"My new home city" a Dubai Travel Page by pakistanibrain

After living in Vienna, Austria for 28 years, ie since my birth, I moved to Dubai in June 2006 together with my family.

After living in this fascinating place for more than a year, I still find it very fascinating. :)

Dubai is really a city that has come a long way from beeing a small fishery and pearl diver town to one of the most exciting places in the world. It has the only 7-star hotel in the world, the highest building in the world, amazing beaches and malls as well as really cool cars.

It still has it's issues though, road traffic beeing one of the biggest ones. I think that is caused by the fact that the city's population is growing quicker than the surrounding infrastructure. And that, although the speed of building and construction is breathtaking.

The whole city was closed down!

My family and I had a 13 hour stay in Dubai on my way to Pakistan in January 2006. We landed there around midnight, so we decided to get a hotel where we could rest for a few hours and then go and explore the city.

The hotel was quite nice and close to the airport.

Our bad luck was, that the Sheikh of Dubai had just passed away a few days before we arrived. Because of that the whole city was closed down. All shops and even the restaurants were closed for 7 days. We couldn't get anything to eat until we reached back to the hotel when we checked out there.

But the few things we saw in those hours were nice. We went to Jumairah first, got a glimpse of the Burj-ul-Arab and Wild Wadi. Then we walked past the Jumairah Beach Hotel and reached a public beach. From there we took a taxi to Sheikh Zayed Road. After taking a few pics there we headed back to the hotel and from there to the airport to get our flight to Lahore.

In March 2006 I went to Dubai for just one day to attend a business meeting in Dubai's Internet City.

I stayed at the SAS Radisson, a brand new hotel in Media City. The service there was good, the room facilities excellent and the location ideal for the purpose, as the office was just in walking distance.