Dubai: Chips Oman, Star juice, Dh3 shawarmas from neighbourhood shops.
When 38-year-old Dubai resident Alex de Smet thinks back to the years growing up in the UAE, the items she lists off are ones every child who grew up in the 1980s, in UAE, can relate to.
“I remember the men selling cotton candy around the street and the little ice cream trucks. It’s going to sound clichéd, but those were actually the moments of our childhood,” she said.
Last month, she marked 30 years of being a UAE resident, but when the Belgian national looks back at the day she arrived as an eight-year-old, she remembers just how new the experience felt.
At the time, de Smet was living in Geneva, Switzerland, when her father got a job offer in Dubai. As she walked out of the plane, she remembers the heat, before getting on to an AC bus.
“Tired little me wasn’t impressed,” she remembers, laughing.
Growing up as Dubai grew
Thirty years on, it has been the little moments that she remembers the most fondly. Her memories are closely connected with some of the ‘firsts’ children in Dubai experienced – the first Dubai Shopping Festival by the Creek, the excitement when Wonderland Aquapark opened, or simply driving along Jumeirah Beach Road when the city looked very different from what it is today.
“Over the weekend, we used to go all the way to Jebel Ali Resort to go to the beach. It used to be a little early morning trip. I used to play golf as a young girl at Dubai Creek Club, which looks so different now,” she said.
But as she grew up in the city, she watched the city’s expansion in realtime, and was able to build a life that mirrored the Dubai-it philosophy – to think boldly, act decisively and deliver exceptionally.
As the city welcomed people from every corner of the world, her cultural understanding grew. As someone who was always inclined towards the arts, she also found the perfect space to explore her interests, becoming a salsa dancer as a teenager.
“Dubai was the perfect place to be, because of so many reasons. You’ve got a melting pot of cultures and nationalities and backgrounds. I think that gave me an opening to the world that I wouldn’t have had elsewhere,” she said.
From Dubai to the world stage
After three years of training, de Smet became a professional salsa dancer at the age of 17 and with Dubai located strategically between Asia, Europe and Africa, the world became her stage.
“Dubai gave me a centralised hub to travel. I’ve performed all over the world, from Canada to Nepal, Malaysia, Japan and Hong Kong, all because of being able to go to all these places,” she said.
Soon after, she opened her own dance studio in Dubai Media City, another city development that had grown over the years.
“I had already been teaching since 2009, but I opened my own dance academy in 2012, teaching and exploring and developing everything here in Dubai,” she said.
While a few years later, her business partner and she went their separate ways, her love for art only grew.
“Around the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, I felt like it was a good time to take a break and pivot,” she said.
Leaning in to her love for the arts
She also met her husband – Adham Salloum, a professional photographer. Accompanying him on his shoots around the UAE gave de Smet a chance to delve deeper and more professionally into the world of photography, something that had so far been limited to a hobby.
“Growing up, I was always interested in photography. My parents always pushed me to express myself in one way or the other. So, I followed that lead. My mum was an artist, and I always saw my father and my grandfather with cameras in their hands. I still remember how on one Christmas morning I got my first camera. It was a film camera, so you just had 11 or 12 shots per film,” she said.
But that experience taught her the importance of taking her time with a shot and focusing on the details.
Today, de Smet works as the Vice President of client teams at an advertising agency in Dubai, while also running a photography studio with her husband.
And as the decades have ticked along, her love for the city as well as the arts has only grown deeper.
“Whenever I see something that can show beauty or express a feeling or a memory, I’m attracted to it. It’s the same thing with the dancing and it’s the same thing with everything I do,” she said.
Where old Dubai meets the new
That seems to have been the case with Dubai as well.
“Dubai is one of those cities that has a lot of stability, so there are a lot of things you can expect like clockwork. But then it also has a heartbeat that makes it go faster and faster and evolve on a day-to-day basis,” she said.
“For me, that means I’ve my day-to-day sorted, but then there’s always something there to surprise you and keep you going for bigger and better things. Whether it’s in your career, your personal life or your hobbies, there’s always something new that’s going to surprise you and delight you in a way that you’re going to not want to leave,” she added.
And after spending three decades of her life in the city, the photographer in her is most attracted to the one shot that connects her past and present – Dubai Creek.
“The boardwalk at Dubai Creek at sunset, when the city gives you those really nice orange-pink dramatic skies around November … from there, you’ve got the creek in front of you, but then in the distance, you’ve got the entire Dubai skyline. I think, for me, that’s a really nice place to be because it links me back to old Dubai and a place I used to be at all the time as a child,” she said.
