An Internet Café in Bur Dubai

Bur Dubai is a maze of twisty little passages, called sikka, and on many of them are Internet Cafés.

One of these cafés, when it first opened, had a sign that said, in English, 'Internet Telephone.' This sign, being a ticket to four years of room and board at a Dubai Municipality facility, quickly disappeared. A sign in Chinese characters remained saying 'Internet Telephone.'

A few weeks ago, I went by and saw an English sign in the window of the café, saying 'Internet telephone no have.'

There are drawings of two circles, side by side. Each circle has a dot that is really at the exact centre of the circle, but it seems to be above centre in one and below centre in the other, an illusion caused by the way lines are drawn inside the circles.

When I saw the 'Internet telephone no have,' it moved the centre of the window that I saw, and I didn't notice the Chinese characters. They are red characters, almost 50 cm high, but the window is quite grimy, so the Chinese characters are much harder to see than the English, and I didn't notice them the first time I passed the café, so I assumed they no longer allowed Internet telephony. However, when I went in, every computer was in use by people who seemed to be talking to friends back somewhere that Mandarin is spoken. When I tried to ask, they just said, 'No English.'

Today, I wandered back by the café, and this time I saw the Chinese characters, and went in again.

I asked, and the proprietors absolutely, positively will not let a foreign barbarian make phone calls from their café, although they did say that anyone is welcome to use the Internet. I asked about the Chinese characters and was informed that they were left by the previous owners and are no longer valid to anyone, even ethnic Chinese, and they suggested that I read the English sign (though none of the staff could).

There is a chance that it is true that it is no longer possible for anyone to make Internet telephone calls from that café, since there were no customers of any ethnic group using the café, and it always used to be very crowded.

But it may just have been the wrong time of day.