Dubai is unique.
Like everywhere. These guys just love to build, stand still for a minute and they'll put a bus stop next to you. And a roundabout, they love roundabouts.
The view from our hotel room window changed in a month, from five shiny, neon wrapped edifices of mind-boggling leans and warps, to a small pile of rubble in the middle of them. That became a large stack of bricks. And a cement mixer, or two, or three. Then a whole heap of concrete clutching huge panes of smokey glass and there it was, a new shiny building. Shutting off light from the others and offering strange insights into people's lives.
I don't know how that makes me feel, after years of casual building in SA and careless building in the UK it's weird to see it done so efficiently. But what about all those warnings I was given by builders elsewhere? "Can't do that till the cement's dry mate, and then there's the grouting." "There's no way we can paint 'til that plasters gone off, be weeks that." Where they telling fibs?
Or am I going to wake up in downstairs' bedroom one morning? I am starting to have this reoccurring dream of high-rise, ultra shiny dominoes casually flicking into each other, that tends to leave me a bit breathless in the mornings.
Of course that could be the other major love of the locals, they do love a good smoke. I mean, really. Huge fistfulls of fags, like 70's working men's clubs in Middlesbrough, a wall of smoke that just hits you and covers you and wrings you out leaving a wrinkled, wheezing slightly surprised husk of your former self. They smoke anywhere. You'll walk into a lift that's totally empty except for a large cloud of nicotine waiting to take hold of every individual piece of clothing and cover them in a carcinogenic tincture.
It's really odd how alien it feels, that once all-pervading fugg that we used to freely inhale with every double V&T as if it were our life's breath, now is so foreign that you really can't understand how you managed just one breath without expiring instantly.
And the rules have changed, again. Now it's back to being the weird one out if you don't partake, the 80's raised eyebrow, the curled lip of derision, the blot on your burgeoning manliness. It's just too much to take, excuse me, I need some air.
