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Dubai, United Arab Emirates (16 - 23 October 2014)

If ever there was a city that practically sprouted up overnight, at least in recent times anyway, Dubai would be it. Dubai is one of seven "emirates" that make up the United Arab Emirates (UAE) which formed in 1971, each with their own royal family and ruling Sheikh. Think of the emirates as being similar to states in the US, although in the case of Dubai, it is the only city in its emirate and so they are considered one and the same. Dubai is the most populous of those seven emirates with a little over two million inhabitants (the UAE as a whole has about 4.5 million), and the second-largest behind the neighboring emirate of Abu Dhabi which Kristina and I also visited during our week here. Today, Dubai is a city of superlatives; it has the biggest, tallest, fastest, whatever'est of bloody everything, and we saw plenty of examples (likewise in Abu Dhabi)! It boasts excellent infrastructure, a thriving economy, and is a key business hub. All of this, however, only came to be in recent times. Locals we talked to all spoke of the time "before the oil". In the 1960s, Dubai was little more than a dot in the desert with its economy primarily based on revenues from trade. All of that changed when oil was discovered in 1966 after years of exploration following large finds in Abu Dhabi, and by the 1970s the city was starting to boom. What followed was a period of extreme growth and prosperity, which I'll talk more about later. Be that as it may, less than 5% of Dubai's revenue comes from oil today. Instead, the emirate's Western-style model of business drives its economy with the main revenues now coming from tourism, aviation, real estate, and financial services. Speaking of Western-style, upon landing in Dubai you might not feel you're actually in an Arab country. Dubai is comparatively progressive with rather liberal policies by regional standards towards things like alcohol and dress code. Be that as it may, Islam is the official religion of the UAE, and so public displays of affection are still frowned upon, and homosexuality and adultery are criminal offenses which can lead to jail time. It was hard, but Kristina had to keep her hands to herself ;) The UAE sits along the Persian Gulf which has seen plenty of war in recent decades, and has some interesting neighbours within a 1,000km radius including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Scary part of the world for some perhaps, but Dubai's booming tourism industry can't be wrong!

After a sleepless 12-hour flight direct from New York, we finally touched down at about 8am. We were flying with Emirates thanks to Kristina scoring dirt-cheap airfares through some deal they were doing for travel agents. In both directions we were flying on one of these monsters - the double-decker Airbus A380. They're equipped with three external cameras on the tail, the nose, and undercarriage for passenger viewing. I took this video during our take off from New York's JFK Airport of the view from the tail and undercarriage cameras.

After checking into our hotel, I climbed the stairs up to the rooftop to check out the view hehe. We were staying a short distance north of the downtown area of the city (visible in the distance to the right). Out of short to the right is the coastline along the Persian Gulf.

I've tried to clean it up in Photoshop but the air is extremely hazy, though it's heat haze rather than pollution. Speaking of which, this is the weather virtually every day of the year. Rain is pretty rare, and we didn't see a single cloud in the sky until the morning we flew out! We're coming into winter and so the temperatures have started dropping from their summer highs of 40+ degrees Celsius (104+ Fahrenheit) so a more tolerable 30 (86). It was still pretty damn warm though hehe. I mentioned above that people talk about the time "before the oil"; I think we'd be talking about the time before air conditioningbut heat doesn't seem to bother them at all.		Consumption of pork and products made from pork is strictly forbidden in Islam. The Pork Station here, containing bacon and pork sausages, was part of the breakfast buffet at our hotel but was placed in the corner far away from the rest of the food hahaha!
The Dubai Metro is the first urban train network in the Arabian Peninsular and is completely automated. The shot on the left is looking out the back of one as we passed through the downtown skyline. This is probably a good time to explain something that plagues us photographers: perspective distortion, specifically "keystoning" in this case, as blatantly illustrated by the shot on the right. Someone asked Kristina on Facebook with regards to a different image whether the buildings are actually on a lean or whether it's just an illusion. Well it's neither - it's keystone distortion. When you stand beneath a tall building and look up, the top of the building appears to be skinnier than the bottom due to its distance from your viewing position, i.e. the sides of the building appear to slant inwards. Same story if you stand between a pair of train tracks or on a long straight road and look into the distance - the train tracks or sides of the road appear to angle inwards and meet at the horizon. This effect of things appearing to lean inwards is exaggerated on camera due to the design of camera lenses, and is more pronounced the more the camera is pointed up above the horizon (or down which gives the opposite effect - things appear to lean outwards). Make sense? I correct it in Photoshop as part of the tedious task of post-processing my photos, but doing so requires stretching the image which degrades the image quality or cropping too much of it out, and so in some cases I can't reasonably correct it completely. The shot on the left out the back of the metro has been corrected; the shot on the right hasn't been corrected at all. There is a workaround however: a special type of camera lens that can be physically manipulated to negate this distortion (used by architectural photographers and such). Unfortunately such a lens is prohibitively expensive, and so for now I just have to deal with it. First-world problems :) Anyway, my point is the buildings are not on the lean. Except one, which you'll see later. Lesson over.
Our first day in Dubai was spent in bed - we were stuffed hehe. Normally we'd force ourselves out but a week is a pretty decent amount of time for Dubai and so we decided to take the opportunity to fully rest up. On our second day we met up with Kristina's workmate Mario who also happened to be here for a couple days en route to spending a week in India. This here is the view from his hotel room. Slightly fancier than ours, but he's a slightly fancier guy :)

Dubai is very much a car-oriented city, and given the relative wealth of many of its citizens, there are some damn nice cars on the road!		I checked the view from Mario's rooftop too (guests are actually allowed on this rooftop). Way out in the hazy distance is the Burj Al Arab hotel. More on that in a bit.

The three of us had organised a private tour of Dubai for the day with a tour guide and driver. Good way to see and learn about the place in a nutshell. Our first stop on the tour was the Dubai Marina, quite a ways down the coast from the downtown area. The marina is an artificial canal city built along a two-mile stretch of the Persian Gulf shoreline. The whole thing is entirely man-made and development of the area is on-going. The most notable building is the twisty thing here hehe. This is the Cayan Tower, and at 306 meters (1,004ft), it is the world's tallest high-rise building with a 90-degree twist hahaha!

When the entire Dubai Marina development is complete, it will accommodate more than 120,000 people in residential towers and villas.				Not a bad spot to park your boat.

From there we headed out to another incredible example of what can be done with enough money under your belt and nothing better to do with it. This is the Palm Jumeirah, also entirely man-made, created using land reclamation over the course of about five years starting in 2001. Furthermore, this is just one of two, collectively known as the Palm Islands, and it's the smaller one hahaha! There was a third one planned but apparently that's not the case now.		Our tour guide dropped us off at the monorail which travels the 5km (3 miles) from the mainland out to the end of the island on the breakwater surrounding the palm. Some of these buildings at the foot of the palm are hotels, and others are condominiums with apartments apparently owned by several Hollywood celebs.
Further out it's all residential. That big thing at the end is an Atlantis resort (below).		Looking down one of the palm's "fronds". Due to demand, a lot of houses were purchased before they were built. However, after miscalculating the actual cost of construction and needing additional capital, the company responsible for creating the island subsequently increased the number of residential units, reducing the space between each unit. Folk who bought property in advance were pissed hehe.
The monorail terminates at the Atlantis, The Palm resort, opened in 2008 and themed on the myth of Atlantis but with some Arabian flavours thrown in for good measure. It has some pretty sweet-looking water slides going on!

We had a quick wander through the shopping complex attached to the resort and immediately spotted this thing: the gold ATM hahaha! Only in Dubai, I dare say. You basically select a medallion from about a dozen different options, and pay based on its weight and the current price of gold.				A couple other things that caught our eye besides the gold ATM were the resort's aquarium, and a lot of funky stuff on the ceiling. Lovely.

Then it was off to the beach and the Burj Al Arab. This cool-looking thing (designed to mimic the sail of a ship) is a luxury 5 Star hotel, though it is frequently described as "the world's only seven-Star hotel" thanks to a British journalist who visited the hotel on a pre-opening press trip and described it as such. It opened in 1999 and at 322 meters (1,056ft) is the third-tallest hotel in the world. Incidentally, Dubai contains the top five tallest hehe. True to their love of artificial islands here, the Burj Al Arab sits on its own, which took longer to reclaim from the sea than the actual construction of the building itself. Room rates start at close to US$2,000 a night, and go as high as US$20,000 for the Royal Suite. Phew!				Just another day in the life.

Heading back towards downtown we stopped in at the Jumeirah Mosque (with prayer mats ready to go), the largest mosque in the city and a good example of Islamic architecture. This is one of just a few mosques in the city that are open for non-Muslims (by guided tour only I believe, to promote understanding of Islam).

This rickety thing in an "abra", a traditional wooden boat used to ferry people across the Dubai Creek between the Bur Dubai district to the area of Deira, also referred to as Old Dubai.

Deira is the perfect place to see Dubai as it once was, "before the oil". It is also the perfect place for a bit of shopping. Deira is full of souks, basically an open-air marketplace, and haggling is the name of the game here.

One of the most popular souks in Deira is the Spice Souk, full of, well... spices. And they smell incredible!

Spice aside, textiles, rugs, incense and traditional clothing can all be found here. Oh and perfume - Dubai is big on perfume! We called into a gas station at one point during the tour to grab a drink and they tried to sell us some hahaha!

Aaron the Arab.		Near the Spice Souk is another popular spot: the Gold Souk, full of, well... gold. The souk contains over 300 retailers that trade almost exclusively in jewellery.		And this here is the world's heaviest gold ring hehe, weighing in at over 60kg (132lbs). Seriously, what's the point?!		And that was it for our overview of Dubai!

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