Sheikh your booty!

While Megan may have chosen to bow out gracefully with cucumber sandwiches at the Burj you won't be surprised to hear that things did not remain classy for long. In fact by the time we'd polished off a third tray of petit fours it was time to head off to the trade center to meet some ex-pats for what, for everyone else, was post-work drinks. From there we headed to a house party kindly hosted by one of Ahmed's work colleagues where we met Ahmed's wonderful girlfriend Maaria, drowned dreams of airlifting Dubai apartments into the West Village with hearty gin and tonics and gradually warmed up for the night ahead.

I've no idea who suggested the night's final venue but when the time came to leave the party (i.e. when Megan and I had eaten all the cheese), we took yet another taxi with Ahmed and Maaria to a subterranean and, apart from us, exclusively Fillipino nightclub. If being a foot taller than all the other customers and dressed in suits didn't mark us out adequately we immediately charged the dancefloor for a vintage display of our spin, spin, trip, catch yourself, pretend you meant it and spin again dance that is still the talk of Solihull. When the dancefloor cleared we took this as a sign of encouragement and continued to flail around as if we might never hear Brian Adams again. In retrospect the applause this seemed to generate may have been for the troupe of show girls who eventually forced us to sit down rather than our dazzling footwork but fortunately this was the first day on the trip we forgot to bring out the camera so the story is that we were awesome. And I'm sticking to it.

I would say the next morning wasn't pretty but that would be conjecture as we didn't see it. We know for sure the early afternoon was sub-par but if there's one thing a bad hangover needs when it's 48 degrees C outside it's unlimited walnut and pomegranite paste, spinach and plum stew, kebab meat by the pound and hot yoghurt soup. That's normally a tall order but Ahmed, as ever, was up to it and so we found ourselves nursing our injuries at the Iranian Social Club for their weekly buffet brunch and one of the more surreal experiences of our trip so far. As beautifully dressed Iranian women and their extended families picked at plates of dates and olives and the men gathered in front of a huge TV for the preliminary results of the election we restored ourselves with round after round of the most unusual and delicious stodge I can remember.

With the exception of a morning at the Wild Wadi waterpark we spent the remainder of our time in a comfortable routine of hiding out from the heat on our wonderful host Michelle's couch until lunchtime, window shopping and watching people ski(!) at the mall till late afternoon and heading out in the evening to a seemingly endless cycle of swanky bars and fantastic restaurants of which the highlight was probably Ravi's (a local Indian restaurant) followed by Palestinian desserts (while a three inch thick plate of melted cheese may not sound appetizing don't knock it till you've tried it covered in nuts and spun sugar and drowned in syrup...)



When the time finally came to leave Dubai I will confess to having some mixed feelings about the city. Thanks to Ahmed and Michelle we had a truly incredible time and I can easily imagine that especially in the "winter" months it is a fantastic getaway for shopping, relaxing on the beach and eating very, very well. And of course you can ski. With the huge caveat though that a week isn't close to enough time to really understand a place, this professional pedestrian and sometime cyclist will not miss the hours we spent every day flying up and down the Sheikh Zayed highway (14 lanes - still gets jammed) nor the feeling that the heat, the labyrinthine highway system and the city's huge sprawl are conspiring to stop you from ever really getting your arms around the place. Many of the cities we have visited so far and hope to visit on the remainder of our trip invite you to explore them and discover their secrets on your own but on our last day, as the wind began to blow a lot of sand up into the air and the clumps of skyscrapers to the distant East and West of Michelle's apartment began to blend into the sky, I couldn't help but feel Dubai does the opposite.

That being said it is a fascinating place and one which I would love to know more about. As I walk around New York or Cairo the ratio of shops to homes to businesses to rich people to poor people seems to make sense whereas Dubai remains a complete mystery. How does some oil wealth, a few small enclaves of white collar professionals and a booming construction industry generate so much trickle down wealth that a city of 1.2 million people requires at least 20 enormous luxury malls and city employees can retire on 75% pay after 20 years? Who is going to live in the thousands of luxury condos that billboards proudly announce will be delivered this year and next and who on earth will ride the metro system when no-one will walk more than five minutes outside and no-one lives near the stations? What was clear is that someone knows what they're doing as for all the lurid reporting of the impact of the credit crunch in the region we saw precious little evidence of a slow down during our stay and have no doubt that Dubai will keep on defying superlatives for a while yet.