From the time we enter Marhaba as wide-eyed freshmen up until we wear our purple gowns and bid our Masalama, the danger of the ‘Saadiyat Bubble’ looms above us like a sacrilegious threat. We are nudged and urged by various departments, student groups and upperclassmen to go out and explore the city. One dirham Karak. Chips Oman. Corniche. World Trade Center. Maybe Electra Street if we’re feeling adventurous. We hop into a white taxi waiting at our doorstep, and off we go into the real world. Ah, the satisfaction of breaking out of our little happiness island.

But have we really left the bubble? Not quite. It's pervasive, following us in the streets we wander for school projects, the small-talk we have with taxi drivers, the fish markets we take our visiting relatives to. This bubble reeks of privilege — a strange foreignness. Strange, because we aren’t always the odd western tourist or rich expat. In fact, many times we are people of color, first generation immigrants, first in our families to attend college, children of middle class parents, second-language English speakers, and the list goes on. Many of our backgrounds, collective experiences, belief systems and cultural identities resonate with the hundreds of migrant communities in the city. And yet, there is a dissonance. We keep a safe distance, stay well within our prescribed social strata and don’t dare overstep the lines of class structure.

After all, it’s the study away semesters that pushes us toward real exploration. Those are the months when we brave the bitter cold for evening classes, memorize complex metro routes, pick up a local language, find a favorite study cafe, and try, by all means possible, to establish a relationship with the city. This elaborate method is not considered a worthwhile process in Abu Dhabi. We prefer our cozy D2 breakfast on Saturday mornings and the familiarity of our sophisticated library over any laborious off-campus excursion.

The irony is this: each of us chose to attend a U.S institution in the United Arab Emirates, either intentionally or by chance. And while we triumphantly walk out with a New York University degree, Abu Dhabi itself constitutes very little of those four years. Now whether the place of your education is of importance to you or not is up for debate. But considering that it is, how do we then break this bubble?

Perhaps if we stopped talking about Abu Dhabi in superfluous touristic terms and moved beyond ‘exploring’ local souqs to really engaging in them, we might begin to redefine our relationship with the city. Take the public bus. Haggle for the price of a rug at the carpet souq. Try out a different Lebanese restaurant on Tuesday nights. Explore the nightlife beyond our local haunts. And I promise you, there are local art spaces to take your parents to other than the Louvre.

Of course, these places are not very likely to make it on your top hot-spots list, nor do they fit into the quintessential city-on-a-budget student blog, but they exist. To find them will require us to momentarily shed our armor of privilege and challenge our outsider syndrome. One may argue that the Emirates has not inherently been a place of permanence or belonging. Even those who have lived and labored here for decades, who have built empires and been the backbone of the economy, still struggle to find a sense of home in the Gulf. So how can we?

Maybe we can’t. Perhaps you don’t see yourself working in the UAE once you graduate from NYU Abu Dhabi. Maybe Abu Dhabi is just a pitstop on your journey to a further destination. But even in this transience, there is a unique opportunity to truly understand a culture and the many intricate subcultures it holds, to form a community beyond our safe haven campus. And while ‘culture’ has become every NYUAD student’s favorite buzz word, and our academic education trains us to over-intellectualize such concepts, we cannot negate its incredibly tangible presence in our lives. We can hear it in the music coming from South Asian workers’ phones on their bus ride back to Mussafah. In the gossip of Filipino cashiers in between check-outs. In conversations with Karak vendors as the chai brews. But if we’re solely focused on getting a cup of Karak and leaving, how will we ever get in on that conversation?

Breaking the bubble is no new challenge for us; we have been trying to combat it since our Sama Tower days — yes, Sama Bubble was a thing. Perhaps we shouldn’t be focusing as much on our secluded desert island, as we should be on ourselves.

Fast forward, a couple of years from now. Looking back on your college experience, would you have wanted your relationship with Abu Dhabi to be more than one dirham Karak?

If so, let’s start now.