Steamed up glasses and poached bottoms

We are flying to India via Dubai, so decided to stay a couple of nights there. Needless to say, it’s immediately obvious that we’re going from one extreme to the other! I pay a vist to the loo in the airport, and not only am I struck by all the gleaming tiles and the fact that the fixtures are securely attached, but the water in the loo is hot! It feels like my nether regions are being gently poached as I do my business!

Of course it’s baking hot – and humid, which I hadn’t really expected in a city that’s built on a desert. Every time I get out of a car or walk out from a mall, my glasses mist up instantly so I can’t see a thing! We’ve reserved an apartment via Airbnb – it has a pool on the roof (31st floor), so we all enjoy keeping cool in there during the heat of the day. However, it turns out to be a bit of a pain, as it only has one double bed, a single and a sofa bed – the previous occupants appear to have completely wrecked the mechanism for the sofa bed… and we don’t have enough bedding. In fact it’s so wrecked that I can’t even put it back as a sofa, so we have no bed and no sofa. We’d paid to specifically get away from this sort of thing after Ethiopia, but at least we were still in coping mode!

After having seen people on every stretch of every road in Ethiopia, it’s particularly striking that there are no people walking anywhere here. It reminds me of the vast swathes of the east coast US, where there are no pavements and you’re forced to drive, even when you’d love to walk. We decide to visit the nearest shopping mall, primarily to stock up on medical supplies. Even though we can see the mall across the highway, it takes about 10 minutes in a taxi to navigate the enormously complicated junction over the 5-lane highway that separates us.

It strikes me (I need to find an alternative expression for that) that Dubai is like a Vogue cover model – stunningly beautiful but completely false. Makeup covers every last bit of skin and then the shot is airbrushed. I’m sure life here is very comfortable for a young single ex-pat on a decent salary (the types hanging around the edge of the pool at the apartment), but my first impression is that it wouldn’t be for me on long term basis.

We stop by the Burj Khalifa, which is truly extraordinary. As we approach, it’s as though I’m looking at a computer generated image that’s been overlaid onto the skyline – it’s just too perfect. And huge! Obviously in height but also in girth. I try to count the number of windows along just one face of the building a few stories up – it’s about 55. I cannot imagine how many offices are in there, in addition to its 900 residences.

We make an aborted attempt to visit the creek in the evening, but it’s cut short by Jemima being violently ill (again). With all this illness in Ethiopia, how are we going to cope in India??!!

So, after a fleeting visit, it’s back off to the airport for our flight to Mumbai. It’ll be back to reality there, no doubt!