Dubai

I recently attended a conference in Dubai. What a place! After nearly a year in Iraq, it was sure nice to see an Arabic country that "works"! I'm sure other Arab countries work, too, I just haven't spent time in any other than Iraq.

Of course, I guess that's not really true. The people who work in Dubai are not the natives....but people from India, Pakistan, the Phillipines, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, etc. The people of Dubai are so wealthy (oil money) that few of them work. Restaurant workers, construction workers, policemen, hotel staff, retailers, etc. are all foreigners!!! It is really a weird place in that regard.

Not to mention the construction and the fact that everything is new!!! As I stepped outside of the hotel, there were 7 construction cranes within a block or two!!! I heard that Dubai has the 2nd largest population of construction cranes of anywhere in the world, except China. I'm not sure how they count that, but I'm not going to argue!!! There were a lot of cranes. And, construction work went pretty much 24/7!!! There were 2 buildings under construction adjacent to my hotel, and I heard construction noise during the night!! Luckily, they must have been prohibited from using the jackhammers that I heard during the day!!!

I took the usual "tourist" trip....the Desert Safari. It consisted of riding around some sand dunes in a Toyoto Land Cruiser for about an hour and a half....stopping to see a pen of camels, and eating a traditional dinner at a little "village" in the desert. Oh, there were shops there, and they had a belly-dancer (who didn't appear to be Arabic)! It was a fun trip.