Difference is mate, immigrants aint a MAJORITY here like they are in Dubai, so, in this sense you kind of HAVE to make changes to the law to accommodate the majority... And it seems like they already have done so (as Addy has stated), or at least are turning a blind eye.... And just how the fukk can these people talk about "preserving" their culture when Dubai has become so hopelessly Westernised anyway on the surface, with its skyscrapers and western-style Capitalistic business commerce, Dubai has no cultural identity, and frankly it's not even a "real" country, its draconian laws are more about keeping people and the workers under control than supposedly preserving some kind of "national identity" ..... Utter bullsh!t..... Even Japan has preserved its own cultural identity far more effectively than Dubai, which is really little more than a US protectorate.....

 

makes no difference, the countries leaders chose which laws to impose and if it causes too much inconvieniance they change the laws accordingly. no ones being forced to go there, everyone knows the score ... no matter how repellant their laws may be in comparison to ours.

makes no difference, the countries leaders chose which laws to impose and if it causes too much inconvieniance they change the laws accordingly. no ones being forced to go there, everyone knows the score ... no matter how repellant their laws may be in comparison to ours.

 

 

Well, all I can say is, I hope, completely for a Workers' Revolt to take place in Dubai, that'll change those b/astards' minds....Something along the lines of "Solidarity" in the Gdansk shipping yards or the workers' strikes in France.... Seeing as how the workers are the huge MAJORITY in that "country", it shouldn't be too difficult....

makes no difference, the countries leaders chose which laws to impose and if it causes too much inconvieniance they change the laws accordingly. no ones being forced to go there, everyone knows the score ... no matter how repellant their laws may be in comparison to ours.

 

Ideally, international law might play a role but since UAE probably never signed any of the UN human rights covenants and even its signatories disregard the rules all the time, it's probably a matter of national sovereignty still. And I suppose I agree with you, that Dubai can create any laws they want. But then I don't believe Westerners should support the emirate... especially all the fashion houses over there who rely on gay talent and business. Plus the multinationals, the tourism companies, etc.

Yeuch - I'd rather a 2-week all-inclusive to Afghanistan than a fortnight in the tacky hell-hole of Dubai.

 

A city in the midst of a desert filled with garish new hotel skyscrapers - no history, culture, very few natives - and laws on drinking and gay sex that are nothing short of simple and revolting.

 

You're welcome to it - looks like the last place on earth I'd care to go.

 

My thoughts exactly. It's a playground for the super rich. Nothing organic or natural about it. Billion-dollar skyscrapers in the middle of the desert, funded by idiotic real estate speculators whose dreams of "flipping" their way to millions is crashing all around them. From what I hear, all these skyscrapers and developments are empty - either because their owners are trying to flip them or because they're "3rd or 4th homes" for the superrich. Who wants to live in a neighborhood where your neighbors only spend a week a year in Dubai?

 

Tacky and tasteless, like Las Vegas without the googie kitsch or vice.

 

They can have their indoor ski resorts. I'd much rather go to, you know, a real mountain with real snow.

Edited February 14, 200916 yr by Consie

But then I don't believe Westerners should support the emirate... especially all the fashion houses over there who rely on gay talent and business. Plus the multinationals, the tourism companies, etc.

 

Good idea, hit them where it hurts, in their pockets...... It may force a change in attitudes..... :rolleyes:

 

Well, all I can say is, I hope, completely for a Workers' Revolt to take place in Dubai, that'll change those b/astards' minds....Something along the lines of "Solidarity" in the Gdansk shipping yards or the workers' strikes in France.... Seeing as how the workers are the huge MAJORITY in that "country", it shouldn't be too difficult....

 

oh i quite agree... it would be a good thing, but until that happens we have to live with the laws they make in their country.

http://img148.imageshack.us/img148/997/jpgr.jpg

 

http://img148.imageshack.us/img148/4149/jpg1.jpg

 

http://img406.imageshack.us/img406/8006/jpg3.jpg

 

http://img148.imageshack.us/img148/7351/jpg4.jpg

 

 

Just when thought Dubai couldnt get any tackier along this comes :wacko:

THE TORONTO STAR

 

Dubai: How not to build a city

 

A cross between Vegas and Mississauga, Dubai is in danger of becoming a ruin-in-waiting

 

DUBAI – If this really is a city and not some sheikh's mad idea of what a metropolis should be, it's a city despite itself.

 

Its vast wealth notwithstanding, the things that make Dubai liveable are those that happened when the planners weren't looking. But life will out, even in a city built by oil-fuelled hubris.

 

To most, the image conjured up by Dubai is one of superlatives: This is the location of the world's tallest tower (the Burj Dubai), the world's most expensive hotel (the Burj Al Arab), the world's richest horse race (the Dubai World Cup), the world's ... Well, you get the idea.

 

And not to be outdone, there's the brand new The Tiger Woods Dubai, a golf course in the desert that requires four million gallons of water a day to stay green. This in a country built on sand.

 

It's also the site of some of the planet's worst congestion. It's not just that everyone here drives; everyone drives badly. In March 8 of last year, for example, three people were killed and 277 injured in a highway pile-up that involved more than 200 vehicles.

 

Still, it's hard not to be impressed by what has been accomplished here. The extent of this ruin-in-waiting is truly mind-boggling.

 

The question is where to start. The main street, Sheikh Zayed Road, may be as good a place as any. It runs through the city and continues on to Abu Dhabi, Dubai's quieter, richer cousin, and capital of the United Arab Emirates. This, the road where the accident occurred, reaches 14 lanes in places – and that's in the heart of the city. Speed limits exist, but only to be ignored.

 

In neither city are pedestrians welcome anywhere near the street. But in Dubai, the visitor realizes in nanoseconds that this is a city dedicated, enthusiastically, if not slavishly, to the car, the bigger the better. People just aren't meant to be pedestrians here, but drivers.

 

According to a recent story in Abu Dhabi's new English-language newspaper, The National, locals overwhelmingly view traffic accidents as the major cause of death and injury among children. No kidding. Anyone crossing a road in these parts is fair game. To step out means taking your life into your hands.

 

And if SUV sales have collapsed in North America, Emirates remain as committed as ever to driving the biggest set of wheels they can find. Hummers, Escalades and Cayennes abound. Dubai's traffic, like its wealth, depends on oil, a commodity that's already running out. It's Abu Dhabi, back down the road, that has the vast bulk of the U.A.E.'s oil reserves – 95 per cent. Dubai has less than five per cent, and it is not expected to last more than a decade. The economy relies on real estate, tourism and Abu Dhabi, the emirate that is reported to have invested upwards of $10 billion (U.S.) in Dubai's economy. The truth may be that this city will be obsolete in less time than it takes most communities to figure out who and what they are.

 

But at the moment Dubai is famous for its architecture. Landmarks such as the Burj Al Arab hotel, which sits in the water off the city's waterfront, have become designated icons, reproduced endlessly in kitsch souvenirs sold everywhere. In another context, such a building, despite its glorious bad taste, would still be a monument. Here it's just another symbol of built excess, one of hundreds, if not thousands.

 

The most interesting aspect of the hotel is the helipad that extends conspicuously from the top of the sail-like structure. Though obviously intended to convey a sense of riches, it actually addresses the underlying frustration of trying to get around by car.

 

To be fair, Dubai is now constructing a new above-ground metro. It will be the region's first serious attempt at public transit, not including bus lines that serve the huge immigrant underclass brought here to do the dirty work. Keep in mind that fully 90 per cent of Dubai's population comes from somewhere else, typically Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Philippines.

 

As for those skyscrapers that crowd Sheikh Zayed Rd., each more outrageous than the next, they have the strange effect of cancelling each other out. Each becomes unexpectedly meaningless, rendering any discussion of architecture irrelevant.

 

One is reminded that as much as anything architecture derives much of its significance from its context. There's no better example than the Burj Dubai, which, but for the fact it's the tallest building in the world, couldn't be less interesting. What's so curious is that it's enough simply to be the tallest; there's no pressure to aspire for excellence. For all the difference it would have made, it could have been designed by engineers.

 

As a result of this frantic race to outdo the guy next door, architecture has been turned into a sideshow attraction. Starchitecture is the least of this city's problems. Dubai resembles nothing so much as a cross between Mississauga and Las Vegas, but on a massive scale; it's not that there's no there there, but that there are so many.

 

Despite everything, Dubai is a thriving city of 1.4 million, the overwhelming majority being expatriates. To wander the streets of the quarters where these guest workers live and work – Bastakiya for example – is to encounter something that approximates what urban Canadians would recognize as neighbourhoods. They don't resemble anything North American, but there's life at street level in shops, restaurants and so on. Walking may not be any easier in these parts, but an urban sensibility prevails. It couldn't be further from the malls, freeways and sprawl of suburbia as we know it, or from "downtown" Dubai for that matter.

 

Where traditional cities have evolved over centuries, sometimes millennia, Dubai was built in decades. Not much was happening here before the 1960s, a mere blink ago in the life of a Paris, London or Rome. By U.A.E. standards, even Toronto seems positively ancient.

 

Though there's something undeniably exciting, even exhilarating, about the idea of Instant City, a place unencumbered by the past and free to embrace the future, the reality says otherwise. Indeed, this isn't so much a city of the future as a city in denial of the future.

 

The old Jane Jacobs' notion of the city as organized complexity – the sense that order can be found underneath the apparent chaos – becomes almost precious in this context. On the other hand, informal networks of various sorts have been created, self-organized, mostly by foreigners. A small but vivid example is a grassy verge that visiting workers have adopted as an informal meeting place. The expatriates can be seen sitting in groups, large and small, once the heat of the day has subsided.

 

Mostly, however, tradition seems more an intrusion. The most obvious instance, perhaps, is the Muslim call to prayers, which cuts through the din five times daily, literally a voice from the past.

 

Perhaps even that will fall silent once this city has become the "colossal wreck" of which Percy Bysshe Shelley spoke in his famous sonnet Ozymandias. Only the desert will remain, and the sand that covers every surface.

 

Source: http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/article/613885

Ok, one more article. It's long, so I'll only post a clip. The whole thing can be found here:

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/mi...ai-1664368.html

 

It's a disturbing read... perhaps the worst part isn't the illegal labor, Draconian laws... it's the Western expats. You have to read their comments to believe them. The most racist, disgusting, lazy, pathetic group of people you could imagine:

 

VII. The Lifestyle

 

All the guidebooks call Dubai a "melting pot", but as I trawl across the city, I find that every group here huddles together in its own little ethnic enclave – and becomes a caricature of itself. One night – in the heart of this homesick city, tired of the malls and the camps – I go to Double Decker, a hang-out for British expats. At the entrance there is a red telephone box, and London bus-stop signs. Its wooden interior looks like a cross between a colonial clubhouse in the Raj and an Eighties school disco, with blinking coloured lights and cheese blaring out. As I enter, a girl in a short skirt collapses out of the door onto her back. A guy wearing a pirate hat helps her to her feet, dropping his beer bottle with a paralytic laugh.

 

I start to talk to two sun-dried women in their sixties who have been getting gently sozzled since midday. "You stay here for The Lifestyle," they say, telling me to take a seat and order some more drinks. All the expats talk about The Lifestyle, but when you ask what it is, they become vague. Ann Wark tries to summarise it: "Here, you go out every night. You'd never do that back home. You see people all the time. It's great. You have lots of free time. You have maids and staff so you don't have to do all that stuff. You party!"

 

They have been in Dubai for 20 years, and they are happy to explain how the city works. "You've got a hierarchy, haven't you?" Ann says. "It's the Emiratis at the top, then I'd say the British and other Westerners. Then I suppose it's the Filipinos, because they've got a bit more brains than the Indians. Then at the bottom you've got the Indians and all them lot."

 

They admit, however, they have "never" spoken to an Emirati. Never? "No. They keep themselves to themselves." Yet Dubai has disappointed them. Jules Taylor tells me: "If you have an accident here it's a nightmare. There was a British woman we knew who ran over an Indian guy, and she was locked up for four days! If you have a tiny bit of alcohol on your breath they're all over you. These Indians throw themselves in front of cars, because then their family has to be given blood money – you know, compensation. But the police just blame us. That poor woman."

 

A 24-year-old British woman called Hannah Gamble takes a break from the dancefloor to talk to me. "I love the sun and the beach! It's great out here!" she says. Is there anything bad? "Oh yes!" she says. Ah: one of them has noticed, I think with relief. "The banks! When you want to make a transfer you have to fax them. You can't do it online." Anything else? She thinks hard. "The traffic's not very good."

 

When I ask the British expats how they feel to not be in a democracy, their reaction is always the same. First, they look bemused. Then they look affronted. "It's the Arab way!" an Essex boy shouts at me in response, as he tries to put a pair of comedy antlers on his head while pouring some beer into the mouth of his friend, who is lying on his back on the floor, gurning.

 

Later, in a hotel bar, I start chatting to a dyspeptic expat American who works in the cosmetics industry and is desperate to get away from these people. She says: "All the people who couldn't succeed in their own countries end up here, and suddenly they're rich and promoted way above their abilities and bragging about how great they are. I've never met so many incompetent people in such senior positions anywhere in the world." She adds: "It's absolutely racist. I had Filipino girls working for me doing the same job as a European girl, and she's paid a quarter of the wages. The people who do the real work are paid next to nothing, while these incompetent managers pay themselves £40,000 a month."

 

With the exception of her, one theme unites every expat I speak to: their joy at having staff to do the work that would clog their lives up Back Home. Everyone, it seems, has a maid. The maids used to be predominantly Filipino, but with the recession, Filipinos have been judged to be too expensive, so a nice Ethiopian servant girl is the latest fashionable accessory.

 

It is an open secret that once you hire a maid, you have absolute power over her. You take her passport – everyone does; you decide when to pay her, and when – if ever – she can take a break; and you decide who she talks to. She speaks no Arabic. She cannot escape.

 

In a Burger King, a Filipino girl tells me it is "terrifying" for her to wander the malls in Dubai because Filipino maids or nannies always sneak away from the family they are with and beg her for help. "They say – 'Please, I am being held prisoner, they don't let me call home, they make me work every waking hour seven days a week.' At first I would say – my God, I will tell the consulate, where are you staying? But they never know their address, and the consulate isn't interested. I avoid them now. I keep thinking about a woman who told me she hadn't eaten any fruit in four years. They think I have power because I can walk around on my own, but I'm powerless."

 

The only hostel for women in Dubai – a filthy private villa on the brink of being repossessed – is filled with escaped maids. Mela Matari, a 25-year-old Ethiopian woman with a drooping smile, tells me what happened to her – and thousands like her. She was promised a paradise in the sands by an agency, so she left her four year-old daughter at home and headed here to earn money for a better future. "But they paid me half what they promised. I was put with an Australian family – four children – and Madam made me work from 6am to 1am every day, with no day off. I was exhausted and pleaded for a break, but they just shouted: 'You came here to work, not sleep!' Then one day I just couldn't go on, and Madam beat me. She beat me with her fists and kicked me. My ear still hurts. They wouldn't give me my wages: they said they'd pay me at the end of the two years. What could I do? I didn't know anybody here. I was terrified."

 

One day, after yet another beating, Mela ran out onto the streets, and asked – in broken English – how to find the Ethiopian consulate. After walking for two days, she found it, but they told her she had to get her passport back from Madam. "Well, how could I?" she asks. She has been in this hostel for six months. She has spoken to her daughter twice. "I lost my country, I lost my daughter, I lost everything," she says.

 

As she says this, I remember a stray sentence I heard back at Double Decker. I asked a British woman called Hermione Frayling what the best thing about Dubai was. "Oh, the servant class!" she trilled. "You do nothing. They'll do anything!"