Breakfast in Dubai, lunch in Cairo, supper in Casablanca

Dear Diary, yesterday was all a bit odd so I thought that I would tell you all about it.

• Midnight, fast asleep at the SAS Radisson Media City, Dubai.
• 01:50 wake up call for a 2am taxi to the airport, arriving there at 2:30am for a 4am flight.
• 3am get to front of check-in queue to find I am not booked on the flight, my confirmed booking had been cancelled somewhere along the line. Much faffing around by airport staff followed which led to me buying a new ticket at 4am and then hot-footing it to the gate only to find the flight, which had been called by then, was running about an hour late.
• 7am arrive in Cairo. Long wait while colleague waits for his bag and I head off to the other terminal to buy a ticket for the evening flight out of Cairo. We got our stuff done and found the driver that had been arranged for us. The journey was interesting because of the driving (anywhere will do) and the views it gave of the sprawling city,
• 9am arrive at Semiramis InterContinental Cairo Hotel and book a room for the day so that we have somewhere to freshen up before our meeting. The photograph above is the view from the hotel.
• 10am get picked up from the hotel by our local colleague and get taken to the office an hour's drive south in Giza.
• 11am very useful meeting, made the whole trip worthwhile.
• 2pm left office to get flight (us) and back home for sundown (our colleague). It was the first day of Ramadan so everybody else was getting home at that time too.
• 3pm back at the hotel to collect bags and a very quick stroll along the Nile to take some more photographs to prove that I had been there.
• 4:30pm at airport and air-side by 5pm! Two hours to kill so had a coffee and a pastry slice (my first food of the day because of Ramadan) and then made use of the airports wireless internet.
• 11pm arrive in Casablanca. Uneventful trip to our hotel for the next three days.

In the process we went from GMT+3 to GMT-1 which made it a 28 hour day with two longish flights, several hours in airports, more hours in cars, and in the middle of all that, three hours or rather good work.

Typical Dubai towers

These two towers, close to my hotel in Dubai Media City, are fairly typical of the many towers in the region, most of which are still under construction.

While these are of standard materials (i.e. reinforced concrete) the sandy colour and local styling of the arches and domes gives them a rather attractive feel and also helps to differentiate Dubai from other skyscraper cities in the world.

Dubai Media City is full of water

Working in Dubai for a few days probably sound more glamorous than it is proving to be. Today I walked about 50m from the hotel to the office at 8:20 and back again at 18:00, took a business call back in my room, went to the hotel bar for a drink and then the hotel restaurant for a (rather nice) curry with a couple of colleagues.

I did manage to go outside for about 15 minutes at lunchtime, which is probably long enough for somebody not used to bright sunshine and a temperature of 44c. In this brief period I had a quick walk around part of the Dubai Media City business park, which also houses the local offices for LogicaCMG.

This may be a very hot desert region but there is water everywhere in the sort of features that would make Ground Force green with envy. The picture above merely hints at the extravagant use of this scarce resource, there are more pictures here.

Tomorrow should be a relatively quiet day which is just as well given the madness planned for Thursday. More on that later.

First impressions of Dubai

This is going to be a very hectic week but it will also take me to some places that I have not been to before, like Dubai.

I arrived here at 07:40 on Sunday morning and, despite getting next to no sleep on the flight over, managed to grab a few hours of sight seeing before the week's work started with a meeting at 4pm.

Two colleagues and myself took a taxi from the hotel to the old part of town and started by exploring the lanes of shops in Al Ras. What struck me was the amount of cheap plastic toys on sale which contributed to the tatty look to the place, nothing like the Grand Market in Istanbul.

It was bloody hot, around 43c, so we stopped for a drink before too long.

Despite this heat we walked a long way but we did manage to get some shelter as we took a pedestrian tunnel under the river.

When the heat finally got too much for us we took another taxi to an air-conditioned mall for some food and some window shopping.

We went to the Mall of the Emirates which is famous for its ski slope with real snow. The mall was spotless and was kept that way by people's tidy behavior and by a small army of people who cleared food tables and swept floors, etc.

The prices seemed to be little, if any, different to those at home so we came home empty handed.

Along the seafront is where all the new building is going on and there is masses and masses of it, a brash mix of office blocks, flats and estates of luxury houses. Those that are being built on manufactured islands are famous but there are several inland schemes too, including one that looks to be trying to recreate some of the feel of Venice.

I am not sure who is going to buy all these new properties but obviously the developers, and their financial backers, are confident that the market is there as the amount of new build is truly staggering.