Black Mirror - Desert City

October 14th 2016

As usual, we start the day with a late breakfast, from where we continue to the Dubai Museum, located in an old desert fortress, where we learn more about Dubai's history and the Bedouin culture. Time and time again it's fascinating to see how young the modern Dubai is — the first airport was only built in 1965 and the population only started to grow significantly with the oil boom around 1970.
On our way to Dubai creek, where the oldest core of the city is to be found, we are greeted quite profusely greeted by our many friends who somehow all seem to be trying to sell us something ("Hello my friend!" / "Ah, my special friend! Where are you from?"). At times, scarves are thrown around our necks in an attempt to lasso us into buying textiles.
The street vendors did not hesitate to grab us by our wrists trying to sell us something until we managed to shake free. Pretending to be Italian did not turn out to be a good defence strategy. We're probably not authentic enough yet.
A pleasant breeze blows at the edge of the creek, and it's quite pretty, too — it's just that there isn't all that much to do here. We end up sitting on a bench for a while watching our surroundings — including newly-wed Chinese couple doing a photo shoot.
Because it's still early and we have some more time to kill, we also visit the Jumeirah mosque today — where we learn that said mosque is only accessible with a guided tour (10 am). Oh well.
Once the evening falls, we head on to the Emirates Towers, our last sight to see for today. On our way, we have a great view of the skyline at sunset.
During our 45 minute walk, we handled the heat surprisingly well. It seems we really are slowly adapting — good news for Singapore.
Once we arrive at the Emirates Towers, I feel like I'm transported into an episode of Black Mirror (for those who haven't watched it yet: Consider doing so. In this case especially episode 1.3 — The Entire History of You): There's a sort of future-store here, offering all kinds of modifications for the human body — just visions for the year 2035, but still both fascinating and terrifying. Among other things, we find contact lenses that read emotions from faces — with its own social network, of course. A disclaimer in the ad spot notes that we give up all rights to the captured footage and emotions. Next up, the "UAE HyperMind" matches us to our ideal future jobs: Robot psychologist and drone shepherd. Career plan: Check.
After dinner in an Asian restaurant (Jan orders a dish with zero spicy-peppers on the menu — moments later, his nose is running and the mouth is cooled with ice cubes — not sure how he's going to survive Asia) we meet Pepper in a branch of the Emirates Bank — a cute little robot that tells us something about banking and stuff and (much more interesting) also gives out fist bumps, high fives and hugs while chatting with us.
It was really spicy, ok?!? Has to be a misprint on the menu...
The same bank has a friendly employee showing us how to make Pepper dance as well as an augmented reality demo about property development or something — so this is what the future feels like.
Finally, we start the project High Rise and try to find out how far up we can get before someone stops us. Results: Just acting like a hotel guest gets you to the 39. floor — in a spectacular glass elevator with a great view.
One floor up is a women's floor, followed by office- and business floors, in which we'd probably stick out with our shorts and backpacks.

Neighbourhood Tour

Because you haven't seen much of our neighbourhood so far, here's at least a few impressions from our way to the supermarket: