Cosima Underwater

The first thing we noticed after leaving the airport terminal in Dubai was the heat. Fortunately you don’t sweat. Any moisture your body develops to cool itself immediately evaporates. It’s like stepping into a very hot oven. The scale inside our car read 52 degrees Celsius (126 Fahrenheit)… it stood in the shade.

The second thing I noticed was the “Ladies Greeters Area”, which was a bit of a disappointment because although I walked through very slowly I didn’t get one hello.

Dubai is a big construction site. Wherever you go, wherever you look, buildings are being built by a huge army of workers shipped in from Pakistan. These guys work day (120s Fahrenheit) and night (100s Fahrenheit), and if they don’t work, they sleep in container barracks at the edge of town.

The raised concrete rail in the middle of the street is for a Monorail line. Traffic is a bit of a nightmare here. There are frequent traffic jams and not much public transport, so the Monorail will make a difference.

Dubai’s population consists of more than 80% expatriates, and whether you live in barracks, ugly concrete blocks, or big villas depends on which country you were born in and what kind of education you received. Americans, Europeans, Middle Eastern people and the odd Asian live in landscaped areas with swimming pools. People from the Philippines, Thailand, Africa, and India live somewhere else. The former are here to sell their education to the highest bidder, the later are here to serve the former. All are here to make money.

If you were born in North America or Western Europe, never forget that you were merely fortunate to be born in the right place.

The picture below doesn’t show it very clearly, but half of the skyscrapers in the distance are in a state of construction too. The only industry that makes stuff in Dubai is the building industry. And if you are wondering who is paying for all this construction… you are, with every fill of your car’s gas tank.

Dubai itself doesn’t have any oil. The investment money is mainly coming from neighboring gulf states, and people from Europe and America hopping on the bandwagon.

Yesterday, we drove into the mountains. It was wonderful to see the desert, camels grazing, and the mountain ranges in the distance. On the way back into the city, we drove by huge industrial areas with factories producing building supplies and passed literally thousand of trucks transporting the stuff into Dubai City. It’s mind-boggling, it really is.