Happy 2011!

New year fireworks on the Burj Khalifa, Dubai

Wish you all a great year ahead!

The spectacle must go on

Here's a few photos and a video of yesterday's opening of the world's tallest building -

Burj Dubai ...

As expected Dubai put up a grand spectacle which has made it to front pages of newspapers the world over... It felt like the whole of Dubai was at Business bay last night...



The renaming of the tower to Burj Khalifa was quiet a surprise! But I guess after all that money that Abu Dhabi gave away it could have been expected.....


This morning I asked an Emirati girl from Dubai at the bank what she thought about it - though a bit surprised she thought it was good move .. solidarity of the country and all that ..!!!!

As for all my Indian friends in Dubai - they all emphatically sympathize with Sheikh Mohammed!

Happy 2010!!!

Happy new year everyone!!!!!

Spend most of last night stuck in a horrible traffic jam .. but thankfully before that I managed to watch the new year fire works display outside the Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai..

Here's a couple of photos

and here's a video of the same

Happy 2010!

Is Dubai finally a metropolis?

Like most things in this crazy City the metro was planned conceived and built over night! Three and a half years to built one of the most advanced public transport systems in the world.

Over the last few days I've taken a few rides on it and as expected it's a great way to see the city; from a completely different angle. This is a much better way to travel in a city - as opposed to catching an underground tube or being stuck in traffic in a bus - so if the city has the resources in should take the aerial route.


Here's a series of photos taking you from the Airport to the Mall of the Emirates shopping mall on Sheikh Zayed road:
As the global recession wreaks havoc with Sheikh Mohammed's grand dreams of turning Dubai into a global powerhouse - in an attempt to show the city's economic stability the RTA (Road and transport authority of Dubai) was forced to stick to an insane date that Sheikh Mo had set for the launch of the metro last year when Dubai was having a real-estate boom!

Although only a small no. of the proposed stations are now functional the Dubai Metro was offically inaugurated at 9:09:09 PM on September 9, 2009.
Most of the station that are operational follow the same layout and was designed by Aedas (which is a global architectural firm with presence in some 25 global cities)
And to end this entry here's a photo from inside the driver-less, fully automated train

Dubai's edifice complex

Rising in the distance in the above photo beyond the historic centre of Dubai (along the creek) is the infamous Sheikh Zayed Road.
In recent years this road has come to symbolize Dubai and it's insane growth more than any other part of the city.
The genesis of what is today the site for some of the tallest structures in the world including the under construction
- Burj Dubai - above photo - (already the tallest building in the world)
was laid way back in 1978 when Sheikh Rashid decided to place the Dubai world trade centre - above photo - on what was at the time a small but important road through the desert connecting Dubai to Abu Dhabi.
This bold building - WTC Dubai - (the tallest in the Middle East at the time of it's opening) preempted Dubai's - and particularly this street's - obsession of conquering the sky.

Here's a few photos of this crazy road:
And here's some focusing on some of the insanely high buildings on this stretch: And a couple more of the tallest of them all :

Critics of Dubai use the Potemkin nature of Sheikh Zayed road as a metaphor of the bizarre development of the city itself.
The above photo shows Sheikh Zayed road as seen from the open beach at Jumeirah.