Dubai

It's Saturday 3 PM my time, midnight Friday back home. Got in to Hanoi a couple of hours ago. Had a beer (well, OK, two...) and going for a nap in a few minutes. Been up around 27 hours or so. Huge culture shock from Dubai to here.

Steve and Peter drove me down to Dubai yesterday to catch my flight. We drove around to see the sights Abu Dhabi first, then did the hour drive down to Dubai, and more sights there. Saw camels along the way. Didn't see Lawrence of Arabia...

These pictures are all from Dubai, which is much larger, more sophisticated and more liberal than Abu Dhabi. Dubai invested all their oil wealth in development. Oil is gone now. Abu Dhabi has about 25 years of oil left.

I couldn't resist the Starbucks shot. Aside from men in dish dash's and women in burqa's, I could have been in Vancouver.

Everything in these pictures is Dubai, and NONE of it was there five or six years ago. It's ALL new construction. Yup, even the ones you see in the distant background along the marina. Depending on who you talk to, 30 or 45% of the world's construction cranes are in Dubai working right now.

The marina shots - that's Vancouver False Creek, right down to the pedestrian way, handrailings and Cambie Street Bridge. They hired the Vancouver architect to build a bigger better version here. It's all build on desert, including the marina, which was man made. Amazing.

The big brown sloping building is the monster indoor ski hill, with a monster shopping mall in the foreground. The huge traingular building is a hotel (you have to pay $50 US just to go in for a look). To give a sense of the size of the hotel, that round disk jutting out hear the top is a helicopter pad, big enough to handle 3 at once!

The shot of the single high rise under construction is the world's tallest building, only half built so far. It will be 160 floors, 2600 feet when done.

I'm on wireless, in a restaurant in Hanoi, inside a monster housing estate complex. Pool side with kids having a birthday party. The restaurant is run by Aussies, hence the name of the place "Jafa" (just another fucking Australian).

Nap and shower time. Out for dinner with the client and her partner tonight (I'm in their spare bedroom tonight as APEC is here and downtown is nuts with lots of roads blocked off for motorcades). Off to Hai Phong tomorrow afternoon (two hours drive north on the Gulf of Tonkin) to begin work Monday. Gotta earn my daily bread!