BY MILT THOMAS

EDITOR’S NOTE: InsideVero Contributing Editor, Milt Thomas, is traveling in the Middle East, and will be corresponding with our readers as he journeys to Egypt to the United Arib Emirates

DUBAI – You may have seen TV programs about Dubai, read about it or seen Tom Cruise jump from the Burj Khadifa skyscraper in Mission Impossible Ad Nauseum,  but seeing the city in person is like the first time you ever visited DisneyWorld in Orlando. Incredible.

Even more incredible, is the fact that 50 years ago Dubai was a tiny desert Bedouin settlement along the Dubai Creek. Today, it is a city of two million, largest in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), itself a sovereign state only since 1971.

It is a city built on a foundation of oil and governed by the Al Maktoum family.  Oil wealth has profoundly changed the way of life for these people, who have historically lived as nomads in the desert, where life itself was a rare and precious commodity.  Life today for the people of this emirate is beyond luxury and well within the realm of excess.

First of all, everything in Dubai is new.  The roads are superhighways, the buildings all skyscrapers. A five-year old car would be considered old and of course all cars are imported. Mercedes, Lexus and Volvo are common, Rolls Royce and Ferrari not uncommon. In fact, a major attraction in Dubai is a Ferrari racetrack where real Ferraris race on a Daytona-size course, all part of an amusement park.

And everything in Dubai runs efficiently, especially the airport. From the moment you deplane until you have gone through customs and collected your baggage takes no more than 20-30 minutes. No long lines going nowhere. If one immigration line reaches a certain point, another line opens, and so on. If you come to Dubai looking for a job, a visa is easy to obtain, but you have 30 days to find a job. If you don’t, you must leave.

Traffic at rush hour is the same as any big city, but everyone waits patiently. Few people exceed the speed limit. All taxis have alarms set for the speed limit. Exceed it and they risk fines or even deportation.

Yes, the laws here are strict, but they are respected and obeyed. From an economic standpoint, free enterprise is encouraged and supported. Everyone has a job.

There are malls in Dubai that exist in another paradigm from malls in America. The Dubai Mall has 1200 stores, a Sea World-like aquarium, two food courts (one with 21 separate franchises featuring just about every nationality of food as well as the usual McDonald’s, KFC and Baskin-Robbins and a Rockefeller Plaza-size ice skating rink with its own Zamboni regularly polishing the surface. The atrium entrance featured a display of Aston-Martins like they were Hyundais at our local mall. I can’t imagine what the rents are in this mall. There is a lake behind the mall where they put on a spectacular water, fire and light show every hour or so, complete with dancers and multi-screen video, all for free.

The City Centre Mall includes an entire amusement park with carousel and ferris wheel, as well as an eight lane bowling alley.  Both of these malls also include a Carrefour’s supermarket. Imagine Vero’s Walmart inside the Indian River Mall. Then imagine the Indian River Mall with four floors and triple the square footage. You have probably seen The Mall of the Emirates, biggest of them all, with an Aspen-size ski slope as the main attraction. Don’t ask what the carbon footprint is for these power-sucking, grandiose monuments to excess.

None of this comes cheap, of course.  Prices are high for just about everything. Our first night in Dubai, Hamdy and I went to a Lebanese restaurant, Reem al Bawadi. We had a fruit juice cocktail (alcohol is only available in hotels here), hummus with pita bread, tomato rocca salad, a mixed grill dinner, tea and sheesha, the customary water pipe. The food was excellent, service superb and the bill was $100. A bit high for a meal that would cost about one-third that amount in Egypt. I made up for it the next night at Ravi’s Palace Restaurant, a popular spot for traditional Pakistani food. There I had chicken Jalfraize, a curry stew and Ravi’s special rice, basmati rice mixed with shredded chicken, beef,  lamb and vegetables, a meal in itself had I known.  Hamdy had grilled lamb chops and the entire meal cost $30. By the way, since Anthony Bourdain is my gastronomical idol, I always try to visit at least one restaurant seen on his show. Ravi’s was one of them. Oh, and since we now knew the location of our Radisson Blu hotel, we made it back for a lot less than the night before.

There is a downside to all the splendor and excitement of Dubai. Members of the Maktoum tribe run  this emirate and are  easily identified wearing their trademark white…….. and checkered ……… headgear. They also drive the most expensive cars. All citizens benefit from the largesse provided by oil sales, as long as they are Maktoums.

Most workers, whether in the hospitality industry, construction and general labor, come from Pakistan, India, the Philippines and other Arab countries. These workers come to earn money they can send back home to their families while keeping enough to live on while they are in Dubai. Many live in what we would consider intolerable conditions because the cost of living is so high. For instance, up to six people share a one room apartment with bathroom, kitchen and bunk beds to sleep in. The rent is 5,000 dirhams a month, which is about $1500. They are in Dubai to work and they all work hard. The penalty for incompetence or laziness is deportation. We met several workers from Syria who could not return home if they wanted to because of the civil war and they worry about the lives of their families back in Syria. More importantly, they must not dally around on the job or risk being deported to their war torn homeland with no prospect for income.

I also spent a day in Abu Dhabi, which is the capitol of the UAE. It is a somewhat smaller version of Dubai but is catching up. The Grand Mosque is one of the five largest in the world, entirely a brilliant white like carved from alabaster, with numerous domes, each with a finial-like top of gold – that’s right, real gold. The prayer hall can hold 40,000 people or the entire Indian River Mall. The highlight is a massive, colorful chandelier that weighs as much as a semi.  It is beyond riches and seemingly an anathema to the humble Prophet Mohammed whose primary mission in life was to help the poor. Many of the emirates’ Arab brothers in the Middle East live in poverty and just the over-abundance of wealth could go a long way to helping them to a better future. It is also ironic that the UAE has created this wealth by simply living on the land where oil was discovered.

My overall impression of Dubai, Abu Dhabi and the UAE itself is that they have maximized the valuable resource that lay under their feet for centuries before it was discovered by foreigners.   To their credit, they have done their best to modernize their society and build a legacy for its people after the oil is gone. But it is success on steroids, not unlike here in the states when someone from very modest means suddenly wins a $100 million lottery. Often those people end up broke. Only time will tell if that is the fate of the oil sheiks.