Abu Dhabi? Or Dubai?

This is an ongoing debate in the UAE. Which city is preferable/better, and on what levels?

To most people who live in Dubai, this is no contest. Theirs is the bustling metropolis with conspicuous consumption and enormous towers. A movable feast. Or a movable party, anyway.

However, for many of us who live in Abu Dhabi, the capital, it also is no contest — in the other direction. Abu Dhabi is a rational place, easy to navigate, far less plastic, far more Emirati and, therefore, far more real.

A coworker at The National, also a blogger, recently laid out 10 reasons why she prefers Abu Dhabi to Dubai. She has identified several of the salient points.

Follow the link, and then come back for a few more reasons of my own.

I appreciate that some of my colleague’s list of 10 come from a female perspective. (I would not have thought of the “heels required” thing if I had all day.)

I am easily entertained. I do not need sieges of drunken carousing. (None of us do, really) Drunken carousing is, often, the Dubai expat life. Occasionally tipsy is Abu Dhabi — for expats, that is.

If you want to live something more resembling a regular life, with some stretches of peace and quiet — then it’s Abu Dhabi you want.

Really, really conspicuous consumption is more of a Dubai thing. It’s not like we live in green-lawn suburbia here in Abu Dhabi, but you don’t get the “Neverland” vibe given off in much of Dubai.

As my colleague notes, this debate was given fresh impetus by a recent decision, in Abu Dhabi, that Abu Dhabi government employees must live in Abu Dhabi emirate. Many of them had been living in Dubai.

And some people who live in Dubai reacted as if they were being asked to move to Siberia.

For the bright kids among the Dubai crowd, I don’t get it. For the vacuous, I do. If you prize boozy Friday brunches, random hookups and weekends you never quite remember, and a three-hour commute five days a week to your job in Abu Dhabi … well, sure, you would rather live in Dubai.

Dubai is like Las Vegas without the gambling. Abu Dhabi is like St. Louis without the baseball. You visit one; you live in the other.