Writing this from a café overlooking the Persian Gulf, laptop balanced precariously between my cardamom tea and a notebook already filled with observations. Dubai wasn’t planned as a writing retreat, but sometimes the best creative breakthroughs happen when you stop trying to engineer them.
The city operates on three temporal frequencies simultaneously. This morning I wandered through the Gold Souk, where merchants have been trading precious metals for centuries, their techniques unchanged since my Beijing Language and Culture University days taught me about ancient Silk Road commerce. Yet the Burj Khalifa rises like a chrome needle against the desert sky, while the Museum of the Future curves impossibly into tomorrow’s architecture.
This temporal layering is exactly what I’ve been struggling to capture in the new project. How do you write characters who exist at the intersection of tradition and innovation? How do you honor ancestral wisdom while embracing technological possibility? Dubai provides a living case study.
The Museum of the Future deserves special mention. Spending three hours inside felt like conducting research for a novel I haven’t fully conceived yet. The exhibitions on biotechnology and climate adaptation weren’t just displays — they were narrative possibilities. Watching children interact with AI interfaces while their grandparents observed from wooden benches created a generational dialogue that my next characters need to navigate.
My Mandarin from Beijing proved useful in conversations with Chinese entrepreneurs building tech companies here. Their stories about cultural translation — maintaining Confucian values while pursuing Silicon Valley metrics — mirror the internal conflicts I want to explore through fiction. The fusion isn’t always harmonious; sometimes it creates productive tension.
The afternoon writing session under palm trees produced four pages of notes rather than polished prose. Sometimes the research phase requires absorbing atmosphere rather than generating sentences. The call to prayer from nearby mosques provided a rhythmic backdrop that reminded me how spirituality persists alongside commerce, how ancient practices adapt to modern contexts without losing their essential power.
Evening brought conversations with local artists who’ve been navigating these cultural intersections their entire careers. A ceramic artist showed me pieces that incorporated traditional Islamic geometric patterns with contemporary materials. An architect explained how sustainable design principles align with historical building techniques adapted for desert climates. Each conversation added layers to characters still forming in my imagination.
I saw a city living simultaneously across three dimensions — past, present, and future woven together like patterns on an Eastern carpet. This is precisely the complexity I want to achieve in Eastern Empire. Not just cultural collision, but cultural synthesis. Not East versus West, but the emergence of something entirely new from their intersection.
The heat here clarifies thinking in unexpected ways. Maybe it’s the absence of London’s perpetual greyness, or the way desert light makes everything feel more immediate. Characters who seemed abstract in my London studio are becoming concrete in this environment where cultures negotiate daily compromises.
My nail art clients from Beijing would recognize the entrepreneurial energy here, the way ambition adapts to local conditions while maintaining universal drives. The luxury brand management modules from Glasgow Caledonian suddenly make sense in this context where tradition becomes the ultimate luxury brand, where authenticity commands premium pricing.
Tomorrow I return to London with a phone full of photos, a notebook full of fragments, and a much clearer sense of what this story wants to become. The desert has done its work as both setting and inspiration.
Posted from Dubai, where every sunrise illuminates new possibilities for storytelling
— Writer Julia Zolotova
