Like any other place on earth without exception, Dubai has its positive and its negative sides. So let us start with the negative to get this out of the way before focusing on the positive of this truly unique destination.

In fact Dubai is unique in so many ways, most of which are due to the fact that it is a totally artificial place, entirely created by man, in the middle of a scotching desert, to serve the sole purposes of greed, ego and visions of unparalleled grandeur.

It lies in one of the most inhospitable places on earth, where temperatures are often around 40C and can even soar to a dangerous 50C, ensuring that you are constantly confined indoors in an unhealthy air conditioned environment and unable to even get any fresh air. In any case you are immediately told that even in the middle of winter when it can be slightly cooler, Dubai was not in the least way conceived with the pedestrian in mind, but entirely for motorized vehicles. So in some form of warped consolation, you are informed that you cannot walk anywhere outside anyway.

And if you were thinking of heading straight to the beach to cool off in the ocean, you have a very big surprise coming, as swimming there is akin to having a really hot bath and about as refreshing as pouring boiling water all over your already sweltering body.

So you spend your entire time being shuttled by air conditioned taxi from one air conditioned building to another, virtually always in the form of a hotel or a shopping mall, which are the only forms of buildings there. For there is virtually no history or heritage or historical monuments in this once insignificant and tiny fishing village, before oil was discovered mainly in neighbouring emirate Abu Dhabi.

So Dubai has gone to truly extraordinary lengths to attract tourists through its man made constructions which include the highest building on earth and countless skyscrapers plonked at random around the desert, running parallel to the coast. In a mad megalomaniac lego-like game, they have also built islands in the shape of palms, which nobody can even notice, unless you live in outer space.

But what can you do there, you may be asking, especially if you cannot even go outside or engage in any seemingly basic activity such as walking, swimming and sun bathing, which are all out of the question for much of the year?

Well you can definitely go shopping as Dubai has built some extraordinary malls where you can find all the shops and brands and items you can find virtually anywhere else on earth, even including Malta nowadays. But wait, before you ask what is then the purpose of shopping here, if it is all exactly the same, let me assure you that it certainly isn’t. Only the brands and the items for sale are exactly the same, the prices on the other hand certainly aren’t. These are about double what they are anywhere else, so there! Also in Dubai they have built truly massive malls to ensure that you can rid yourself of great amounts of your hard earned cash in the shortest time and with the least bit of effort possible. In a last stroke of genius, their national airline Emirates, also allows for an extra 10 kilos of luggage per person when compared to most other airlines, ensuring that you can shop till your credit rating will drop, without the least bit of concern.

Ok let’s recap. So you can’t swim, you can’t walk, you can’t visit anything of interest simply because there isn’t any, and you can’t shop unless you enjoy paying a lot of money to get there, then paying a lot more to buy stuff you can buy for much less back home, before again paying a lot of money to get back home. But hey don’t forget the world class wining and dining. True that these are again all based within hotels and malls as virtually nothing else exists there. And true that they are all prefabricated concept style copies of different aspects of world cuisine as authenticity there does not exist beyond the rear end of a camel. But the choice is virtually endless. You could eat yourself silly through every hotel and mall if you really wanted to and especially if you don’t mind spending amounts of money which anywhere else would buy you not a meal but the entire restaurant itself. Suffice to say that a bog standard bottle of wine which in Malta would cost say €5 in a supermarket and perhaps a maximum of €15.00 in an expensive restaurant, would cost you at least €100 in Dubai! And a standard spirit such as a whisky costs roughly €15, as does a small glass of wine.

So extravagance in Dubai may be deemed as that first moment when you simply order just two drinks and the barman casually inquiries whether you want singles or doubles and you even more casually say oh yes let’s go for doubles, only to be given a bill of €60. And once the realization has traveled all the way down your body and reaches your anus, it independently decides to drop its little mouth open in utter amazement letting out a bit of fecal matter straight into your trousers.

But the good news is that while drinks cost around 6 to 7 times what they do in Malta, food is only about double or treble the price. So if you are mad enough to have a proper full three course meal with a very average bottle of wine this will set you back around €400 for two. Otherwise you might want to skip the wine and the starters and the desserts to somehow desperately try to keep the bill in the realm of the imaginable, while eating much less than you normally do back home. But don’t worry, your holiday will soon come to an end, so you can start eating and drinking normally and no longer live like a pauper, as soon as you get back home.

For both Russia and Japan, which are renowned for their exorbitant pricing, pale in comparison with the cost of simply anything you might buy in Dubai. We had countless jaw-dropping, backside dripping, cashpoint experiences, culminating on our last night when we were in one of their faux souks, for yes, sadly even their markets are reconstructed modern copied versions of the real thing. We stopped to buy some loose nuts and admittedly asked the vendor to fill up two fairly large bags. When the bill came so did my anus in a pseudo orgasmic way. The price was an astounding €75 which can only be described as nuts! Yes, we had just purchased two largish bags of mixed nuts for €75.

The staggering stupidity of this deed must have reverberated all the way to Malta, as in spite of virtually wearing out my credit card all over the world for an entire month, entirely without incident, that night I receive an SMS from BOV card centre informing me that my credit card had been blocked ‘following a dubious purchase’. So I call them back on their 24 hour emergency number and the girl there tells me that they saw a purchase of €75 for nuts, which they suspected was illegitimate, so they blocked my card. It was one of those pretty hard to explain moments for me. How do you intelligently explain that you agreed to purchase €75 worth of nuts without sounding nuts yourself? So at least I had the imagination of telling her that there were in fact many other items not just nuts and that I did approve such an outrageous purchase after all, so as to have my credit card unblocked.

And before anyone starts screaming – Garbage, we’ve been to Dubai and it is not that expensive – listen to this. We also have been to Dubai before, and no it was not that expensive. It is only very recently and apparently mainly due to the very unfavourable rate of exchange which has become very unfavourable. Whatever the reason and whatever the case, we were there last week and that is what counts, not what we used to pay 10 years ago, or even 7 or 5 years ago, when admittedly you didn’t have to take out a bank loan to purchase a drink.

But before I move onto the more positive aspects of Dubai, it is also worth mentioning a few other interesting aspects of this overrated, boring, expensive-as-hell destination. Firstly, in spite of the empty glitz and the artificial soulless modern facades, supposedly representing all that is cutting edge, this remains firmly a Moslem country. So you are clearly required not to show any PDA’s (public displays of affection – yes they even have a word for it!) such as holding hands or kissing or hugging, all disgusting infidel actions as far as they are concerned. So for couples such as us, who usually enjoy expressing our love towards each other simply by holding hands or putting our arms around one other, plus enjoy the occasional kiss and a hug, we have to constantly check ourselves and subdue these natural albeit most evil and obscene of instincts. So many a time we stared at each with looks of love, all from a safe distance and obviously never making contact, galvanising those precious, romantic and distant moments for ever.

That’s when you’re in public places. Now on the other hand when you are hidden away in private, the state also dictates to you exactly which web sites you can access and which you cannot, as anything which is deemed of sexual content is totally blocked and simply inaccessible from any of your own personal devices. So it is not up to you to choose what is and what isn’t suitable for you, but it is the government’s prerogative to do so. No wonder men make love to camels here as a special treat.

There’s plenty of pork and alcohol around if you’re willing to pay super sucker price. But until the government figures out a way of discreetly taxing porn, then it will continue to save your soul from the totally unnatural thing which is nudity.

The place isn’t either on any kind of show circuit because of the perceived sexual content of anything we consider normal. In neighbouring Abu Dhabi they have been discussing opening up a world class art collections museum, but cannot come to terms with any form of nudity, even being that in classical art, so the project is at a total standstill. This is the real Dubai and unlike the more progressive Arab states where their women are allowed to wear European style clothing, there they are required not only to wear a veil but to entirely cover themselves up, face and all leaving, only a tiny slit for their eyes and only wearing black.

There are many more nasty aspects about this place such as the way they treat their workers, which in many ways is akin to slavery. Similarly if you ever have any form of problem or dispute whatsoever with a local, then you better head straight to that airport, because it can never ever be their fault. You see their reasoning goes that had you never come to their country, then this problem would have been avoided, so it is always automatically your fault. And I won’t even mention the really bad aspects such as the sandstorms and Ramadan just to keep this discussion light.

But enough about all the negative or you might start to think that I somewhat dislike the place! Let us now talk about the positive side of Dubai, which in summary boils down to the fact that you are not at all forced to go there!

There, that was a very positive aspect of Dubai and possibly the only one that comes to mind. But there is also bad news to this one statement I am afraid. For alas if you are transiting from the Far East and want to break up the very long journey, then in reality you probably do have to stop there after all. Also, as in my personal case, if you have a deranged sister who insists on living in such a dumb-assed place and keeps trying to convince you how cool and wonderful that place really is and ends up convincing you every few years or so to try it out again ‘because it has now really changed in all the years since you’ve last been here’ and forgets to add the last part of the sentence ‘for the worse’, then you have a second reason to visit.

Oh and there you go I just managed to find yet another positive thing about Dubai – their power sockets are square like ours!

But just in case anyone is still wondering whether seeing such a weird and unlikely place at least once is worth their while, I would firmly recommend the following. If you want to see tall buildings then go to New York, it is infinitely more interesting with infinitely more things to do and on an entire different scale of enjoyment altogether. If it is a man made playground built in the middle of a desert that you want to experience, then for fuck’s sake go to Las Vegas, where prices are a fraction of those of Dubai, you can hold hands, your wife doesn’t have to dress like a nun and can happily display legs and cleavage and above all, there at least you have the shows, the casinos, the fun, the clubs, the porn, the hookers and at very least you are allowed the most basic of human functions, opening your favourite porn site and having a good old therapeutic self-indulging jobbie!