Dubai

                                Let’s say that, hypothetically speaking, a man walks up to you one day and says, “If you give me your first born child I will give you the keys to my apartment in Dubai with my credit card. No questions asked.” You take the deal. There is NO other option. Sell your kidneys, take up some kind of black market trade operation, become a lady of the night. Do something, anything to go to Dubai.

                On a more serious note, the city of Dubai is really something spectacular. From the port, it looks just like any metropolitan city, with its intricate infrastructure, skyline, the smell of ludicrous amounts of liquid assets in the air. However, take a ten minute taxi from the port of Dubai to the city center, where the mall is, and your breath is literally stolen from you and every one of your senses is over taken by the most amazing city on the planet. Now, of course the number of places I’ve been in my lifetime is slightly limited, making my point of view somewhat…. Unfair. But the bright lights are the first things to hit you from the taxi. I mean REALLY bright lights. Christmas lights surround every palm tree, but in intricate patterns that don’t make them look cheesy. It’s a certain elegance I didn’t know existed with Christmas lights. The signs of the stores must be ten times brighter than the ones in Times Square. Super vibrant colors adorn the billboards everywhere you look. There are families walking hand in hand late at night looking for places to shop and eat and do whatever the super rich do. I assume they eat lobster and wash their hands with silkwater and dry them with one hundred dollar bills. Also I made up silk water. But if that were a real thing, they’d have it in Dubai.

                The center of the city is encapsulated by the mall, the burj khalifa ( I really have no idea how to spell it or if that’s even the right name but I don’t have time to google it because I’m cheap, so do it yourselves) which is the tallest building in the world and other little restaurants and shops and large hotel chains. In the very middle of the center of the city is a massive , crystal clear pool with fountains everywhere. They lay dormant until about 9:30 pm or so, but when they come to life, it’s something to be seen. I have a video of what I’m about to describe because there really are no words to describe it. Every half an hour music starts to play and the fountains come to life, shooting streams of water at various heights and angles, dancing along with the music and being illuminated by God’s light. Okay, maybe it’s just by some lights in the fountains, but I’m going to say God himself is coordinating the light show. It’s really amazing. They played every kind of music from Michael Jackson to Russian hip hop to some Andrea Bocceli. And at a certain angle you can see the fountain show with the burj khalifa in the background, standing towering over you. If you want to have a reality check and feel small, don’t stand next to a mountain. Stand next to this building. Saying is tall is like saying Dubai is nice. It’s such a gross understatement its almost insulting.

                Probably my favorite part about the city is that it’s so clean I would literally (okay, maybe only figuratively) eat off of the ground. After being in the city for 6 hours, I had not seen a single piece of trash on the floor. Not a single one. Everyone walked around and politely smiled in an almost Stepford-wife fashion. I had never felt so safe in a city before in my entire life.

It’s definitely a once in a lifetime opportunity that I cannot believe I had the chance to experience. Now that we’re on the subject, is anyone interested in purchasing one of my kidneys?