Dubai Diary

Finally ,got a chance to get out of the city-state singapore. Living in a small circle for 1 yearalmost gave me a nervous breakdown.So when this chance to goto Dubai on office work came ,i just jumped onto the opportunity.And ,what better place than Dubai during the last week of Dubai Shopping festival.
Soon i was on board emirates flight to Dubai.Next time if you have a choice and your company is footing the bill,i suggest you prefer biz class of emirates airlines. Emirates is probably the best airlines in the world.They pamper you like anything on biz class.But am yet to fly SIA which is also supposed to be good .The list of wines and alcohols they serve is just amazing ,Its like a flying pub literally.I remembered my ealier biz class flight on air india when they served only wine and whisky.And they keep on feeding you throughout the flight - pastries ,fruits and juices ,you name it they have it. And then there is the personal entertainment with dozen games ,20 video and 20 audio channels.Btw,one of the video channel gives you live pictures of ground from the aeroplane's camera.I wonder ,if they turn it off during crash landing or trubulence or it can be quite a scary experience.I saw "road to perdition" and "platoon" on flight on my way to dubai i was busy playing chess with the computer and return it was movies and movies all the way.Like a good software engineer i managed to find a bug in the application as the personal entertainment system with my seat gave application exception and crashed.Did you know that one of the previous swissair plane crashes was linked to the game on board? They have also good indian classics like "pyaasa".
Once in Dubai ,Whatever time i managed to squeeze out , i was able to see a few places in Dubailike heritage village,city centre,bur juman and a few good shopping places. Dubai museum is ok,but gives an insight into the life in Dubai before oil was struck,the pearl divers and the souks(the markets)Did you know Indian rupee was the currency used in Dubai before oil was struck in 50's.?Then there was this global village - kind of fair where diff countries have stalls.Mostly asian and african countries ,czech republic was the only odd country out there.India had the biggest stall there.A replica of Hawa mahal - jaipur one was put up there.I couldn't cover other places, The desert safari,sand skiing,belly dancing are somethings dubai is famous for and night life it's infamous for.

Dubai is supposed to be islamic country ,but it's probably more moderate and liberal than rest of middle-east.You don't feel like in islamic country at all We had some problems though ,we were taking pictures of dubai creek as we were walking down the creek and then from nowhere this arab and a policeman came to us apparently we were taking pictures of this guy's sister and mother we showed him the preview of all photos we took and he was satisifed thank god, it was a digital camera ,or the moron would have demanded the whole reel went on to the top of emirates tower, there is a small pub on the 51st floor with a wonderful view of dubai city.Dubai is also famous for the world's only 7 star hotel and is also the tallest hotel in the world.Very huge and majestic. One night there in one of it's spl rooms can make you poorer by 12000 USD.
I tried lebanese cuisine,kind of local cuisine there,it was ok ,They have many indian restaurants ,too many actually.And a few good thai restaurants.I didn't know dubai had some many indian expats,indian schools,indian restaurants.Lots of pakistanis in dubai,most of the taxi drivers i guess are pakis.One taxi driver was still crying over india about 1971 war and how bangladesh got independence because of india. !!!!