mattbell

I have long been fascinated with Dubai from an engineering and cultural perspective. Dubai is a small city-state (technically, an emirate) awash in oil money but running out of oil reserves. Instead of spiraling down, they decided to become the Hong Kong of the middle east, a freewheeling center of trade, finance, and tourism. I thought of them as a shining example of a traditional Islamic middle eastern country opening up its culture and diversifying its economy. It has sort of managed the second part, but the first part hasn't gone so well.

As I got closer to Dubai I kept meeting people who lived there, and most of them didn't have very good things to say. More on that later.

I only had slightly more than a day to explore. I organized a big architectural tour for myself, taking nine cab rides totaling around $70. The cab drivers provided a lot more perspective for me on the inner workings of Dubai.

Dubai is financing some of the largest engineering and architectural experiments in history. Leading firms can try daring things here that they can't try anywhere else. Much of it is extremely kitschy, but I find the kitschiness fun. Some of it is horrendously ugly, some of it is beautiful.

They have the tallest building in the world, which is around 160 stories high and just a couple of months from completion. It was interesting seeing how they had to factor the building crane's position into the building's design... with such a tall building, you have to ensure that a crane on the top of the building can move materials from the ground to the top, which means lots of interesting design constraints. Things slow down once the building is so tall... I watched 5 minutes pass as a single I-beam was raised from the ground up 150 stories or so.

They have giant artificial islands in the sea. The act of dumping earth into the ocean to make more land has a long history (they've been doing it in the Netherlands for hundreds of years), but it's being attempted on an unprecedented scale these days. The first completed island is in the shape of a palm tree several kilometers long, which has the nice effect of dramatically increasing the coastline-to-ciity-area ratio, ensuring that as many people can have beachfront housing as possible. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get a good view of the palm tree, as the hotel at the tip had ridiculously tight security, but I did get a great shot of the whole island on my flight out.

They have several of the largest malls in the world, including one called Ibn Battuta Mall. This mall vaguely traces the travels of Ibn Battuta by decorating sections of the mall in the styles of the various countries he visited. The decorations were so impressive that I barely noticed the stores themselves and spent no money there.

They have a giant indoor ski slope in the middle of the desert, where temperatures can reach the 110s in the summer.

Whole sections of the city are going up in preplanned sections, with skyscrapers surrounded by substantial green areas. It's an urban planner's wet dream. Urban planners are a sorry lot... they create more or less theoretical plans for “cities of the future”, but when it comes to actual construction, they usually have to spend years figuring out how to properly upgrade a small section of highway (say, the approach to the bay bridge on highway 101) while balancing the needs of numerous special-interest groups. Dubai's literally a blank slate, and some new sections of the city (like the Dubai Marina) look like the sort of Utopia that Le Corbusier was proposing back in the 1920s.

They have a ridiculously opulent hotel, the Burj Al-Arab. Again, due to tight hotel security, I couldn't get anywhere near it. However, I got a nice view of it from a nearby mall. Amusingly, from the back side, it looks like a giant crucifix.

There was a ridiculous lack of places to view this horizon-to-horizon orgy of construction cranes from high up. I did eventually finagle my way up Emirates Towers, and had a good 51st-story look out the tilted, somewhat dirt-covered windows.

I got to try a wide variety of dates. There were hard ones, chewy ones, crumbly ones, and fibrous ones. The sudden influx of sugar gave me a massive headache though... dates have a high glycemic index. I've started noticing that now that I have less sugar, I can't have much of any sugary food without getting a headache. It's a built-in block on diabetes.

My hotel room was half a block from a mosque. I didn't realize that the first of the five daily loudspeaker calls to prayer from the muzzeins is at around 5am. I awoke in the middle of the dream thinking I was hearing the Arabic version of “this is the police, we have you surrounded!”