Saturday 30 January 2010

Comparative analysis

I'm lying on the beach next to the Indian ocean. There are drums in the background and people fishing in the water which is about 25• they break every now and then to drain some local rum. I can see some mountains in the distance.


But before I start getting any more enthusiastic about Mauritius I'd planned to write a few words about Dubai and what it is like in 2010 compared to 2001.

When we went to Dubai last time, I lived in Brussels and had only really travelled in Europe. Now obviously we live in Beijing and I am relatively more widely travelled.

That said I still found Dubai an exciting destination. Even though we were there for less than 24 hours we saw a lot.

It is still a city under siege from cranes. And now like then there is some degree of uncertainty around the future. Then the burj al Arab had just opened and was attracting much attention. But if the anecdotes are to be believed the palm island hadn't even been conceived. It certainly wasn't the mass tourist destination that it became in the last decade although the beginning and the desire was clearly there.

We visited just over six months before September 11 2001. You'd have thought that this might have proved a challenge to the popularity of an Islamic country as a tourist destination, but it didn't seem to affect Dubai. However I have no way of knowing whatever happened to our Afghan driver, Mohammed who no doubt had to shelve his dreams of moving to London.

Now of course Dubai World (the company behind much of the highest visibility development) had to request a delay to payments leading. After much uncertainty Abu Dhabi, the oil rich neighbour with less vertiginous but seemingly more stable growth backed by natural resources, stepped in with support. Consequently the world's tallest building, constructed with the name Burj Dubai, was renamed Burj Khalifa on opening, seemingly in tribute to Abu Dhabi's ruler Sheikh Khalifa.

So with much schadenfreude from some financial analysts, it is no longer clear if Dubai will build the second and third planned artificial palm islands. The third and biggest of which is planned to be bigger than the ilê de France, on which stands Paris. Here is an interesting fact, the existing palm island required so much hardcore for its foundations that, collected together it could build a 2m x 2m wall three times round the earth! I don't know whether to be awed or terrified by this fact.

So that feeling of schadenfreude is understandable on many levels. Dubai is painfully shallow and nouveau riche. I thought Beijing was money-obsessed till I went back to Dubai. But at the same time I do have respect for their efforts to build an economy based on trade and property markets without the resource wealth of abu dhabi or the support-tinged with religious overtures given by Saudi Arabia to neighbouring emirate Sharjah.

One element of Dubai I have no problem admiring is it's openess and international atmosphere. You only need to take a walk along the working creek on the Deira side and note where goods are in transit to and from to feel a part of international trade and exchange. You'd think that rather than taking some delight in its financial stutters, western countries would be as supportive as possible of dubai's interpretation of Islam with freedom of different worship and acceptance of Egyptian legal codes rather than the sometimes scary-seeming Sharia law.

But of course, despite this openess, massive disparities exist in this 'society'. I use inverted commas because in truth there are none of the cohesive elements of a shared society in evidence. Little or no tax, no universal healthcare or education for resident migrants, hell there isn't even a postal service. As early as the queue for passport control, we experienced Emiratees treating workers from Asia with ill disguised contempt, whilst not even questioning our visas.

So in conclusion, despite building many of the world's biggest buildings and creating a man made island, Dubai for me remains a compelling and interesting place to visit, but way too disjointed a place to ever consider living there. Which is lucky really, since we've no pending offers.

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Ten years later

In early 2001 while living in Brussels I went on a ten day holiday to Dubai with three friends. Chris's parents lived there, which made it a surprisingly affordable option for what was effectively a student budget for me at the time.

When we came back I wrote a piece for a newly established website, hostelworld.
http://www.hostelworld.com/community/travelstory.php/StoryNO.11
That website is now celebrating it's ten year anniversary and I am back in Dubai for just under a day in transit to Mauritius on holiday.

I thought it might be interesting to compare my thoughts of the place and see what changes have been made in the interim.

Apart from being overly worthy and a little clunky I still think that piece isn't bad. Take a look and at some point over the next few days I'll post some thoughts and photographs on today's visit for comparison. Unfortunately the last visit was recorded on old fashioned camera film, so without a scanner I can't easily post then and now shots.


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Friday 29 January 2010

Constant contact

I'm writing this on a plane. I can't actually post it from up here, yet. But I was able to send and receive a text message to and from my parents, who are on a canary island off the north west coast of Africa using their uk phone. It cost $1. At that price it's not inhibitive. I know that some domestic USA carriers have wifi and I believe lufthansa do too. So as I say, it's a case of 'yet' until this can actually be posted mid-air.

So we're clearly reaching a point at which available and affordable technology exists to keep in constant contact with people, even with photographs taken seconds earlier and gps geotagging of your location.

It's easy to feel sceptical about this. A friend of ours recently advised that the new biometric passports can be disabled with a quick zap in the microwave. And it's not necessarily as paranoid as it sounds. Certainly living in china you're aware that freedoms taken for granted at home do not apply there. Mostly feedoms to go about your business anonamously. Not something you can do when you have to register your location with the police everytime you move apartment or even, in theory, visit a hotel. But then in most European countries it's necessary for foreigners to register at the local police station and that's rarely presented as a civil liberties infringement, simply a means to know who is living where and how many people there are. Something which is particularly useful when developing public policy as we learned at Newcastle council when the EU enlarged and a very welcome but unknown number of Poles arrived.

The reason it feels vaguely unsettling and more tempting to subvert in china is because you don't have the same confidence that the information won't be used for more potentially sinister purposes should situations change.

And not just in china. For example it only took one, admittedly major event for the US (and I assume UK) intelligence agencies to start monitoring phone and email records. Try talking about jihad via email and see how long much vaunted free speech lasts.

So, plenty of reasons to feel a bit nervous about being plugged into a never-ceasing network. But there's also a huge amount of creative potential. Personally speaking I am at my most interesting and dare I say amusing when I remember, sometimes abstract, sometimes pertinent things that I have read or seen. Obviously it has always been possible to have an aide-memoire for such anecdotes using the high-tech solution of a notebook and pen. But I seem much more able to record the useful and interesting things if I can act on them immediately with a camera and a blog post.

So thanks to this new technology you're able to enjoy such delights as the man hanging upside down in a tree, the video bike ride and the knowledge that some Arabs like to take the opportunity of the flight home for a last cheeky beer for a while.

Not exactly earth-shattering admittedly. But it does make it a bit easier to share your life on a drip-feed basis, rather than on the slightly more pressured and therefore less revealing responses to the annual question of "so what's china like then?"

And on a more useful level, you only need to check out the news website demotix to see the way these technologies can bypass the traditional media, providing a different often directive perspective on news. This couldn't be more significant in a week when research revealed Fox News to be the most trusted network in America...

So I'll post this when we land, most likely via some free wifi in the airport, since somehow we ( read I) seem to expect most of this advanced technology to be somehow self-funding and therefore free at the point of consumption.

And you can expect more vaguely philosophical ramblings the next time we're on a late night / early morning flight and Caroline is asleep on my shoulder.


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Intermittent service

Whereas normally we update this with such regularity!
We're just about to board the flight from shanghai to Dubai. It's 05:30, but since we're cracking on a bit we did actually have a hotel room last night rather than a wheelchair in the airport.

Very excited about the impending holiday and will try and post a few words every couple of days, or at least when something notable happens. Wifi depending of course.

Not many Chinese people off to Dubai and beyond for Chinese new year. Announcements aren't even given in Chinese, just English and then Arabic.

Next words from the Arabian penninsula.


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Thursday 21 January 2010

Someone else's work

This link to the Guardian is aimed at families travelling by train across China.
But I think it captures the feeling pretty well.
I'm hoping this proves to be a teaser for any of you planning to come and visit us.

Sunday 17 January 2010

Vlog

A brief hiatus due to Christmas, travel, work, vpn issues, blah de blah.
But here we are back again and now that I have the technology and since I received positive feedback from Greg at least, you may see more of these video blogs, or vlogs to us tech-savvy characters in the future.

Count the clauses in that sentence, win a prize...



The link, if embeddication doesn't work.