Dubai - The City of Dreams

I am impressed! A hot desert in the middle of nowhere and Manhattan has every reason to be worried of this place as its competitor to being the Skyscraper capital of the world. Its construction boom-time in Dubai and these guys don't even think of anything less that few hundred metres tall. Look at some of the ambitious projects to happen in Dubai:

• 64 Residential towers alternating in Black and white called the Chess City
• An underwater hotel called Hydropolis
• UAE's biggest mall called the "mall of Dubai" to be completed in the next 2 years
• The world's Biggest Mall called "Mall of Arabia" , supposed to take 5 days just to walk through the entire mall (to be completed in the next decade)
• The world's tallest building, rumored to be 900 metres tall (The one in Taipei is just 500 metres high). In fact, this building is planned to be "extendable", so that it can always be kept the tallest building in the world.
• Palm World, 300 man-made islands resembling the world map, where you can buy any country you want and be its king/queen
• Dubai Marina, a huge complex of residential skyscrapers on the beach.

Some might dismiss all of the above as castles in the air, but that was what people would have said 20 years back, and look at where Dubai is now. An indoor Ski slope with 8 slopes, 40 Huge Malls, Palm Jumeirah (an island complex resembling the Palm tree), Burj Al Arab (the only 7 star hotel in the world) and much much more. The Dubai Marina, with its semi-constructed towers looks awesome, can't imagine the Beach Skyline once its completed.

Hats off to the rulers of Dubai for being great visionaries. Probably, they epitomise the term "rulers". The Arab locals (only a measly 20% of the inhabitants) have nothing to complain. They get free villas from the government, free electricity and water and have to act as signatories for any non-UAE industry setup in the UAE. This way, they are assured of huge sums of money for just sitting at home , while immigrants from the rest of the world slog to increase the economy of Dubai. Intelligent Economics, i must say !