During my stay in the UAE, I was able to extend my almost non-existent knowledge about this country. Travelling is definitely the best way to improve one’s general knowledge. Honestly, I didn’t know much about the UAE before, apart from the standard prejudices…! I visited the museum of Dubai and some other exhibitions about the country and now I am ready to make a short summary for you.

The UAE is a federation of 7 Emirates which are each governed by their own sheikh, with Abu Dhabi as a capital city. The entire area was controlled quite a long time by the United Kingdom (hence the fat British power plugs everywhere!), until the Brits left peacefully end of the 1960s. The sheiks of the 2 main emirates, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan of Abu Dhabi and Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum of Dubai (names copy pasted from Wikipedia! haha) initiated this federation in 1971 with 5 other Emirates you have never heard about: Sharjah, Ajman, Fujairah, Umm al Quwain and Ras al Khaimah (who first refused to join and noticed one year later it was a lame decision!). There were also discussions with Qatar and Bahrain but without success so that these both countries became independent.

Sheikh Zayed was the first president of the UAE. Nowadays, Sheikh Al Maktoum’s son is sheikh of Dubai and prime minister of the UAE and Sheikh Zayed’s son is sheikh of Abu Dhabi and president of the UAE, although he had a stroke years ago, and people even don’t know if he’s still alive…. His half-brother is currently controlling the power. Talking about half-brother, remember that polygamy is practiced in some Islamic countries, and in particular in the UAE… so there are many half brothers and sisters in some families…! By the way, did you know that Islam sets a maximum limit of 4 wives for a man? I don’t get it… If you can have 4 wives, why not 10? Maybe it’s getting too expensive… ?!

Back to the sheikhs…! There is a huge personality cult for both fathers and sons. The fathers are considered to be the fathers of the nation, and the sons are the current rulers. You can see almost anywhere their pictures… or in other emirates, also pictures of their own less-famous sheikhs. I had a hard time recognizing who is who. They are all wearing the traditional white headscarf (called Guthra). They all have black (died) beards. And pictures of different ages are used, with a preference for pictures of their young years…! I made a little selection of my sheikh pictures collection… a mix of the Sheikhs of Abu Dhabi and Dubai (father and son!), and Sharjah all over the country.

 

The official currency is the UAE dirham with following nice colorful notes:

Until the 1960s, Dubai was a little harbor city famous for its pearl fishing and trading! End of the 1960s, oil was discovered and it changed the region forever. With the oil money, the city developed at a crazy pace, created good infrastructures and free trade zones to attract companies from the entire world. Now, its economy is even not depending on oil anymore! It’s quite impressive how a city managed to develop so quickly and in particular to develop a huge touristic industry from scratch. Abu Dhabi followed a similar development but is still very dependent on oil revenues. It seems that the need to develop tourism only appeared recently and new projects to transform Abu Dhabi in a Dubai Number 2 are ongoing.

I hope it wasn’t too boring but I liked to share this and it’s a bit shorter than what you could have read on Wikipedia!

So what did I do in the Emirates? I hadn’t planned anything before arriving there and improvised all the way, but I feel like what I did was quite good. At the end of my 9 day-stay, I had the impression that I got a good overview of the country. Here is my final travel route through the UAE – the days are indicated in blue.

I spent 4 days/5 nights in Dubai, a day in the Emirate of Sharjah, 2 days in the desert oasis Al Ain in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi (the biggest Emirate), and 2 days in Abu Dhabi City. And I will describe my adventures in the next blog posts!

Day 7 – 19th February 2019

Here we go for the second country of my trip: the United Arab Emirates.

I must admit that the UAE is not a country I have ever even remotely dreamt about. To be honest, I had quite a few prejudices about it and I was very curious to see if they are justified or not. Dubai has always been for me a synonymous of pretentious buildings, man-made fake tourism and very strict societal laws (little preview of my final opinion after leaving: my prejudices got confirmed!). I know some people that love going to Dubai for beach holiday and are super enthusiastic about all the activities there, so I had to check it out! And honestly, there is no country in the world that I am not interested in, so it was worth giving the UAE a try! But just a little try… I didn’t want to risk too much and only planned 10 nights / 9 days for this part of the trip, which should be enough to get a good first impression. And most of the people going to Dubai stay there for about 5 days only anyway!

On my way to the airport bus stop in Budapest, I bumped into this travel agency advertising…

This is the typical Dubai dream travel catalogues are selling! I realized I would finally get to see the highest skyscraper in the world, the Burj Khalifa! That’s something I was quite excited about since I’ve always loved skyscrapers and especially the ones with a sky deck!

Arriving at the airport, I had for the first time to deal with what would become a game in all the countries I visit: leaving the country without any cash from the local currency. I just don’t want to carry useless money with me through the world! I did quite a good job balancing the payments with credit card and cash on the last day so I only had a few coins left. The only problem was that I wanted a long coffee americano style at the airport but I was missing a few Hungarian forints to afford it! I was quite cheeky and tried what I would have never dared doing in Germany! I told the girl about my “issue”… She asked me how much money I had, typed “espresso” on her cash machine which was the only thing I could afford and made me the americano I wanted! I gave her the few left forints as a tip (it must have been a few cents…haha!) How nice and uncomplicated! This is something I miss in Germany, where everything has always to be 100% correct! Even if I only missed 1 cent, I would have never gotten my coffee!

My flight from Budapest to Dubai was announced with a delay of 1,5 hours, and I realized the desk of the hostel I booked for my first 2 nights in Dubai was closing at 23h, so that I wouldn’t be there on time for check-in! This stressed me out since I didn’t want to arrive in front of a closed door in the middle of the night and be forced to take an emergency 300 euros hotel! So I called the hostel from the airport and realized the number was an Austrian mobile… quite weird! But I would figure out why later… They told me they would wait for me and not to worry, which was nice!

The flight was ok but very uncomfortable! I flew with the Hungarian lowcost Wizzair whose flight Budapest-Dubai is the longest flight. The service is reduced to zero and so is the seat spacing. It is ok for a 2 hour Ryanair flight but it was quite annoying for the 5 hours to Dubai.

I am a bit nerdy sometimes, and I love getting a window seat to look out and see the landscape. I like trying to figure out where we are and verify my ideas by using the GPS of my phone and Google Maps (yeah, it’s working offline in a plane… just takes a while to find the position and you need to hold the phone close to the window). I was quite proud to identify Bukarest from the sky thanks to its crazy huge Parliament building and super wide communist avenue. (I really liked Bukarest by the way. It was fun exploring it with my Spanish monkey Carlicos!). Flying over the snowy mountains of the North of Turkey with the sun setting was beautiful and made me forget I could barely move my legs!

I arrived at the newest of both Dubai airports, called DWC (Dubai-World Central / Al Maktoum International), which is quite out of the city. It is barely used and as our plane landed, we were alone in the entire airport which felt like a haunted place. I never went so quickly through emigration, waiting maybe 5 minutes!

Since this airport is still under development (it is planned to become one of the biggest in the world!), there is no useful public transport going there yet; only a bus which wasn’t running that late. So I had to take a taxi which I hate doing abroad at airports. I was very positively surprised by the taxis in the UAE though, which are very regulated. They all have high-tech taximeters and you don’t feel ripped off at all! I was lucky to stay in one of the city neighborhoods closest to the new airport, Dubai Marina, but it was still about 40 km away and took 30 minutes. I was positively surprised to pay only about 22 euros though. The Dubai taxis are really quite affordable.

I finally checked in in my hostel “Marina Dream” in a condo building of the Marina called “Dream Tower”, a completely normal apartment building with no hostel sign. I just got in an email the number of the apartment I had to go to (after getting controlled by a building security guy, which you find in all the buildings in Dubai!) That’s where I met the hostel tenant, a Russian/South Korean woman as she said, whose husband lives in Austria, hence the Austrian phone number! She lives in this apartment and rents one of the rooms as a girl dorm room! She brought me to another 2-room apartment on a quite high floor transformed into a 2-dorm room male hostel! It was quite nice because it really felt like sharing an apartment with friends, with a kitchen and a bath! And it was very affordable for Dubai, especially in this fancy Marina neighborhood! After a good night of sleep, my UAE adventure could begin!