Dubai: The "-est" City

A compilation video of my time in Dubai.

This past week I’ve had a blast in Dubai which is all thanks to Abi and the generosity of her parents. This was my first time visiting the Middle East (and my first time in Europe if you count my layover at Amsterdam where I’m currently typing this blog en route back to my last semester at Olin College).

Dubai loves being in the Guinness world records, everywhere we went there was the largest X or the tallest Y, and I get it, everyone wants to be number one. It’s also a relatively young city so it’s constantly under construction, building the next tallest building in the world, or the largest theme park in the world. I’ve also eaten more kebab here than I have in my entire life.

Here are some of the biggest, tallest, coolest places I’ve visited:

1. Dubai Mall (the world’s biggest mall) – True to its name, this place is huge. It has a ridiculous amount of stores from extremely high end stuff like Gucci or Prada to your Forever21. Some people would consider this shopping heaven, but it was so big that trying to window shop could mean walking several miles. It was cool, but exhausting.

2. Burj Kalifa (the world’s tallest building) – Attached to the Dubai Mall is the Burj Khalifa, there’s an entrance from the mall that go through to take an elevator all the way up to the 148th floor which is approximately half a kilometer off the ground. Dubai has a lot of skyscrapers but they all look pretty puny from the world’s tallest.

3. Dubai Frame (soon to be the world’s largest picture frame) – This one is a personal favorite; we saw it pretty frequently driving from Abi’s home to downtown Dubai. It’s basically two buildings with a walkway connecting them but they’re going to hang a picture of the current Sheikh up in the middle (or so I hear).

4. The Palm – So the Palm is this huge island shaped like a palm leaf (which I’d imagine looks really boss from an aerial view but you never really get high enough to see it unless you’re skydiving), which was created by dumping a bunch of sand into the ocean and then hauling rocks to the shoreline to protect it from eroding away. It has a few fancy hotels, the rest of which are residential areas.

5. Desert Safari – We got picked up by a white SUV which took us on a sandy off road path over mountain dunes. Once we got to the camp location we rode camels (for like a 2 minute loop), tried sandboarding (which due to the friction was a sore disappointment), and watched various performances by a belly dancer, fire spinner, and a dude with a spinney dress.