...or: the worlds biggest construction site!

The city is breathtaking, but it´s very hard for people like us to travel around. We are used to walk quite a lot, but it´s impossible to do so here. Not because of the heat, but rather because of the amazing number of cunstruction sites. We have never seen anything like that before. The "main road" Sheikh Zayed Road is in fact a highway with 6-8 lines in euch direction, full of construction rubble on either side. No way of crossing this road - fortunately there are bridges at the newly built railway stations - but be aware - they are closed at night!!!

We once tried to walk from our hotel to Burj Dubai, the highest building in the world. Its just about 2km - but it took us around an hour to get there. Most of the time there are no sidewalks and even more often we had to walk through construction areas, simply because there was no other way. Very unusual for us, we went back with a taxi.

It just seems as if traffic planning is lightyears back compared of the development of the rest of the city.

Another question that kept our minds busy: who on earth shall live and work in all the skyscrapers that are being built. There are hardly any lights visible in the existing ones during nighttime, no people in the shopping malls during daytime, and just a few during night. So all in all we think there are much less people than offices and appartements. At the moment it just seems as if they are putting excessive money into skyscrapers as if there were no other possibilities to spend it - just in case there will be some people in the future that might need the property. We don´t know how that will affect the market rate of real estate in the near future. We hope the best for the region, but have just experienced how falling market values can affect the economy very badly, but we are no experts.

Nevertheless we had some great days in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, but now we´ll go home again after 7 days with more than 1.400 photos and 90 video sequences. And there are no snapshots - we stopped shooting things that we think won´t sell, they just clog our harddrives and you never watch them. The next days and weeks will bring extreme retouching, uploading and keywording ;-).