I'm back from my trip to the UAE. Needless to say I was not impressed with the airport in Dubai. The passport lineup took about an hour and given how Dubai always goes on about how modern and advanced it is I expected a lot better. Everyone in the line up was pretty annoyed. On top of that because I'm Canadian I had to sort out my visa. Most Canadians need to get a prearranged visa before they come to the UAE but because I'm resident in the Gulf (and have a certain title on my job permit that matched an "approved" list) I was able to get a visa upon landing. This was a three stage process at the airport and there are no signs or indicators to tell you what to do. Thanks to information desks I figured out where the:
1) office was where I had to fill out a form
2) retinal scan was located (and I had to line up for 30 minutes); and
3) bank was to pay for my visa
All in all I was in the airport over two hours. Good thing my friend didn't come to the airport to pick me up or he would've been waiting forever. I grabbed the Metro down to where my friend lived.
It was my first time taking the Metro, as it had been completed in 2009, and I found it quite good. It made it easy to get around a lot of the city. Qatar needs to hurry up and build one. It also made it easy to see that lots of Dubai is still unfinished and I'm not sure how many of these partially built towers are going to be completed. Real estate is still in big trouble here.
I spent the weekend hanging out with my friend and seeing a couple of sights. Because it is so hot and humid out most of it was indoors, usually visiting malls. I saw the new Dubai Mall and while it is very large I found it rather empty. Not a lot of people shopping and while I have never been someone who is big on malls I found that Dubai Mall didn't have a lot of character. I'll take Souq Waqif in Doha any day! I was at the Mall for about an hour and a half and was thankful to move on and have lunch with my friend somewhere else.
I'm not sure what it is but all the new developments that come up in the Middle East seem so artificial and sterile. Yes, they are nice and luxurious, but they just seem to lack a lot of life or character, “soul” might be a better term. In Dubai I much prefer the old city area around Dubai Creek (Deira and Bur Dubai) than the shiny new neighborhoods and developments. If I ever lived in Dubai I would definitely live in that area, forget about the Marina or the Palm or all those other luxury neighborhoods. Same thing in Doha, I prefer the place I am in now in one of the older neighborhoods than living in shiny West Bay.
I had meetings in Abu Dhabi on Monday so that morning hired a car to take me on the two-hour drive to the city. Abu Dhabi is well laid out and appears to be well planned, far more so than Doha and Dubai. Streets are laid out in a grid, traffic was not too bad, and most surprisingly there was the odd parking space available. Downtown Abu Dhabi is very dense with buildings and yet somehow the parking situation was a lot better than Doha. I'm not sure what the secret is but Doha should find out. Thanks to the planning and density even their downtown core seemed to have a lot of life to it. Abu Dhabi seemed more like a real city.
I had not been to the UAE in over two years and with the exception of the fact that I have friends there would be in no hurry to go back. They're much more interesting places in the area to see, such as Oman.
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