seems quite frank in her willingness to share her culture and explain its peculiarities.

I decide not to ask the only question I have on my mind (since most of the traditional food being served is based on dough, I wonder where the original bedouins got their cereals for making it), as my fellow guests are clearly mostly interested in anything that has to do with Arab women and marriage customs (which seems to be the general interest during such gatherings - I remember an evening with Indonesian exchange students in the Netherlands quite a while ago when most of their questions had to do with the fact that many Dutch youngsters live together unmarried.)

Now Rihanna Gaga herself has discovered the doors of the prayer room as an interesting plaything and it is getting more and more difficult to keep her quiet. Luckily, with one last question about polygamy, the meeting is over and we say goodbye and thank our hosts. Then, we head off for a different side of Dubai: the Indian quarter.