Fake rolex and spice and everything nice

I spent all day everyday in the office so I didn't get to see a whole lot of Dubai though I did escape one evening to go to the old part of the city and wander around the souks. Traders have been in this area for hundreds of years and while the souks are labelled 'tourist attraction', the shifting of goods is still their business which means you end up with a very eclectic range of goods for sale. The different traders are generally grouped together so you can play them off with each other - textile traders are all in the 'silk souk', there's the gold souk, the spice souk, the perfume souk, the 'hey mister you want a fake rolex' souk and the chinese made plastic remote control toy souk. It's all there.

One of the things I love about traveling is finding quirky little gems that you would never come across at home, here is a picture of #246 on the list of things you will never see for sale in Australia:



No your eyes are not deceived, that is actually a giant sack of dehydrated prawns. It is sitting at the front of a spice traders shop, outside where the temperature is hitting mid to high 30's every day. Though in his defence, this is the cooler less humid part of the year, I assume the prawns are taken inside or not for sale in August when the temperature is hitting the high 50 degrees with 90% humidity. Hmmm...

I've had this thing nagging at me the whole time I've been in Dubai, it's a question
nobody has been able to answer, even the people actively involved in creating this crazy place. It's this: By 2015, there will be enough residential accommodation in Dubai for over 3 million people plus the equivalent commercial space. Dubai's population is currently 1.4 million, 250,000 of which are imported Indian and Pakistani labourers who are certainly not going to be buying new houses and settling here when it's all finished. Where are all the people coming from? Maybe they're all waiting for their house on a palm frond to be finished before the sell up and hop a plane to their island paradise. The rumours are anything from the Russian mafia diversifying to rich folks in third world countries creating a fail-safe if/when their own countries become a little too politically awkward. Whatever it is, the fact that they have designs on tripling the population in the next 7 years is probably the least weird thing about Dubai.