Conclusion to my visit to Dubai

I thought I'd make a conclusive report to what I've seen and done in this pretty spectacular city rising from the desert as it were. So here goes nothing.

To visit Dubai is great as the novelty is not likely to wear off at least for another week, to live in Dubai simply drives the nail of self-obsessiveness and boredom further into one's head. I agree there's quite a lot of nice scenery here but at the same time I get the feeling that this place just tries way too hard to get your undivided attention by throwing money in the direction of major new developments such as the 'Burj Dubai' - the world's tallest buidling apparently.

Everything's a competition for these people, they have to have the biggest, tallest, most luxurious and expensive of everything. Anything less is simply not considered. Of course most of these developments are being built by the government through their development arm EMAAR so they can afford to splash their cash as it were.

And guess who has to toil away in the 45C degree heat day in day out building these superstructures without the possibility of ever being able to set foot inside these huge projects that their two hands helped to build and just admire their work. Yep you guessed it those same labourers I spoke about about 3 posts ago. What's more is that they may not even get paid for years of hard labour they put into making Dubai what it is today!

To me Dubai is really nice and beautiful, but it has no soul and probably will never have one because of the sheer fact that the powers that be are interested in one thing and one thing only...Money! They don't seem to see that you can't simply manufacture entire communities overnight and think that people will flock from all corners of the globe just because your flogging a few hundred square kilometers of land around in the middle of nowhere.

It all seems really artificial and contrived to me and you see it in the way the middle to upper classes behave there, none of it is real. So the bottom line is Dubai is a whole lot of nothing! Still I think it'll only manage to be a playground for mostly people without any idea of what stories of misery are made in this part of the world on a daily basis. If you thought slavery has gone the way of the DoDo then all you have to do is visit a construction site in the the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and I'm not sure about Oman but I would'nt be surprised if it were there too!

Doha to me still seems like home and it still has a sense of that 'small town charm' that Dubai seems to have lost somewhere on building its way to international glory, one that will probably be short-lived if the arab mentality is anything to go by.

Well thats all for now, hope my flight tomorrow is nice and smooth looking forward to taking some inflight pics and vids, don't know if you can post shorts clips here...oh well nevermind,

Ciao for now