Last weekend, I found myself on a corner of downtown Abu Dhabi with which I was intimately familiar. Within a five-minute radius, there was my favorite Lebanese restaurant in the city, one of my most-visited karak cafeterias and the hotel I once spent a night at. About an hour later, I would help a group of fellow students take a shortcut to their destination through a byzantine network of small roads, proudly exhibiting my knowledge of the area.

But at the moment, I was there for a class, zoning out as a photographer spoke about the architectural style embodied in the structures in front of us. What was there to see in buildings, already centered, in a city where there are so many unseen human stories? And what was I going to learn about this particular corner that I had not already discovered over the past four years?

But as Hussain AlMooawi spoke, I could not help but slowly find myself drawn to the conversation. He pointed at a building right opposite us, a structure that I had walked past hundreds of times, but never stopped to stare at. The building had circular windows, with a pattern that eerily resembled the popular board game. The structure was designed in a manner to prevent sunlight from directly streaming into the building.

Over the next hour, AlMooawi continued to educate us about Abu Dhabi’s buildings, helping me understand new layers of history and expression on a street that I had visited countless times before. My arrogance — derived from visits where I looked down but never up — was quickly dispelled, as I learned about the architects that had dreamt up these structures, often seeking inspiration from Beirut, Cairo and other cities across the region. I walked back with a renewed vigor, wondering about all that I did not know, in an area that I had convinced myself I had an intimate knowledge of. As I slowed down, spoke to people, I discovered new parts of an area that I thought I knew: a Chinese restaurant that I had never stopped at, the small parks that lie at the edge of Al Zahiyah, and the popularity of new fried chicken outlets at the start of Hamdan street.

For an outsider like myself, this encapsulates Abu Dhabi’s most exceptional quality and also its most frustrating feature: the constant state of incomprehension. The city constantly evokes curiosity, but it so rarely answers the questions it forces you to ask. And when it does, it creates new questions, continuing a never-ending cycle. It is the class reading that you start, discuss with everyone around you and then proceed to never finish, as glimmers of comprehension are bracketed around the vast, colorless expanse of ignorance. It is in Abu Dhabi that you realize the depth of that fallacy. Throw a cliche at the city and it spits it right back, almost scolding you for having the audacity to reduce it to a pithy line.

Does the city feel inauthentic to you? One trip to Electra Street should dispel you of that notion. Is there a dichotomy between authentic downtown and inauthentic malls? Then how does one explain the complexity of urban spaces within malls; the silent negotiations that Professor Rana Al-Mutawa writes about? Feel that the city lacks informal recreational spaces? How is that reconciled with the informal basketball leagues that have quickly popped up across downtown?

This is not to make the orientalist suggestion that Abu Dhabi is a mystery or even that it has secrets, as the name of The Gazelle’s prominent column implies. But rather, it is to conclude that the city, like all others, cannot be explained by hasty grand conclusions, at least not by those who spend four years here. And most importantly, it can only be understood through conversation with those who have seen it through a different lens — that is not an education that can be received on campus, unless they take a class with a certain Deepak Unnikrishann.

We often talk about breaking out of the Saadiyat bubble, but the metaphor implies a spherical object that can be popped by the simple act of taking a taxi across Sheikh Zayed Bridge. Do we break the bubble when we venture to the city and talk to fellow Saadiyat voices about Saadiyat? Do we break the bubble when our outings are limited to quick meals, shuttled in and out of the city? Can we even break the bubble and access experiences that are not necessarily ours, in a city where the question of sociocultural ownership is so fraught?

I do not have the answers to those questions, but what I do know is that I regret not finding out more. I consider myself to have engaged with the city more frequently than many of my peers; it has changed me and left me with a life-long fascination with urban spaces and the inequities that they display. But I will always feel pangs of regret for weekends spent in Saadiyat; or even nights spent on a perfunctory trip to the city that did not go beyond the errands that I was running.

This city rewards you if you invest in it; it gives you time if you give it time. Those that know the city better are often unflinchingly generous with their time, and our ability to learn is only limited by our own willingness. So, to evoke the limited authority of a senior giving unsolicited advice, I implore you to take the 170 bus and let yourself wander, listen, see, observe, let yourself come to grand conclusions, find them dispelled and let yourself be frustrated by that cycle.