Dubai Global Village

Dubai Global Village

This is an extremely hurried post. Why? Because today's a Friday, and over here Fridays are the only off-day of the week. This Friday however, happens to be my turn to work, so there you have it. Today is also the last day of the month and I am going home in about 15 minutes time and I have scheduled so many things into the last 30 minutes of time including an update of this blog (actually it just dawned on me about 2 minutes ago... didn't really cross my mind that today's the 31st already, time flies huh?) Anyway, this is Dubai's Global Village, the once in a year Pasar Malam (night market) extravaganza in Dubai that takes place in winter (of course, who'd want to go out in summer??!?)


A man-made canal inside the Global Village


A performance outside the Chinese Pavilion - each country (which participates) has it's own pavilion, with it's own shows & performances - wanna know how the Saudi shows are? Go, see for yourself, but one thing, don't expect any girls OK?

The Emirates Road Project

The Emirates Road with Dubai city in the background

OK, here’s to giving everyone a glimpse of the highway project I’m at everyday.

The Emirates Road is the highway running north-south across the UAE, much like our North-South Highway in Malaysia. Unlike Malaysia, where the current 4-lane highway is being expanded into a 6-lane highway, causing road users to hurl abuses at the Highway authority and whichever Contractor is carrying out the works (due to their tendency to close all but one miserable lane and effectively defeating the purpose of having a bloody highway in the first place, and having the guts to continue extracting ridiculous amounts of toll money from already recession-hit users), Dubai is expanding the Emirates road from an existing 6-lane road (note: not highway) into a hu-friggin-mongous 12-lane super road (note: again not highway) which is absolutely toll-friggin-free. Our Project consists of about 10 km of the said road (not highway) and 3 enormous interchanges with 10 flyover bridges and 2 underpasses. It’ll cost Dubai about a billion dirhams (approx 950 million ringgit) and generates incomes for people like me, and the others working here. Thank you very much Dubai for your foresight in developing your city.


Our office compound (the circular building behind is Dubai's Cricket Stadium, not part of our office)


Group photo of China State Construction, Emirates Road Project team