A celebration of the physical

In a world that turns more digital with every breath, I have found a haven of celebration for all things physical.

In Dubai, somewhere on the outskirts of the city where the desert works hard to reclaim its lost terrain, a large pale pink warehouse of a mall stands proud: DragonMart, home of four thousand stalls and shops selling everything from screws by the kilo to wholesale toys, garden furniture to mountain bikes and strips of LED lights.

Walking through this mall is a very unique experience. Most of the shopkeepers are of Chinese descent of course, not much of a surprise for a destination that bears the name of a mythical creature from China's rich cultural past. Structured as a series of diamond shaped halls, the mall as seen from the sky forms the shape of a dragon, its halls staggered to mimic the flowing spine of the legendary creature. Which, in essence, means you get lost in it faster than a child in a thick dark forest.

And what a forest this is...

Most people in Dubai think of DragonMart as the island of cheap in a sea of dear. They dismiss its contents as nothing more than poorly put together asian hardware, full of lead paint and flimsy screws.

Not so.

DragonMart is Ali Baba's cave of wonders.

You can find anything there, and by that I mean, quite literally, anything. You could build an entire house using nothing but supplies from this amazing place. Quality is not the primary concern here, but the predictable nature of this lack of interest for the reliable leaves the customer comfortable to plan ahead. You don't come here to buy quality. You come here to buy what others are not selling.

Price is a key component of anyone's visit here. The place is structured to take your money at every turn, aggressively transparent in its mission to bleed you dry. It's like the IKEA marketplace on steroids. You walk in there wanting to buy a tube of glue and you walk out with a three seater sofa, a replica of the Eiffel tower barely smaller than the original and enough garden lights to kill every corner of darkness in Versailles. And you know you need to come back for the glue.

DragonMart is a slice of hobbyist heaven. You can purchase every kind of screw, bolt or rivet under the sun, and you'll pay by weight for simplicity's sake. You can acquire every conceivable screwdriver, drillbit or wire cutter, buy an impossible bike and the gear to go with it. It's like Black & Decker threw up in there, the birthplace of Radio Shack and Home Depot's deformed lovechild. The place is a mess, and this mess offers opportunities like nowhere else.

Most people don't realise how much they can do in there. We have come to accept that our primary interface with the world is a screen of some kind, touch based or not. We don't immediately think of the myriad of objects, things, that we can pick up and turn into something else. And each one of those things is in DragonMart.

The key to all this is that everything in there is dirt cheap. This lets you experiment. You can try your hand at some DIY with a fancy drill, a truckload of wood and a mighty spinning saw, all for the price of a DVD player and a smile (of which there are surprisingly few here. Smiles, not DVD players. Those are available by the kilo too). You can decide to piece together a lifesize sculpture of a deer made entirely of tealights and soap, all bought for the equivalent of a SuperSize meal. You can venture out and buy yourself all sorts of trials and errors. That also buys you experience, physical experience in the real world, with real things that you can touch, that have uneven coatings, gritty surfaces and imperfect finishing. I walked into a plumbing supply stall in there the other day and felt a wave of goosebumps wash over me as I took in the rows of brass connectors and chrome fittings available. And I haven't the first idea about plumbing, but I felt it anyway. The physical world was begging me to give it a try.

That's DragonMart.

Next time you find yourself staring at a set of cheap objects, think what you could do with that. Think how you could hack those cheap simple things into life experience. There's nothing like the present.

It might be cheap, but it's priceless.