do you... dubai?

After miles of flat white sand stretching out from the highway, suddenly grey rectangles stretch toward the blue sky.  That's when you know you have arrived in Dubai.  As you get closer, the rectangles sparkle in the afternoon sun - long expanses of glass and mirror that, like everything else here, glitter and beckon.  

Dubai is a superlative in a country of superlatives.  Here you find the tallest building in the world, the biggest mall in the world, the largest dancing fountain, the biggest indoor aquarium:  biggest, longest, greatest, best.  It is difficult to find words that adequately describe the level of frivolity and decadence that is Dubai.  Our weekend was filled with the trappings of excessive money.  Here, everything glitters, twinkles and gleams.  

After checking into a modest hotel, we walked 2 blocks to the Mall of the Emirates.  The scale of the mall is astonishing - it contains not only every store you can possibly name from the U.S., Britain, France and every other country worldwide, but an ice rink and ski slope too (that's right, a ski slope inside the mall!).  People scurry to and fro on two floors like ants, weighed down with packages.  Sprinkled in the crowd are women in abaya or burqua - when you can see faces, they are invariably colored with heavy makeup.  Arms and hands are heavy with jewelry.  Outside, South Asian valets scurry to park a Lotus, Rolls Royces, Ferraris.   

Burj Khalifa

Later we would ride an impossibly clean, yet crowded, metro to Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building.  Tickets to the top, purchased on the spot, are 400 dirhams (roughly $100).  On this night, tickets were being offered for the low price of 125 dirhams, since they were trying to break some sort of world record for the number of visitors.  We opted for photos outside instead.  That evening, we watched the world's largest dancing fountains (the size of five Bellagio fountains!), then sat in an outdoor Lebanese restaurant amidst hundreds of people going about their weekend - eating, walking, drinking and laughing.  I found myself watching a middle-aged woman in an abaya as she inhaled deeply on sheesha, her puffy cheeks filling with smoke, which she exhaled into the air beside her abaya-clad daughter.  

Dubai Mall aquarium

Dubai Mall was much the same - suffocatingly crowded and a scale that is simply overwhelming.  Here a consistent throng is shadowed against the enormous blue wall of an aquarium.  In the deep blue water, several sharks, huge grouper and hundreds of other fish glide around like people along the corridors of bright stores.  A sign from the Guiness World Records certifies that the fish appear through the largest single acrylic pane in the world.  As night falls, red, green, blue and purple neon light up buildings against the blackened sky.  For me, the noise, the crowds, the lights and activity were too much - too decadent, too frivolous, too extravagant.  Dubai is Los Vegas on steroids, NYC in sequins and lights.  I couldn't help but wonder how many children were starving worldwide and what all that money might have afforded them.

The next day, we ventured to the quieter Ibn Battuta Mall and then to Palm Jumeirah, an artificial island shaped like a palm tree and constructed of 94 million cubic meters of sand and 7 million tons of rock just off the shore of Dubai.  At the top of Palm Island is the Atlantis hotel, where we sipped mixed drinks, watched people lounging on white recliners and gazed at the blue sea beyond.  It was a moment of peace in the cacophony that is Dubai.  We took the monorail back into Dubai, gasping at the incredible views of the city.  When multicolor skyscrapers again lit up the night sky, we would take a quick taxi ride to the gate protecting Burj al Arab, the world's most luxurious hotel, from passersby (you must have reservations to be allowed inside the gate) and take a few photos before the long drive back to Al Ain.  #ibmcsc uae

Downtown Dubai, view from highway

Dubai, view from Palm Jumeirah monorail

Homes on Palm Jumeirah

Burj al Arab