A Week in Dubai: The Journal of Someone Who Expected to Hate It
I'll be upfront: I arrived in Dubai with prejudice. Everything I'd read suggested it was a city built on excess — air-conditioned everything, artificial islands, the world's largest everything. A place with all the depth of a hotel lobby.
I was wrong about some things. Right about others. But mostly wrong.
Day 1: The Arrival Adjustment
Landed at DXB at 11PM. Even at night, the temperature outside the terminal was 28°C in November. The airport is enormous but efficient — immigration took 15 minutes, visa stamp was free for US citizens (30-day stay, no advance application needed).
Uber to my hotel in Bur Dubai: AED 65 ($18). The driver was from Pakistan and had been in Dubai for 9 years. He told me his favorite restaurant was a Pakistani place in Deira that charges AED 20 for biryani. "Dubai is cheap if you know where to look," he said. I wrote down the restaurant name.
First impression from the car window: the city is spread out. Really spread out. There's no single center — it's a collection of neighborhoods connected by highway. The Marina skyline glows in one direction. Old Deira glows in another. They look like different cities.
Hotel room: AED 280/night for a solid 4-star in Bur Dubai. Clean, huge, with a view of the Creek. I fell asleep wondering if the city was going to prove me right or wrong.
Day 1 spend: AED 350 (Uber $65, hotel n/a)
Day 2: Old Dubai and the AED 1 Experience
Woke up and walked to the Al Fahidi Historical Neighbourhood — 15 minutes from my hotel. And this is where my cynicism started cracking.
Al Fahidi is a restored 19th-century neighborhood with wind-tower houses, narrow shaded lanes, and small galleries. The wind towers — passive air conditioning that funnels breezes into the rooms below — are beautiful engineering. The Dubai Museum in Al Fahidi Fort costs AED 3 and tells the story of a fishing village that became... this.
But the real moment: the abra ride. AED 1 to cross the Dubai Creek on a wooden water taxi, packed next to commuters and traders. The Creek smelled of salt and diesel. Wooden dhows from Iran were docked along the bank. This is the Dubai that existed before the Burj Khalifa. And it's still here.
From the Deira side, I walked through the Spice Souk. The air was thick with saffron and cardamom and dried lime. A vendor explained the different saffron grades and sold me a packet from Iran for AED 40 that would cost $80 at home.
Lunch at an unnamed place on Al Rigga Road: chicken biryani for AED 18. Better than any biryani I've had in London. The restaurant had plastic chairs and a TV playing cricket. Nobody spoke English and I pointed at a picture on the wall to order. It was perfect.
I went up the Burj Khalifa. AED 169 for the Level 124/125 deck. I'd booked a sunset slot, which was the right call — watching the sun drop behind the horizon while the city below turns from gold to electric blue is a genuine moment.
But — and I'll admit this is contrarian — the Dubai Fountain at ground level after dark was better. Every 30 minutes from 6PM, 900+ water jets dance to music against the illuminated Burj backdrop. It's free. I watched three shows in a row. An Arabic ballad, something classical, and a pop song I didn't recognize. The ballad was the best — the water moved like it was breathing.
I did not go into Dubai Mall. The exterior is vast enough to generate a sense of exhaustion before you even enter. I'm told the aquarium inside is good. The mall has 1,200+ shops, which is approximately 1,180 shops more than I need.
Dinner at a Sri Lankan place in Karama: AED 22 for a rice and curry plate. The neighborhood around me was alive — shops open, families walking, the call to prayer from a nearby mosque mixing with Hindi pop from a barber shop. This was the Dubai I didn't expect.
Day 3 spend: AED 220 (Burj $169, food $51)
Day 4: The Desert
Booked a desert safari with Arabian Adventures. AED 300 for the evening package — hotel pickup at 3:30PM, return by 9PM.
The dune bashing was genuinely thrilling. A Land Cruiser sliding sideways down 50-degree dunes while everyone inside oscillated between terror and laughter. The driver had been doing this for 15 years and appeared terminally bored, which was simultaneously reassuring and alarming.
The camp afterward: camel riding (brief, uncomfortable, memorable), sandboarding (harder than it looks), henna painting, and a BBQ dinner under the stars. The belly dance show was tourist-grade. But the desert itself — the silence, the amber dunes extending to the horizon, the stars coming out over an empty landscape 30 minutes from a city of 3.6 million — was genuinely powerful.
I sat on a dune after dinner, away from the camp lights, and listened to nothing. In a city where everything is engineered and air-conditioned, the raw emptiness of the desert felt like the most honest thing I'd experienced.
Day 4 spend: AED 300 (safari only)
Day 5: JBR and the Beach
Dubai has excellent public beaches. This surprised me — I'd expected everything beachside to be behind a paywall.
JBR Beach is 1.7 km of free public beach with the Marina skyline behind it. I rented a sun lounger (AED 50) and spent the morning alternating between the warm Gulf water and a book. The water temperature was 27°C in November. Coming from a November in the northeastern US, this felt illegal.
Walked the JBR boardwalk for lunch — settled on a shawarma wrap from a street cart (AED 12) and ate it on a bench watching Ain Dubai, the world's largest observation wheel, turn slowly against the sky.
Evening at a rooftop bar in the Marina — AED 75 for a cocktail, which stung. But the view of the Marina towers lit up against the water was the kind of Dubai I'd come expecting. Sometimes the theme park version is worth the ticket price.
Spent the morning at the Gold Souk because I felt I should. 300+ gold shops, each more gleaming than the last. The vendors are persistent but not aggressive. I learned that gold prices are based on the daily rate plus a "making charge" that's negotiable. I didn't buy gold. I bought a small brass lamp at a hardware shop on the edge of the souk for AED 30.
Afternoon: revisited the Creek on the metro (Gold Class, front cabin, AED 8 — genuinely one of the best public transport experiences in any city). The views from the front window, weaving between skyscrapers, were worth double the fare.
Evening: dinner at Al Ustad Special Kebab in Bur Dubai, operating since 1978. Iranian kebabs on fluffy rice with saffron butter. AED 45. The walls are covered in photos of celebrities who've eaten there. The food justified every photo.
Day 6 spend: AED 115 (souk $30, metro $16, food $69)
Day 7: Departure and the Grudging Admission
Final morning. I walked along the Creek at 7AM. The light was soft gold. Abras were already running. A man was fishing off the bank. The Deira waterfront had the quiet energy of a place that's been doing the same thing for a century.
Here's what I'll say about Dubai: it's not the soulless shopping mall I expected. It's a city of layers. The Burj Khalifa layer, the mall layer, the desert safari layer — those are real, and they're impressive in a look-what-humans-can-build way. But underneath, there's a trading city that's been here for generations. The Creek, the souks, the neighborhoods in Deira and Bur Dubai where people live normal lives for AED 20 dinners.
Dubai isn't deep in the way that Istanbul or Cairo are deep. It doesn't have millennia of continuous culture to lean on. But it has something else: the audacity to build a global city in 50 years and the old trading bones underneath that keep it grounded.
I came to dismiss it. I left respecting it. That's the best revision a city can earn.
Total 7-day spend (excluding accommodation): AED 1,265 (~$345 USD)
Would I go back? In winter. Not summer. 45°C is where my respect for human engineering reaches its limit.
