After an unexpected layover in Chicago on Wednesday night I was able to get a flight to Dubai the following day where I had to wait another 29 hrs till I could fly to Chennai, India. This gave me a chance to explore Dubai and mix it up with some of the locals, many of which were not originally from Dubai but workers who travel back and forth from there home country to make money in the city's (until recently) booming economy. Many of the people I talked to didn't even speak Arabic.
Dubai is a very diverse city that is being built to accommodate may different cultures. It is considered the business and cultural center of the United Arab Emirates and there are thousands of freshly built and unfinished skyscrapers, hotels, shopping malls and other lavish buildings to prove it. However, all this new construction has recently come to a grinding halt and it seems like every other skyscraper is topped by a motionless industrial crane. Dubai is a city built on debt and due to the current state of the global economy, it has defaulted on a lot of this debt. But according to some local papers things may be looking up for Dubai in the near future and if they are ever able to finish their enormous projects, it will definitely be one of the worlds most extravigant cities.
Also, every single American I met in Dubai ( which was only about five or six) was a military contractee of some kind either coming or going from Afghanistan or Iraq. They couldn't really talk much about their line of work and nor did they want to in that neighborhood. Although Dubai is a world cultural center, it is very close to the war zones and there is still a lot of resentment towards Americans in that city. While most people were very friendly, there were a lot of evil looks to put up with.
(Pictures coming soon)
See you in Chennai
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THANK YOU for posting this very interesting piece on Dubai. My son in law went there to work on an extravagant project which also got put on hold due to the economy and I wondered how the people there were feeling toward americans. Though it is hard really to associate oneself with the entire country (I am speaking of myself and the U.S.A.), especially if one is an american but very much against the wars going on in Iraq,Afghanistan, etc.... I lived in Iran and loved it. I loved the beauty and the language and the Iranians on the whole were a wonderful people. But they were not their government, which at the time was the Shah, and it is a shame that the regular people have to carry the weight of their governments decisions, as if they each individually represented all those decisions, good or bad.
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