Dubai

Bus stops with air condition and electric slide doors.

This is the tallest building in the world - Burj Dubai. It measures 818m.


I was so unbelievably lost when I came to Dubai. I had the address of my couchsurfer and I thought "well, I just ask people when I arrive to Dubai", just like in Iran. But it doesnt really work like that here. First, Dubai consists of huge highways where it is impossible to find people. Second, everyone comes from abroad and doesnt know their city. Third, the roads go everywhere - underground, on bridges. On the picture above is me when I thought I was on the right road but the road ended up in a huge parking house. Well, finally, after about five hours and after dark, I managed to find to my couchsurfer.

Intellectual names on the parts of the city.

Here is me in the Dubai Men´s Collage. I visited this collage and held two lectures for the first grade students in their course "Global Awareness". I told them about my trip and they were all very curious about it and had so many questions.

All of them were locals from Dubai and most of them were dressed in turban. That was really cool. When I asked them what they know about Sweden they all said "Ibrahimovic!!".

Me with some of the students after the lecture.

They invited me to participate in a meeting that the student council had. The topics were a bit different than in Sweden, like where they should put the sixth room for praying. They were also discussing whether music with love lyrics should be played at the national day in school. All the meeting was in English.

They have huge artificial islands in Dubai. Here is at one of the palm islands. This hotel is unbelievably huge and was build by Donald Trump.

After my visit at the collage one of the students, Ibrahim, wanted to show me around the city. He was a funny man. When we got out of the taxi he told the taxi driver to stop and wait for us because he was too lazy to get a new one when we were finished. So three ours later we retured back to the same taxi driver.

This is in Emirates Mall. It has an indoor ski slope.

The day after the visit two other students wanted to take me out to show me the city. Then they wanted to take a picture with me and the bike to put in their local newspaper of the collage.

The guy to the left on the picture above, Meshad, gave me this watch as a gift because he was so impressed that I had cycled all the way to Dubai. They all thought I was gonna be in Guiness World Records so I had to explain that I am not unique and that there are a lot of cyclists out there in the world.

Anyway, I have never seen anything like Dubai. As the guy I´m living with now, who is a stock trader, said: "This is capitalism at its finest". Well, to me Dubai is a little bit too extreme. It was really cool to see, but I would not want to live here. It is to superficial. Tomorrow I am heading to Oman and in a little more than a week I hope I will have cought the flight to India.