Gym's Ramblings: Amazing Dubai

Wow, what a place! Dubai is everything that you have seen in the viral internet slideshows, and more. Our local guide showed us around yesterday and he admitted that although the pace of construction has slowed down and real estate prices have fallen since the recession, there is still a prodigious amount of other business that is thriving here. Dubai is the middle-eastern headquarters for many technology companies. It is also the base for world media in the region with CNN and others having large offices here. In addition, the banking sector is well represented in Dubai. The axiom of “build it and they will come” really rings true here.

First we drove to the Dubai Mall, which is the largest mall in the world. That really didn’t excite me personally but I could feel a little bit of an electric field pulsing out of my dear wife who took at least a dozen pictures of the outside of the mall. We stopped there for a photo opportunity, not for the mall but for the Burj Khalifa, which stands across the lagoon from the mall. This magnificent building is the tallest man-made structure in the world at 828 meters in height. It has 160 floors and is comprised of three parts: the lower third is a hotel, the middle third is condominiums and the top third is commercial. The hotel is not just any hotel it is an Armani Hotel.

Next we drove to the Dubai Marina area where much of the construction in the past few years has occurred. On the way we toured the Emirates Golf Club and the Mall of the Emirates. The Emirates Golf Club is of course where they play the Dubai Desert Classic and the Mall of the Emirates is where the indoor ski course was built, a winter wonder-land kept at a constant -3 degrees C. Linda and I plan to go to see this later today or tomorrow. We have been watching the weather in Calgary and we wanted to experience the cold for a few minutes so we can put ourselves in most of my reader’s shoes and then quickly run back out into the 35 degree C heat and laugh.

The Dubai Marina area is a part of Dubai where non-Arabs can own 100-year leases to residential real estate. This is as close as you can get to full title in Dubai real estate if you are a ‘foreigner’. In the base of the condo towers here there are numerous restaurants and hooka bars that are woven together by walkways along saltwater lagoons where row upon row of newer model yachts are parked, some of which look like they have more cup-holders than Bill’s boat. I have never seen a more diverse mixture of people co-existing in one place. People from all over the world live in this area.

The climax of our tour was High Tea at the Burj Al Arab, the famous sail-shaped hotel built on a man-made island. It was where Tiger Woods hit a golf ball off the heli-pad into the Arabian Sea. Oceania outdid itself on this tour when they included this event in the only 7-star hotel that I have ever set foot in. The building is amazing! Our group had exclusive use of a venue on the 27^th floor right under where the heli-pad sticks out of the building. The service of this 7-course formal tea was impeccable, the food was delicious and artfully presented and the room was unbelieveable. It was an ornate hall with a 40-foot ceiling capped by a golden dome. The china and tea service were also gold-rimmed. We were told that if you wanted to book this on your own that they are taking reservations for 12 months from now and that the price is $100 (U.S.) per person.

On the way back to the ship our guide espoused commentary on the state of the U.A.E. He said that life was good in Dubai, probably better than it would have been if he’d stayed in Mumbai where he was born. He owned a couple of cars, both he and his wife had good jobs and their kids went to private schools. However, notwithstanding those nice things, he had lived in Dubai for 18 years and he wanted to stay in Dubai, but he could never be a citizen because only Arabs can be citizens of the U.A.E. In addition, even though his kids were born in Dubai they had to take on the citizenship of their parents and if their visas were ever revoked they would be shipped back to India, a place they had never set foot in before.

The Arab citizens have it all. They are a very small minority, and yet only they have the exclusive rights to property and citizenship. The Arabs are well looked after by the Sheik. They get free education, free medical care, beautiful and luxurious free housing and guaranteed cushy government jobs when they get out of university. They have no worries in the world. But the Sheiks built Dubai and the Sheiks set the rules to protect the indigenous people who were their responsibility, and those indigenous Arabs were the only ones that lived in Dubai before the Sheiks made the investments that built Dubai. So I can sort of understand their view too.

We are here for a couple more days.