Dubai. After three months in SE Asia and five weeks in India, we were longing for some of the luxuries of the West. We were still recovering from the sickness of India and had lost a lot of weight. I have lost at least 10kg and none of that was fat. The promise of a decent coffee, some proper international food and a real nightlife made us very happy. Furthermore Melanie was flying in to meet us for the second time on our trip and that was something special to look forward too. I knew where I was going to get my first coffee from too. For three years I was a barista at Brunetties cafe in Melbourne. The place is something of an institution in that part of the world and I always enjoyed working there. A few years ago they opened a store here in Dubai and I certainly wasn't going to miss it!

I was also very excited about seeing the architecture of Dubai and now that I have been here for a few weeks I must say I am slightly disappointed. Firstly the place feels very artificial. Not necessarily fake like I imagine Vegas would be, but rather artificial. It's like someone has tried to transplant a western city on the edge of a desert. Unlike other cities this one has not evolved over time but has been planned and force fed into reality with oil dollars in just a few decades. Twenty years ago this was mostly desert and a decision was made to use money coming out of the ground to turn this place into a city so the locals could have a future when the black gold runs out. I think the people that made the decision could have been more adventurous. With some wild imagination one could imagine a truly original place. A place built in sympathy with the local conditions rather than one built and maintained with the brute power of fossil fuels. Perhaps a green oasis in a desert where green roofs are used extensively and trees are planted on a large scale to create shade. A place where water is used carefully with grey water systems and careful irrigation and so on and so forth. Persian and Arabic literature always talk about paradise as being a garden, but sadly there is none in this concrete urban heat island. Maybe our expectations where too high as there are certainly some interesting buildings, I am just far from overwhelmed and I thought I would be.

Shopping malls! Dubai is full of them. The ones here are the nicest I've ever seen but still just malls, full of the same chain stores that you get everywhere else in the world. Very clean as always, but clean in the same way that a hospital is clean, not just sanitary but also sterile. Never the less after five weeks in India sterile was just fine with us and lapped up the inorganic nature of Dubai with the satisfied air of someone who has over indulged at a good restaurant.

We were very excited about seeing the Palm Jumeirah. The whole idea of making an artificial archipelego in the shape of a palm is exciting and very modern. There is a mono-rail that runs right down it's length to the Atlantis hotel at the far end. I had read that the villas on the fronds sell for an average of about three and half million US each so we were excited to see the interesting architecture that ought to be found there, given the cost, location and freedom. Perhaps our expectations were too high but I do think the only really inspired work here was the grand plan. The elevated monorail is very nice and allows a good view over the palm as it hums along. Unfortunately the villas were quite monotonous, being largely clones of each other or using repeating design elements that create boredom rather than uniformity. The place also seemed to be quite deserted although admitedly it was Ramadan and the population decreases as many people flee the heat and the difficulty of the fasting month. All photos are from the monorail so please forgive their defects.