Dubai is Hot as Balls
Looking for something to do until the crisis ends? Dubai is the place to go, and New York Magazine has a taste of what it is like for Americans to move there.
Blond female Texans are apparently in demand...but it is all good, as long as you don’t mind watching NFL games late Sunday night:
Every Sunday evening, Al Zarouni invites anyone who wants to come over and watch American football on his large flat-screen TV. Dubai is nine hours ahead of the U.S., and the games are broadcast live. At halftime, Al Zarouni’s domestic servants—two diminutive Filipino women—serve a buffet dinner in the kitchen.
Around his business associates and his employees Al Zarouni wears the traditional Emirati dishdasha—a white flowing cotton robe and matching headpiece with black band. When I visited, however, he was in shorts, a T-shirt, and sandals, and was sitting on the couch going over the week’s picks, the TV tuned to the Seahawks versus Giants pregame show.
He suggested we take in the view from the backyard. Al Zarouni’s villa looks out to the coastline, where the view is of dozens of skyscrapers and towers and hotels and developments in various stages of erection, the whole of it extravagantly lit and teeming with hundreds of construction cranes. Dubai has the highest concentration of construction cranes in the world, and the sight of them working away on the skyline is not unlike the scene in War of the Worlds where Tom Cruise gets a view of the alien tripods munching away on the city.
“It’s the best view on the palm,” Al Zarouni said. “We bought the place as soon as they announced they were building it. My dad’s uncles and his friends scooped up the rest of the villas on the frond.”
Al Zarouni’s friend Mark Chandler was standing by the pool, crystalline and deep blue. He has been in Dubai for only a year.
“What were you doing before?” I asked.
“I worked at a bank. Wachovia. They’re not doing so well these days.” New York Magazine
The stories I have hears are not quite so warm and fuzzy; waving the American flag over there is not exactly condoned, and much of the socializing is limited to hotel bars that can serve alcohol.
And the swimming pools run “coolers” to chill the water.
Yes, it is hot!
photo Mark Peterson
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Escape to Dubai
New York Magazine
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