Dubai - Welcome to Middle East Mayhem

My Middle East trip began with a day in Dubai, the most liberal city on the Arabian peninsula and the largest city in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

I am traveling with three friends from Stanford - two of my roommates, Rob and Jason, and another friend Owen. We spent our first day of the trip in Dubai basically to all meet up from our various flights in and to catch a flight to Oman.

The first thing we did upon arriving in the Middle East was, of course, go to the best water park in the Middle East. The Wild Wadi Waterpark (www.wildwadi.com) was awesome. It featured the pitch-black Tunnel of Doom, the Jumeirah Scairah (at 80 km/h the fastest waterslide outside North America), and several pretty cool water slides called blasters that shot you up the slide before you slid down it. But the best parts were the views of the Arabian Sea and the Burj al-Arab hotel right next door. The sail-shaped Burj is both the signature landmark of Dubai and reputedly the nicest hotel in the world.

Since I am coming back to Dubai for a week later this trip, I will save most of my commentary on Dubai until then.

But here are a few first impressions:

• Despite the occasional English mistranslation or knockoff (like Safestway grocery store, TGI Thursdays restaurant) Dubai was impressively first world.
• Dubai is under incredible construction. 20% of the cranes in the world are currently in Dubai which is even more amazing since there are only just over 1 million Emiratis who live there (and about 3 million expats, largely poor Indian workers and rich Western expats)
• Dubai is incredibly rich. The city just exudes wealth - in fact the biggest contrast I felt with China was that while China just feels like growth, Dubai feels like money