I won’t bore you with details a Discovery Channel type program could tell you about Dubai, just know it is all that and a bag of chips. And remember to see the laborers’ side of town so you get the full picture. If you stop over anytime soon, be sure to look up my friend Rahul. He can help you know the other side of Dubai.

Amazing food. We stopped at one Southern Indian style restaurant in the locals’ part of town. Amazing: All vegetarian and inexpensive. Follow that up with some Southern Indian sweets and you are set. Fresh squeezed mango juice, lemon and mint juice, pomegranate juice… I just could not get enough of that in the beautiful warm winter sun.

Then off to a few great restaurants serving mix-grill. This time I even loved the chicken. Wonderful, amazing hummus—not the kind you get prepackaged from the US grocery stores. This stuff is smooth, shaped to hold olive oil and sometimes meat or pine-nuts that you stir in yourself. While indulging and sitting on the patio, watching the parade of cars drive by. Check out this bit the license plate numbers: numbers 1-1000 cost extra money. The lower your number the more you paid for it. And by paid I mean $375,000 just for number 82. Some VERY exclusive expensive cars don’t have these special plate numbers and seem to lose their prestige. The cars with the elite plates, no matter the car, make you look up and say, “oh there’s a number 36, I wonder how he makes his money.”

After grazing late into the night, watching groups or men walk by or groups of women followed by their hired escorts, you may want to stop at the market and check out the “Not for Muslims” section of the store. There you can find a concentrated area of products made from pigs, or food not prepared halal style. For you meat lovers, this overwhelming amount of made-with-pig products could be your dream come true. When you go to pay, you may be surprised to find a small box of chicklets instead of small change. Gum is unofficially an official form of currency.

I wish I could tolerate Chili’s because there are as many in Dubai as there are Starbucks. When pretending you don’t see the popularity of the “American cuisine” look up to watch the “national” bird of Dubai, the crane, and I am not talking about the type with feathers.

Dubai = great food. If anyone has a bunch of cash and would like to invest in a great restaurant idea in Dubai, let me know and I will fill you in. Serious inquires only, please.