I've been there once with work

I was speaking at a conference and had a half-day free, so I agreed a (very reasonable) price with one of the taxi drivers out front to take me around for half a day - saw the Burj, the museum, the market, other bits and bobs.

I hope Jumbo has a different experience. I hated it. I've travelled widely both in general and in Arab countries (a lot with work) and love pretty much all of them. Dubai, not so much.

Dubai is a very recent state and it's clear an awful lot of money has been spent very fast. The population is a couple of million but a large part of that is transient.

This breaks down into rich people - richer than you or me by far - and working people. Working people are often basically under some form of indentured slavery or something very much like it - we'll take you (mostly from India but also other places) to Dubai, now you're here you owe us USD x,000 which you can earn back by working for USD y/day, where y is not very large, and when you've done it you can have your passport back kind of thing. They sleep and work in bad conditions.

That transience spills over into other parts of the culture as well. The museum is very telling - it's a complete mishmash, exhibits on the solar system next to historical stuff, no thought to curation or cohesion.

The market is horrible - very westernised, so it's entirely unlike the kind of thing you see even in North Africa let alone the Middle East. The gold market is something, but I found the juxtaposition with the conditions people worked in deeply uncomfortable.

All in all I thought the whole thing felt fake, somehow - I breathed in but nothing filled my lungs if that makes sense.

It's sunny with nice beaches, you can drink alcohol if you're reasonable about it (lots of locals do - it's actually fine to drink in hotel bar but what isn't fine is getting lairy or behaving like a t**t in general or a drunken t**t in particular). There's quad biking and water parks if you've time/money to spend on those things (I had neither, I was in and out very fast).

I personally would much rather spend my time in North Africa or somewhere like Egypt for my holibobs though, if hot, sandy and Arabic is what you're after.

I hope Jumbles has a wonderful time and I hope he's ignoring all the above :-)

Posted By: Old Man on August 20th 2015 at 18:12:00

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