Inside Abu Dhabi's Most Rollicking Karaoke Joint

"My Secret City" is a collaboration between CityLab and Narratively, a digital publication featuring extraordinary stories of ordinary people, told through video, text, photo essays, comics journalism and more.

When I tell other Americans that I have been living in Abu Dhabi for seven years, I’m often confronted with what I call The Look. Its exact composition could probably be broken down into 23 percent wariness and 77 percent abject horror—allotting perhaps a small variance for envy and intrigue if the listener has spent time perusing heavily filtered travel photos on Instagram. (Ooh! Sand dunes!) Most know Abu Dhabi as that place where Vin Diesel nonchalantly jumped a sports car between three skyscrapers; where Carrie Bradshaw shopped a lot while wearing impractical ballgowns through ancient labyrinthine markets. But Abu Dhabi is also somewhere in that whole tumultuous Middle East region; its widely held image is a hypermodern city comprised of lavish wealth, intangible danger, and Orientalist exoticism—a live-action Aladdin meets “The Jetsons” on steroids.