Held a presentation at a college in Dubai

So now I am in Dubai. I haven’t seen anything like this before. What an unbelievable contrast to Iran. Here are some pictures!

Bus stops with air condition and electric slide doors.

This is the tallest building in the world – Burj Dubai. It measures 818m.

I was so lost when I came to Dubai. I had the address of the place to the couchsurfer where I am staying and I thought “well, I just ask people when I arrive to Dubai”, just like in Iran. But it didn’t really work like that here. First, Dubai consists of huge highways where it is impossible to find people to ask. Second, most of the people I found to ask come from abroad and does not really know the different parts of the city. Third, the roads go everywhere – underground, on bridges etc. On the picture above is me when I thought I was on the right road but the road ended up in a huge parking house. Finally, after about five hours of cycling and after dark, I managed to find the place.

Funny sign with intellectual names of the different city areas.

Here is me in the Dubai Men´s Collage. I visited this collage and held two lectures for the first grade students in their course “Global Awareness”. I was really nervous but it all turned out well. I told them about my trip and they were all very curious about it and had so many questions.

All of them were locals from Dubai which was really cool. When I asked them what they knew about Sweden they all said “Ibrahimovic!!”.

Me with some of the students after the lecture

They invited me to participate in a meeting that the student council had. The topics were a bit different than in Sweden, but it was really interesting to participate. The topics were different than to Sweden, e.g. whether music with love lyrics should be played at the national day in school. The meeting was held in English.

They have huge artificial islands in Dubai. Here is at one of the palm islands. This hotel was unbelievably huge and built by Donald Trump.

After my visit at the collage one of the students, Ibrahim, wanted to show me around the city. He was really funny, joking around all the time. A funny detail was when we got out of the taxi he told the taxi driver to stop and wait for us because he didn’t want to waste time on finding a new one. So three ours later we retured back to the same taxi driver, who was sleeping in the car

This is in Emirates Mall with an indoor ski slope.

The day after the visit two other students wanted to take me out to show me the city, and we spent some great time. This picture will be posted in their local newspaper at the collage! They thought I was gonna be in Guiness World Records so I had to explain that this is not that unique and that there are a lot of cyclists touring around in the world.

Anyway, I have never seen anything like Dubai. The guy I am living with now, a stock trader, said: “This is capitalism at its finest”. Yes, Dubai is very extreme. It was really cool to see, but I don’t think I would want to live here for a long period of time. Tomorrow I am heading to Oman and in a little more than a week I hope I will have cought the flight to India. Until then!