Time has passed, things are settling down and I have a few destinations to log on the blog. Starting with a trip a few months ago to Dubai. Over the last 2 years, our family has hit 10+ different countries and the boys were getting ACO (All churched – castled out). So we decided to take a break in Dubai where there isn’t thousands of years of culture to tempt us. It is all sand and sun. Just what the family needed.

Dubai is a big European holiday destination – and it just so happens that they had just opened the new Atlantis The Palm, so we booked it. As luck would have it, we booked it well before the financial sector crash so we paid a nice high price … but there is upside, the place was empty.

Dubai is a very odd place. If you have done any reading about the region, you will know that it is very wealthy and that they are reinvesting their oil money in the hopes of building the city into an economic, travel and expat center for the Middle East. It is their hedge against when the UAE runs out of oil (25 years). The pursuit of this goal means one simple thing: construction. Lots of construction.

Everywhere.

It does not take more than a 10 minute drive into the city to realize that their construction philosophy is either ’the bigger the better’ or ‘the biggest – period’. When I was a University student, I lived in an area with the biggest mall in the world – the West Edmonton Mall (went to University there). Dubai easily displaced it with their 1200 shop mall – Dubai Mall (ingenious name) which cost $20B. A few other notable ‘biggest’ (to name a few):

• Dubai Tower, the world’s largest tower with 162 floors – crushing the closest competitor (100 floors)
• Dubailand, the world’s largest theme park. It is twice the size of Disney world with 45 megaprojects and 200 subprojects. Six Flags, Legoland .. and on and on.
• Of course, the world’s largest man made islands (3 different groups, each progressively larger).
• Burj Al Arab, the world’s only ‘7’ star hotel, which we had a beautiful view of from our hotel room.

But in the end, I was left wondering if it is sustainable. I understand why it is being done (genuine effort to create a new economic base), but was not convinced that it makes sense long term. Over the last months, the police have been finding thousands of leased cars abandoned at the airport as workers flee the country, leaving behind piles of bad debt. Real estate prices have fallen 25% (with your own private island a regular millionaires bargain now!) and worries about the states ability to pay back their huge debt continues to plague the region.

Really cool place to visit once. Which I don’t believe is the intent. That being said, we did do some cool things – which are up next.