After Vicky and Alex went off to work I spent about an hour strutting around the apartment eating their food, showering and booking a flight for tomorrow. I decided to go to Prague, Czech Republic.
I figured no trip to Dubai would be complete without seeing an artificial island so I went to Palm Jumeirah to catch a monorail to Atlantis adventure. Its a water park constructed on purely artificial ground and it's massive. Right next to it was an even massiver hotel called Atlantis. And near that they were constructing the massiverist thing ever. Calm down Dubai! You don't need to build so much stuff! Everyone thinks you've overcompensating.
One thing that struck me about the island (and Dubai in general) is that it's textbook beautiful. Everything was so perfect and looked after, but it has no character. I felt like a character in Wall-E.
On my way back I asked a tram assistant to direct me to the nearest monorail to go to the gold souk. He was very specific and told me to transfer here and hop on there, but I stopped him half way through and clarified that I wanted to walk to the nearest monorail. He gave me an expression of pure panic and tried to reason with me by saying "but sir, the monorail is a 15 minute walk from here!".
After the exhausting walk I took the monorail to Al Ras to see the souk. It was a big change from the city center. There were beaten down side shops, crappy resteraunts, dirty roads and locals! Finally, some culture. I got lost and ended up stumbling into a resteraunt jam packed with locals. They didn't give me a menu or a knife and fork, they just sat me down and shoved two bowls of meat in front of me with a large slice of bread. I actually enjoyed the system they had there; I didn't get my plates cleaned for me, instead I had to clean my plates myself. I ended up making good friends with another guy there. He was from Comores; a tiny island off east Africa. It's a French colony so his French was awesome but his English was quite crude. I got talking to him for quite a while and he told me about his difficulties in searching for a job in Dubai. He was going to leave back to his country in 1 week because he never found a 'business job'. He spent close to an hour hyping up this magnificent work of architecture that he said I had to see while I was here. He was unable to communicate what it was so he decided to show me; it was only a 10 minute walk to get there. I finally arrived at the 'magnificent work of architecture' and discovered it was just a tunnel with cars driving into it. The poor guy had never seen a tarmac road before, yet alone a tunnel.
Before I left I went to a kebab place. Kebabs are so much smaller here! I guess thinking that kebabs in the middle east would be baseball bat sized chunks of heaven was an unrealistic expectation. Australian kebabs are far superior!
After Alex and Vicky finished work we drove to the burjkalife (I have absolutely no idea how to spell that), which is the tallest building in the world, to have a fancy upperclass steak at some fancy upperclass Argentinean resteraunt. The food was great, the view was spectacular and the tip alone cost what I would usually pay for my weekly food shopping.
On my way back I discovered that Dubai is made up of little specialized cities. You can find 'business city', 'healthcare city', 'internet city' etc etc. How Brave New World is that!?
My lasting impression of Dubai is that its very artificial. Both literally and metaphorically. But I guess that's to be expected from a country which is: teeming with money, has sacrificed some of its Muslim roots, and is made up of 91% foreigners! Despite that, I still really enjoyed Dubai; it was a refreshing break and a good chance to meet my family. Dubai is a great place to live if you want to live an easy, upperclass and culturally vacant lifestyle. I don't think that lifestyle is for me though.
Alright, my plane is about to land in Prague. I know literally nothing about this place other than it has good cheap beer. Just before I boarded my flight I looked up an address of a hostel:
Na Zderaze 267/10, 120 00 Praha-Nové Město, Czech Republic
Time to continue exploring!
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