The Hindu Business Line : Off the wall

Dubai’s airport seems to be built in the middle of a shopping mall! You land at the airport, go through the rigmarole of security check, take the escalator up and you are bang in the middle of what you think is a shopping mall. One that is milling with crowds. There are artificial palm trees too.

Duty-free shops selling nearly anything you may want to pick up — chocolates, electronic gadgets, cameras, mobile phones, jewellery and trinkets. There are offers too. Shop duty-free and you could win up to a million dollars, the shops advertise. Wonder who the lucky one was?

Not only shops, even the numerous eating places are packed. Seeing the crowds at the shops, you wonder whether there really is an economic slowdown. Especially after alighting from a packed Emirates flight from Frankfurt for a six-hour wait before you take another packed Emirates flight back home to Chennai.

You are so tired after the overnight flight from Frankfurt that despite the shutterbug instinct in you — the advantage of a digital camera is that you can shoot as many pictures as you want without worrying about the cost of film — you do not even want to shoot pictures of the duty-free shops. You just want to stretch your legs during the wait for the flight back home.

That wait in Dubai comes after a crazy run in Frankfurt. At the tail end of a visit sponsored by the German engineering company Voith AG, we got to spend the last day in Berlin. We had two hours in between alighting from the Berlin-Frankfurt flight and boarding the one to Dubai. Time enough you would think. Not quite so at the Frankfurt airport where you have to constantly follow signboards, board escalators going up or down. The baggage carousel is never in sight. Then, it is another long walk out of the terminal to board the train to your designated terminal.

We made it to the check-in queue with barely an hour to spare. A co-passenger asks for an aisle or window seat. The counter-clerk politely tells her that none is available. Any chance of an upgrade, the passenger tries her luck. “No, ma’am, the flight is full.” “Not even one,” the passenger persists, and the counter-clerk tells her she could have checked-in online 24-hours earlier to choose her seat. No sign of recession here either. Even the Emirates flights from Chennai to Dubai and then on to Munich were full; not just the “cattle class”, in the by now famous words of Union Minister Shashi Tharoor, even the business class was full.

The day in Berlin itself was a blur. It was windy, raining non-stop and cold. We were on the road immediately after breakfast, on a conducted tour of the city. Before our departure from India, our hosts had told us that the forecast for the week was some rain with temperatures of around 15 degrees Celsius. They were spot on. Only, with the rain it was also windy and chilly.

In Berlin, our 28-year-old tour guide, Jan Porstendorfer, said the remnants of the divide — the Brandenburg Gate; the East Side Gallery along the Spree river, a 1.5-km stretch of the Berlin Wall now converted into an open-air gallery; and Checkpoint Charlie — are still the most popular tourist spots in the city. All through the city, where the Wall once stood, cobblestones mark the contour the wall took.

Porstendorfer, who studied at Berlin’s Humboldt University says with pride that Albert Einstein worked there a while. Waiting to join as a schoolteacher in a few months, the guide says despite the economic slowdown there has thankfully not been a drastic drop in tourists. Most of them come from other European countries — Spain, France and Italy — and from the US.

All through our drive around Berlin, we see mini-buses similar to ours disgorge tourists at popular spots. On November 9 it will be two decades since the Berlin Wall fell; a short walk from the Brandenburg Gate is the Holocaust Memorial, built a few years ago in memory of the Jews killed by the Hitler regime.

Berlin is no doubt a historic city, with plenty to see and enjoy. Provided the weather is good. October is not ideal. We were told that just the previous week, the temperature hovered around 25 degree Celsius — really hot for that period. We were not so lucky.