Dubai

So i am aware that this 'India' blog so far hasn't talked much about India, and I will remedy that with the next post (I am in Mumbai now, I promise!), but first stop for the trip was in Dubai.

I stayed here two nights, and I think that was long enough to get a pretty good feel of the city. On arrival at the airport, I was rather shocked to see the number of non-arab staff, basically running the place, and that thought stayed with me the entire time. It turns out 45% of the country is Indian, and only 15% are Emirate Arabs. Which is a very low number, but not one that seems to concern too many people living here.

The brand new metro is very shiny, and worked without fault, although it doesn't seem to have attracted too many customers yet. At less than £2 for a 20min trip from the Airport to where I was staying, it won me over anyway!

I stayed with a friend from Japan, and it was great to see him again, and hear more about his post-Japan experiences (Peace Boat then Dubai), and eat fantastic hummus! He had to work during the day, which left me free to explore. On crutches. Recipe for disaster, but actually accident free!

Instead of going to the malls to look at stuff I wasn't going to buy, I went to try and find some of the 'old' Dubai, rather a challenge, seeing as the city only started to gain the importance it now has, from the 1960's onwards, but some effort has been made downtown to preserve (or simply build from scratch) some of the traditional buildings. This is centered on the creek, and made a pleasant walk, with the water and palm trees providing more to look at than the identical apartment blocks that make up much of the city. I popped into an Islamic house, which had a very interesting exhibition on Calligraphy, and it was nice to see examples of stuff I had studied in my Islamic Art course. The rest of the house though, was rather evangelical in its information about Islam, and was rather odd. In the first room,

there were displays showing how the Qu'ran must be true, as there are scientific statements in it, that scientists have only just proved to be correct (womb having 3 layers, people being made of water etc)...the NEXT room though, was all about the creation story, which is basically the same as the Christian idea, which couldn't be further from science. Very odd indeed, and only reinforced my belief that people can believe in God and the stories from religious texts if they want, but dont ever try to use science to prove them as being correct, as it just looks silly.

Anyway, I leave you with this photo, and the promise that I will finally talk about India in the next post!