I usually wrap up my trips with some general thoughts and comments, which I hope aren’t (and won’t be) too boring for people.  A number of things have run though my head over the course of my trip and these past couple days back home.  I know I’ll never be able to get them all down, but I thought there were a few comments that kind of put a bow on all this.

This trip was kind of the end of an era and the start of a new one.  To my recollection, this is really the first time I’ve ever traveled with someone, at least by air.  With as much travel as I’ve done — especially these long flights over the past couple years — I’ve gotten really good at entertaining myself and otherwise passing the time.  My wife… not so much.  So this was really a different flying experience for me, and given that I’ll be traveling more as half of a couple going forward, I expect it is something I will need to get used to.  (Hopefully, at some point, my wife will become jaded by the window seat and I can get that back.  I really prefer the window — not so much for the looking, but because there’s a little additional shoulder space there for me.)

This was also a notable trip because it occurred to me that I’ll probably never again be the sort of tourist I have been in the past.  In this regard, I suppose the era actually changed during that week my wife and I spent in Kiev, but it wasn’t until this trip that I actually knew it.  In the past, I’ve never really liked hitting the tourist spots.  Some of them are nice, sure, but for me, the real fun in travel is understanding the people and lives of the places you visit.  I’m not adverse to going a bit off the beaten path and getting a better glimpse of how people live.  When I visited London years ago (my first “real” tourist trip), I remember how enjoyable it was riding the Tube and doing a load of laundry, just like a typical Londoner might have done.  Visiting the British Museum was great, but staring at mummies doesn’t tell you what it’s like to live there.

Much of the Dubai trip was hitting the traditional tourist spots and/or doing the traditional tourist things.  Had I been on my own — assuming that I would have even gone — I almost certainly wouldn’t have visited the beaches (well, maybe once, just to look out on the Persian Gulf), and I probably wouldn’t have wandered around the souks or souvenir shops as much.  I wouldn’t have shunned all the touristy things — the safari was fun, and it probably would have been cool to look out from the 125th floor of the Burj Khalifa — but I definitely would have tried to get a better sense of what life for people living there was like.

I had read beforehand that despite the significant wealth of the people of Dubai, there was also a wide disparity of wealth between richest and poorest.  I would have liked to understand that more.  I definitely didn’t see any homeless people and didn’t encounter any people begging for help, but maybe I wasn’t in the right parts of town.  Wealth was definitely evident (some of those private homes looked pretty nice), and from the trips on the Metro I did see what I would consider to be the more middle-class of Dubai.  Whizzing past a housing development with row after row of the exact same townhouses proved that not everyone could have a McMansion on The Palm, but was this as low as it went?  Is there a lower class to Dubai society?  I know that there is a lot of immigration to Dubai from Southeast Asia; where do these newly arrived citizens live and how do they get by?  I would have liked to find that out, but I probably won’t now, and similar questions for future destinations will probably also go unanswered.

The two big questions for most any trip are, did I have fun and would I go back?  For the “did I have fun” question, I refer you to my previous posts.  As I said at the outset, Dubai had never been on my list of places to see, and even if it had, I likely wouldn’t have picked a hot time of year.  Of course, it was great spending time with my wife, so that mitigated some of the non-fun of the trip, but I honestly don’t know if that would be enough to push it to the positive side of the scale.  Sunburn?  Not fun.  Silly jokes with the wife?  Fun.  So it’s hard to say.

The question of “would I go back” is actually a bit easier to answer.  It might surprise you, but I would consider a return trip.  There would be conditions and considerations for such a thing, but from some of the discussions I had with the natives, there are some things I wouldn’t mind seeing.  The winter months are supposed to be quite pleasant, temperature-wise — almost like summer in Portland, perhaps even a little cooler.  And apparently Spring arrives around February; I would like to see Dubai with greenery and blooming flowers everywhere.  I probably wouldn’t go for a full week; there’s only so much to do in Dubai if you’re not big on shopping or hanging out at the beach.  But it seems like it would be nice to see at least one.  So I might consider a return visit, for contrast and comparison.

Plus I never did ride the camel on our safari.  Gotta go do that…