Impressions of Dubai
Buildings and skyscrapers are sprouting in Dubai like the plants that could never thrive there. During my three day weekend trip to the city for corporate training, and despite everything I had heard and read before arriving, I was surprised by the scale of the construction. Dubai is going to be huge, and it isn’t a single city. Rather, it is at least two or three, and each is significant in its own right. The Marina, the Financial District, and the Creek are each booming and scrambling toward the sky.
Monitor’s Dubai office, and the Hilton hotel where I stayed, is in The Marina, next to the massive Jumeirah Beach Residence development, which alone incorporates 40 nearly-complete buildings. The Marina will soon include 200 high rise buildings, about 120 of which (by my naked eye estimate) are already well underway or finished.
To share a few of my first impressions of the city:
Floating, Skiing, then Partying - The fact that in a single day I managed to float in the gulf, attend an office meeting, go skiing for two hours, grab some dinner, get some shopping done, then go out to party at a ritzy night spot is just incredible. Ski Dubai, while not exactly the best ski experience in the world, was a fun and novel way to spend a couple of hours at the mall. The slope was actually pretty impressive, and a decent challenge, so I walked away happier than I expected to be.
My visit was during Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, so the options to party were somewhat limited - essentially, we had to stick to hotel bars. Luckily, Dubai has a lot of high class hotels with equally impressive bars. Buddha Bar, at the Grosvenor House, was quite a scene, and fully on-par with many of the great night spots I have been to in San Francisco and London.
Dubai is not Las Vegas - I have frequently heard Dubai compared to Las Vegas, but feel the comparison is inaccurate because of the attitude of the two cities. Whereas in Las Vegas many resorts and developments are huge and ostentatious for their own sake, big projects to build the “biggest,” “tallest,” or “best” in Dubai are about garnering respect and prestige. This is a city that wants to be taken seriously, but also embraces the fact that novelty and innovation attract tourists, investment, and money. Let’s just say that I don’t expect a Hooters Casino to open here. In the near future, anyway.
Sleek, Modern, and Developed - Dubai is quite upscale, at least in the parts of the city that I saw. In fact, the degree to which there seemed to be very little in the way of “budget” accommodations, etc. was surprising compared to Bahrain, Riyadh, or Egypt. The beach was a line of hotels ranging from a Sheraton to a Hilton and on up the chain of prestigious hotel brands.
The Mall of the Emirates, another example, is also quite upscale. It’s actually nicer and larger than most that I’ve been to in the US or Europe. Not cheaper, however.
It’s in a Desert - This one shouldn’t have been any shock, but I found myself disappointed by how unattractive certain sections of the city were because they were un-landscaped, un-developed, and essentially swaths of dirt. Empty plots of land and things like highway medians simply don’t grow anything. No grass - no shrubs - nothing. Until confronted with this, I never realized how attractive undeveloped countryside is in most other countries.
Also related to its desert climate are the heat and humidity that come with the package. Every time you walk outside your sunglasses immediately fog up with condensation. It’s also impossible not to mention that the water temperature is almost disgustingly warm. While I am sure it’s great for arthritics, water that is 32 degrees C / 89 degrees F is simply not that refreshing. I am sure when I return in a month or two however, and have been living in a colder climate, I will probably change my tune.
Difficult Conditions for Foreign Labor - Dubai imports a lot of working class labor from places like India and the Philippines. From what I have seen, this is true across the region - it seems like half the coach class seats on any flight to Riyadh are full of migrant workers with little experience flying (the kind that hop out of their seats and rush for the doors while the plane is still taxy-ing).
In Dubia, the sad situation is that for all the novelty of seeing hundreds and hundreds of buildings rising into the air at the same time, the reality is that hundreds and thousands of poor foreign laborers are the ones who are toiling beneath the midday sun to get them built.
The businessman and economist in me feels that this is “okay” because these workers are employed voluntarily and are earning far better pay than they could in their home country. They’ve decided that it’s worth spending a year working in the harsh conditions to get themselves ahead in life, maybe to buy a car or put their kids through school when they return home.
The human inside me is nevertheless disturbed to look from the balcony of my luxury hotel room and see young men of my same age doing hard labor in the midday sun, only to be packed into an un-airconditioned minibus to be brought back to wherever it is they spend the rest of their day. One of the salesmen at the mall said it best: “They treat Indians like dogs here.”
Ultimately, it is the availability of this massive, cheap labor force that makes the miracle of Dubai possible. Love it or hate it, that’s how it’s happening.
Impressions of Cairo
Last weekend I went on a last-minute trip to Cairo with a colleague. I literally bought the flight less than three hours before the plane left. I couldn’t be happier that I did.
The fact that Egypt is most definitely a “third world” country smacked me in the face the instant we walked out the door. Until this trip I hadn’t realized how relatively calm things are on the roads in Riyadh, how few people heckle you for cab rides as you exit the international terminal, and how by comparison, the city is clean, modern, and bright. That isn’t to say that Cairo wasn’t an incredible place to be, but more a confession that I had frankly nearly forgotten that Cairo IS, in fact, in Africa. In many ways it felt much more like Quito or Mexico City than Riyadh or Bahrain, the only other two major cities in the region I have experienced thus far.
Two other impressions of the city have really stuck with me from this trip. First, that the pyramids are literally right on the edge of town. As you cross the river Nile on the highway, you begin to see off in the distance, past the agricultural fields cultivated practically in the middle of neighborhoods, past the tall apartments in the distance, the tips of the pyramids. As you approach, you begin to realize that the neighborhoods around the pyramids run practically smack into their base. Once you reach the pyramids, however, you reach the desert, and there is very, very little to see in the distance.
The second realization was that the Nile is a HUGE river. Keep in mind that Saudi Arabia, which has deserts and a climate that looked very similar to the dunes at Giza, has no permanent rivers or lakes. By contrast, the Nile is truly massive, and allows vibrant green plant life to thrive along its banks that stands in sharp contrast to the many deteriorating buildings, dirty roadways, and deserts beyond.
On my second day in Cairo, after my colleague Magnus had already headed off to the airport to return to Saudi, I took a leisurely trip to the Egyptian Museum. While it was a mess of a museum, full to the brim with artifacts of staggering importance with little or no explanation or signage, once I found a knowledgeable guide, its secrets began to reveal themselves.
The man who led me through the place was actually an archaeologist by trade and training, and full of incredible stories of an empire that truly came to life for me when looking at the artifacts in the museum. He is actually going to be part of a National Geographic documentary on possible new cures to cancer which have been uncovered through examination of the DNA of mummies which suffered from Leukemia by had apparently lived for decades before dying of other causes.
The energy devoted to ensuring a shot at reincarnation through mummification and tombs just amazing, and the luxuries that existed for the royalty were staggering. It was incredible to see King Tutankhamen’s famous gold mask sitting rather inconspicuously in the treasures room, and to learn that one of the famous black stone sculptures (whose significance I have already forgotten) was actually carved with diamonds.
The trip was like an appetizer, and has left me with a strong desire to return to Egypt and explore more of the nation’s history through a visit to Luxor and Ramses Temple. Who knows, maybe I will find another opportunity sometime soon. Unfortunately, that seems unlikely unless my next project sends me to Africa.
For now, it’s off to Dubai on Tuesday for the total juxtaposition: a city with little history, but with a present and future built to dimensions which are almost impossible to imagination. I hope the experience is just as fascinating and rewarding.
Previous Lives: Uphill and Down in San Francisco
Today I was trying to remember the mailing address for Monitor’s office in San Francisco, and googled “Monitor Group San Francisco.” With a bit of amusement, I realized that a BusinessWeek article written about me (well, more like BY me) about a year and a half ago is the third hit that comes up.
I figure it’s worth linking to the article from here to say “yes, that’s me” and smile to think about how much has changed since then.
“Consulting is a fun job with a tough work schedule,” says this Georgetown grad, who bikes the famous hills to work each day