Thoughts on Dubai

No Uber Taxi for us!

Air Conditioned Bus Stop

Spice Market

Sky Scrapers sprouting from the desert

The Creek, The Desert and more buildings

Urmil at the Mall

Burj Khalif, the world's tallest building

Today the weather in Dubai was hot. Yesterday the weather in Dubai was hot. Tomorrow the weather in Dubai will be hot. I can’t quite understand why anyone would come to Dubai for the 2^nd time. They have a bus system in Dubai (it has a population of 2.5 million people). The bus stops are different from any I have seen anywhere else. They are enclosed air-conditioned bus stops. There are over 900 of the in Dubai.

Dubai is separated in two by a creek that is actually used as a commercial waterway with goods being shipped by all kinds of boats. We crossed the river by a water taxi, small wooden boats that ply up and down the creek ferrying people.

I will give anyone a pass on coming here once, it is on the way to India, you got to stop somewhere and Emirates is a great airline. My advice, don’t leave the airport. Transfer to the next flight out. When you fly on Emirates they display a giant compass on their screen that beyond showing N / S / E / W, it also points to Mecca. So at 32,000 feet while we are drinking at the bar aboard the A380, I saw men kneeling in the isle pointed towards Mecca praying. A very unusual flight indeed. Glad the two groups can coexist!

Lets skip the heat and talk about the vegetation. This will be a short paragraph, there is no vegetation. Just brown desert.

The architecture is definitely over the top. Everywhere there are skyscrapers including the famous Burj Kalifa, the tallest building in the world. We went to the 124^th floor observation deck. This allowed us a maximum view of brown desert and skyscrapers. I got to see more of what I didn’t like from this location then anywhere else in Dubai. An achievement of sorts. Most cities have some sort of unifying architectural elements. In Dubai there is none. Every building is unique, most to my eyes are ugly.

The national pastime of Dubai is driving down long straight highways from one mall to another mall. All of these malls are basically the same, with the same stores we have in Los Angeles. They pale by comparison with their Los Angeles counterparts for one gigantic reason. Any mall in LA that I would go to has an Apple Store (the only reason for going to a mall in my opinion). There are no Apple Stores in Dubai as far as I can tell.

Unlike India, Dubai is clean, quiet, efficient, it comes at a price however. On our tour today we visited the spice market, the gold market and the huge Dubai Mall (when in Dubai, do like the Dubaiers do). The ultimate test of shopping is that we are leaving Dubai tomorrow having spent a total of less than $ 20.00 shopping.

One genuine nice part of the trip, is that we got to meet Urmil, who I used to work with.   Her husband was attending a conference in Dubai so she came along to be with him. She had been in Dubai 3 days and was sick of visiting malls. We of course met in a mall and had a nice lunch discussing the weather.

I sincerely believe even if we were here in winter with much cooler weather, we would feel the same.