It was six o’clock on a Saturday and the tiki bar was all but deserted. Outside, the sun was just beginning to recede behind the office towers, stretching long, cool shadows across parking lots that had been all but impassable a few hours before. Inside, it had been exactly the same temperature for years. Very faint, familiar music tinkled from behind the bar: Buena Vista Social Club, the oldest of standbys. The elaborate island-themed décor – conch shells, primitive sculptures, miniature boats – seemed to quiver in anticipation, like a natural history museum just before opening time. Surveying the emptiness, my friend L. and I played along with the pageantry by clinking our absurdly large cocktail glasses together, simulated revelry in a simulated island retreat.

The great irony is that Abu Dhabi in March is, for all practical purposes, a tropical island. Were there some way to throw open the double-paned tinted windows, the evening breeze would rival that of any paradisical getaway. Bougainvillea blooms on the edges of parking lots. Electric-hued flowers fill traffic circles. Hundreds of palm trees dot the median of the airport highway. Of course, the flora thrives only with superhuman effort. Luckily, oil has given this small set of humans superpowers.

By 8:30, this corner acre of the Beach Rotana Hotel – one of more than a dozen locations of the Trader Vic’s chain worldwide – is humming quietly with clusters of tourists and expatriates. There are no Emiratis in here, obviously, but just on the other side of the door, the hotel’s white marble-lined and fountain-filled halls are full of them. In their immaculately starched white dishdashas, they look a bit like angels floating through a slightly over-airconditioned version of heaven.

It occurs to me that this silly bar, just across the indoor fountain from the Benihana, is in its way more of an island that the Polynesian one it emulates. I suddenly have the sense of being enclosed, Russian doll-like, within many layers of isolation: The expats in their inebriated bubble within Emirati society; Abu Dhabi the vertical city a sparkling thing apart from the emirate that shares its name; the UAE a relatively liberal bastion within a largely conservative Arabian peninsula; all these poor primates huddling indoors away from what, even in forgiving March, is a forbiddingly hot climate.

Earlier in the day, we had hit the mall—not to shop, but merely to hang out, something I hadn’t done since being stranded in the Midwest pre-driver’s license. The air was cool and pleasantly free of dust and smoke. Well-dressed Emiratis and expats rode the escalators up and down, seemingly without a care in the world. The coffee shop, though corporate and overpriced, was actually packed with all kinds of different people talking to each other. It was like the ancient notion of the public common aboard an updated version of the Starship Enterprise.

In Brooklyn we value the raw. We like to live amidst exposed brick walls and to eat from secret kitchens in the back of bodegas. We fantasize about farming and drink outdoors at any cost, even if it means breathing in truck exhaust between expensive swigs. Abu Dhabi could not be more cooked, in the Levi-Straussian sense of the word. But by the end of this day of mall hopping and hotel bar hanging, the very notion of authenticity has begun to break down. I start to wrap my head around a very liberating idea: If nothing is real, then everything is. I am no longer responsible for having taste, because there’s nothing that I could do with it here anyway. Bartender, I’ll have another Zombie please.