Dubai, UAE
I landed in Dubai running on fumes - maybe nine hours of sleep in the last two or three days - and to top it off, the air conditioning on the flight had been broken the entire way. The only saving grace was that I’d managed to score an exit aisle seat, so at least my legs weren’t cramped up while I slowly melted.
Getting to the hotel should have been the easy part, but instead I ended up waiting ages for my room to be ready. There’s something about standing in a hotel lobby with your backpack, jet-lagged and sweaty, that really amplifies the loneliness of solo travel. Those first few hours in a new city, when you don’t know a soul and everything feels slightly alien, are always the hardest.
Rather than wallow, I dumped my bag and went for a walk, then jumped on the metro. I ended up chatting to a bloke who worked at the Dubai Mall, and he offered to show me around. The mall itself is absurd - it’s less of a shopping centre and more of a small city that happens to sell things. But the real highlight was going up the Burj Khalifa. A hundred and twenty-four floors up, and the view is just something else entirely. You can see the entire city sprawling out beneath you, the desert fading into the horizon. Afterwards we caught the water fountain display outside, which was genuinely spectacular. By this point I was absolutely knackered, and getting back to the hotel involved some interesting taxi drama that I won’t bore you with, but let’s just say navigation wasn’t my driver’s strongest skill.
Day two was a bit more relaxed. I went back to the Dubai Mall to check out the aquarium, which is impressive even by the standards of a city that seems to be in a permanent competition with itself. There’s also a SEGA theme park in there, which felt hilariously out of place but was good fun. In the afternoon I made my way out to Dubai Marina and spent some time on the beach, which was a nice change of pace from the air-conditioned excess of the malls.
For dinner I found McGettigans, an Irish bar that felt like it could have been transplanted straight from Dublin. Had a proper feed and a few pints while watching the men’s tennis final on the big screen. Ended up sitting next to a lovely old bloke from Norwich who was out in Dubai visiting his son. We had a good chat about cricket and travel over a couple more beers before I called it a night. Early bed was necessary - I had a long flight to Argentina the next day, and a birthday to celebrate on the other side of the world.
