I Stayed in Dubai When My Friends Flew Home: What Academic City Was Actually Like

When things escalated in the region earlier this year, most of the people I know on campus left. Flights out, families calling, group chats going quiet over about a week. I stayed.

I want to write this carefully, because "was it safe" is something people genuinely search for and mostly get answered by strangers with an agenda. So this is only what I saw, in one place, over a few weeks. It isn't a security assessment and it isn't a promise about anyone else's situation.

Why I stayed

Two boring reasons.

I had work I couldn't put down. Projects with people depending on them, deadlines that didn't care what was going on regionally. And flights home at short notice, in exactly the window when everyone else was also trying to fly, weren't cheap.

That's the whole decision. Practical, not brave. I mention it because I think people imagine a much bigger deliberation than there was.

What it was actually like

Quiet, mostly. Uncomfortably quiet.

Academic City is a student area, and student areas run on students. When most of them go, the place doesn't get dangerous, it gets empty. Corridors that are normally loud at midnight were just corridors. I ate alone a lot. I missed my family more than I thought I would, in that specific way where you're fine all day and then it hits you at eleven at night.

But the city itself kept working, and that's the part I hadn't expected. Shops open. Metro running. Deliveries showing up. I went to the cinema. I went out with the handful of people still around. None of the ordinary machinery of the place stopped, and that does something for your head that's hard to explain until you've been in it.

The parts that scared me

I'm not going to pretend it was all calm.

There were interception sounds. More than once. If you haven't heard that, the closest I can get is a distant flat thud that you feel slightly before you work out what it was, and then a few really unpleasant seconds of figuring out how far away it was and whether there's going to be another one.

And then there was this, which landed on everyone's phone at the same time:

An official alert telling you to get into a secure building, away from windows and open areas, and wait, is a strange thing to read on your own lock screen. I was scared. I don't think there's a smarter way to say it.

What I noticed afterwards though was how the alert was written. Specific instructions, no drama, and then a real follow up when things changed. Being told clearly what to do is worth a lot when your own instincts aren't much use.

What I came away with

I trusted the country would look after the people inside it, and for the stretch I was here that turned out to be right. That's my personal read and I'm holding it as one. I can't turn it into a guarantee and I wouldn't want this post used as one, because the honest answer to "will it be fine" is that nobody knows in advance.

What I can say confidently is narrower and probably more useful. Nothing in my ordinary life stopped working. Not the transport, not the shops, not the power, not the internet, not being able to go watch a film on a Tuesday. Whatever was being handled was handled somewhere well above the level where I had to think about it, and the information that reached me was clear and calm.

The hardest part was never physical danger. It was being a long way from my family, in a building where nearly everyone had gone home, with a lot of work and a lot of quiet.

If you're a student somewhere far from home wondering whether staying is the wrong call, I don't know your situation and I'm not going to tell you what to do. All I can tell you is that I stayed, that I was scared for a few specific hours and fine for most of the rest, and that the campus is slowly filling back up.