Today I got to show Terry my Dubai! It’s like a kaleidoscope, you can tell something is the same as before but it keeps changing all the time. It’s been 30 years since I lived here and it is unrecognizable but I still love it. (In fact the Harvard implicit association test showed that I’m biased and favor Arabs over other people. Oh dear). Our port time was a bit too short, especially because we had to be the last group off the boat and immigration took nearly an hour because of issues with a passport scanning improperly. We were left with just enough time to do a sightseeing tour of the new Dubai and 2 minutes inside the Dubai mall (the world’s largest) before the bus took us back to the port for another confusing onboarding process that luckily didn’t take as long (but it did for many others).

Our sightseeing was jaw dropping. Skyscrapers everywhere and not a penny has been saved. The commentary was like a broken record – the world’s largest or deepest or tallest or first or biggest. A spectacular spectacle. Like Las Vegas but with sophistication and class and not a touch of irony. It’s east meets west in a nearly surreal setting.

We are definitely coming back. And then we’ll have a look at old Dubai too with the souks and deserts and dhows and bedouins.