Dubai

A strange place! On the shiny Metro (I hear you get fined for chewing gum), each train hasVIP (“Gold”)seating, and a car only for women.
The Metro covers some serious distance—my quest to reach an Asian shopping area takes 50 minutes and 16 stops, yet we are still some distance from the edge of town.

Flocks of shining sky scrapers—30-40 stories high-- seeming to vie with each other for world height records. There is almost nothing on the ground between them, spaced out; appearing as hair plugs on a vast bald head.

I pass by—OMG--a golf course. This is for real desert, so obvious, then a green golf course. No one out there at this time—2 pm on a 104°day.

We stay at a 5-star hotel :-)  at Ibn Batutta Gate.  Named after 13th C explorer Ibn Batutta, who set out from his native Morocco for the Haj to Mecca, and found he liked traveling so well that he spent the rest of his life visiting Moslem lands, never taking the same road twice.

The hotel and the nearby shopping mall have floors or wings dedicated to each area he visited. We stayed on the Turkey floor.

Ibn Batutta gate

from the hotel elevator

Three grown women, who climbed on a camel statue in the hotel lobby

Dubai is known for its shopping malls; Mall of the Emirates, Dubai Mall, Ibn Batuttta Mall. They are amazing, and vast. Honestly, what else is there to do in a desert city anyhow. A newspaper article promoting good health exhorts us to “shop until the weight drops off.”

The indoor ski slopes at Mall of the Emirates

Detail from on of the wings of Ibn Batutta Mall--maybe Persia?

Migrant workers lining up at the mall to send remittances home

I

n line at the checkout at the malls' enormous supermarket, I note a lady’s shoes poking out from underneath her abaya: Skechers.

The entire country, as, I gather, much of the Gulf, is run in a day to day sense, by people from other countries: migrant workers.  The shopkeepers make me feel as if I am in Manila. Fabulous service. Imagine stepping into a Walgreens to find someone waiting to ask "May I help you find something?"

At our hotel, people in varying shades of brown serve us US, British, and Saudi tourists and business people, along with, one day, a busload of Chinese.

Just LOVE the clouds painted on the ceiling in the mall