Although we felt immense sadness leaving Muscat, we also felt excited about our next stop: the United Arab Emirates, Oman's neighbor. Our stay here lasted only a few days, enough to give us a small taste of this remarkable country, which is one of the world's major oil producers and boasts one of the highest per capita incomes anywhere in the world. The country is actually a federation of several emirates, of which two, Dubai and Abu Dhabi, are far and away the most important. Dubai and Muscat could not be more different. Dubai is truly a global city, a Hong Kong of sorts in the Arabian peninsula. The convergence of people—Iranian traders, Nepalese bellhops, Filipino maids, Russian "entertainers", Indian merchants, British engineers, and on and on—makes for an amazing mixture. Almost the entire labor force comes from elsewhere, making it one of the most genuinely cosmopolitan and international places on earth. It's flashy, brash, glitzy, vibrant, awash in money, spanking new—and we loved it. Muscat seemed a sleepy little town in comparison, and suddenly the oft-repeated remark by Omanis that they didn't want their country to be like Dubai made sense. We felt almost guilty enjoying it! With great reluctance we concede that the shopping malls are second to none, and with even greater reluctance we confess that we spent a lot of time in them. People actually fly half way around the world to shop here, which we found rather exotic behavior until we saw the malls. We took the opportunity to shop, go to Starbucks, and eat sushi (note Isla: she's become quite expert!). As you can see, the architecture looks quite dramatic, and one of the more interesting trips is by water taxi up the creek that divides the city. Although Dubai is clearly the commercial center of the UAE it is in effect a tiny city state. Abu Dhabi produces almost all of the oil and is far and away the largest emirate. The last two pictures show the city of Abu Dhabi, which did not exist in the early 1960s.
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