We arrived into Port Rashid at mid-day in warm sunshine but with heavy haze over the city and to the traditional welcome depicted in the photo with the Emiratis men all dressed in the long white robes and white headscarves that they all where with great pride and to differentiate themselves from the thousands of expatriates. The dance consists in raising up and down thin canes with curved handles and tossing high into the air small spinning maces accompanied by loud Arab style music that I do find interesting if a little repetitive.
So before I get into a description of my first shore tour let me give you a few more facts about Dubai. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) consists of seven Emirates of which Dubai is one. It is situated on the northern shore of the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Peninsular. Dubai is the second largest Emirate after Abu Dhabi and is often described as the “Pearl of the Persian Gulf”. In fact Dubai began its life as a series of fishing villages that made their living from diving for natural pearls and this is the way it remained until 50 years ago and the discovery of oil. There was nothing here then but desert and sand, everything I was to see today – the huge skyscrapers – have all been built in the last 30 years from oil revenues. Pretty mind boggling and impressive but still doesn’t match what I saw in China last year in terms of infrastructure projects since all the effort has gone into hotels, offices and shopping malls.
Although Dubai has been transformed into a man-made hi-tech city it still has a strong Islamic culture. Whilst some may view this as a conflict of old meeting new, it is also considered to be a captivating city that offers both extremes, a traditional past interlinked with modern day. I must say I didn’t see a lot of evidence for this claim in the cruise brochure and in some ways it was more in evidence in the next port of call Abu Dhabi.
No comments:
Post a Comment