My first journey to Dubai

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

2nd September 2004

My day began in London, England. I picked Anja up from work around dinner time and we took the Tube to Heathrow. We were in a peaceful mood for the most part. I had to wait an hour to check-in and it became harder and harder for us knowing we were going to say good bye for two and a half weeks. Eventually the time came and it was very painful.

I was frisked by airport security after going through the metal detector with no sound going off. I then proceeded to the waiting area for my Emirates flight to Dubai. I was surprised by the number of Europeans that I was to be flying with; I was even more surprised by the lack of Arabs that I was expecting to be on this flight. I saw one girl in a tube top and another with no underwear on bending over to get stuff out of her bag whilst mooning most of the waiting area. I thought that they would be stoned the second we touched down in the UAE but this was the first surprise of many in my short stay in Dubai.

I sat next to a stock broker from Brisbane on my flight to Dubai. He seemed to be quite nice. Every seat had a personal entertainment system and every sign was in Arabic and English. There were stickers with every seat that said "please wake me for meals"; I thought these would prove quite useful attached to the back of my monitor at work.

I began to play with the entertainment system when I saw our projected flight path. On the Emirates website they should the flight path between London and Dubai as flying over France, the Mediterranean, Northern Africa and Saudi Arabia. In actual fact it fly's over Germany, South East Europe, the Black Sea, Turkey, ever so close to Northern Iraq and Iran.

I sat for the whole of the journey staring out the window, looking at the lights below from countries which have experienced severe turmoil, places I never expected to see. I was taken by the number of oil rigs in Iran, it was though there was an oil rig every 2KM; I had never seen so many in all my life.

Most of the entertainment channels on the flight were in English. They had 4 or 5 channels in Arabic. It was really interesting to see so many Arab movies, music videos, award ceremonies and television shows. The west always shows this part of the world as an uncivilised hell hole. The media from this region shows the people as stylish, friendly and quite peaceful. Much of the content looked as though it might have been on TV in Europe or America at one point in time.

One thing that did stand out was a music video I watched. The song and the name of the artist were in Arabic so I couldn't quite figure out who it was. It showed him and 40 of his closest male friends at a party dressed in clean-as-can-be white robes and singing with clips of a woman with her female friends getting ready for a night out (or a night in I'm not sure). These people looked extremely wealthy. They looked relaxed. They looked glamorous, more so than I've ever seen portrayed by any artist on MTV. They also looked very humble and friendly, opposite the paranoid and reclusive attitudes depicted by the rich in western societies.

As dawn broke over the Persian Gulf and after six and a half hours of flying we began our decent into Dubai. The sky was a beautiful purple and blue with lots of sand particles floating through the air. I was taken back by the view of Dubai; it didn't look like any city I had ever seen before. Half of me through it would look like any city you would find in the Western World but it wasn't. It looked historic and unharmed. It had a rich Arabian feel to it which I wasn't expecting after seeing nothing of Dubai except for photographs of the Burj Al Arab and The Palms.

As the plane landed I got my bag and said good bye to my fellow passengers. I walked off the aircraft and up the steps looking at what has to be the most modern airport I have ever been too. As I walked up the stairs to customs I got hit in the balls by a woman and her cane. It was an accident and it didn't hurt too much so I ignored it.

Customs was really quick and I soon found myself in Dubai Duty Free, which is advertised as the Mecca of shopping in the Middle East. I didn't find too many things there that I couldn't find back home and regardless of the price I wasn't interested in getting anything that wasn't unique to the region. I eventually got a toy camel and a DVD on Dubai as well as an Iced Tea and an Iced Mocha to keep me hydrated in the Arabian climate and the 36C heat outside (at 6:30am in the morning!!).

I was warned about taking photographs of people without permission as it was against their culture and to not photograph the airport as it might be considered to be spying but I couldn't resist, everything looked so beautiful and I couldn't loose sight of this opportunity.

I had only been in Dubai for 90 minutes but it had left an amazing impression on me. This is a place I definitely want to explore in further detail.