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Before Christmas I whizzed off to our Dubai office to help out with some project work. In my spare time I managed to see a few of the city’s sites and I thought I would share with you some impressions from my visit:
Day 1: Rows of shimmering white pillars lining the airport baggage claim. A hotel with 1600 rooms and 70 floors. Bit dizzy.
Day 2: Strolling to work passed rows of glittering glass skyscrapers that look as though they are jostling in a line up for a beauty pageant. Large white four-by-fours whizzing by. An unfathomable road network. Dusty shoes.
Day 3: Miles of snaking black irrigation pipes winding through spikey succulents. Irrigation calculations for planting schemes. Plant lists of unfamiliar species.
Day 4: Women only metro carriages. Palm trees clothed in glittering fairy lights. Cathedral malls with sharks and parrot fish watching shoppers circle the aisles.
A lake that begins to simmer then explodes into a dancing fountain choreographed to Michael Jackson’s thriller. A towering twinkling building (not quite scraping 1km high). A big dose of the biggest, the tallest, the largest…
Day5: The call to prayer echoing in the office corridors. Views across a 12 lane motorway from my desk. Views across a 12 lane traffic jam on my walk home.
The tallest building in the world – the 829.8 m high Burj Khalifa
Day 6: Talk of brunches. Mocktails. Gold Souks. A model in a mall that displays visions of the next Dubai dream: an entire indoor ‘city’ with air conditioned streets (a world’s first of course). More glittering mirages?
Day 7: Off home, blinking.
Take a look at alshamsi terrafirma’s blog to read about what they’re getting up to in Dubai: alshamsiterrafirma.ae/landscape-architecture-blog
