Dubai days

I probably should write about my softball team's first game today against the big American school in Dubai. We lost 5-4 in one of those evenly matched contests that could have gone either way at any time. They won today. We could win next week in our double header. Yes, we only play this team until the tournament in mid-April. It is the only other softball program in the whole country. So, when I say I have the best team within 100 miles, it's not just coachly bragging. If we win next week, I can safely say I have the best team within 1,000 miles--or however far away Doha, Qatar is from here. Until we beat them at the tournament, of course...

But I don't really want to write about the game. It was great for the girls, but featured no Bad-News-Bear moments of victory or startlingly bad errors on the other side. I want to provide an eyewitness account of Dubai, which has been much in the news lately for its recent transformation from shiny Gulf Cinderella to desert pumpkin. Some of you may have read the New York Times article about unemployed expats abandoning their Mercedes, mortgages and credit cards at the airport to flee back to their home countries and avoid the prison sentence for debtors in the UAE.

We played our softball game in the shadow of the Burj Dubai, currently the tallest building in the world. It's a pencil-thin, half finished tower, only the tallest of the countless unfinished buildings that dot the skyline. The Burj is scheduled to be finished this December, but other structures aren't faring as well. In the stands during the boys game, talk turned (as it does these days) to rumors concerning Dubai's downward spirl. People reported project sites abandoned like those airport Mercedes, foremen instructed to fill in holes and sell all the equipment. The big American school, once full to bursting with still more parents lining up at the doors, now doesn't have a waiting list at all.

But the most noticeable image of Dubai's decline, in my opinion, is on the road into town. Coming from Abu Dhabi, the terrain is pancake flat, a scrubby desert plain. The only contour is provided by overpasses and uniformly square billboards placed at regular intervals all along the road. The billboards and overpass ads are all empty these days. No one is advertising on any of them. The people are trickling away, but the ad space was the first to be abandoned. It's almost apocalyptic, in economic terms.

Abu Dhabi is a different story. Although this emirate supposedly underwrote much of Dubai's expansion, they have played it conservatively at home, plus there is still plenty of oil under the sand. Although I can spin plenty of dramatic fantasies about Dubai turning into a desert wasteland with dunes reclaiming the skyline and the whole metropolis reverting back to its pearl-diving shack and camel train days, I know that won't happen. Dubai is here to stay, though perhaps in a more muted form. The Burj Dubai may even get more than 10 minutes as the world's tallest building if the economy also slows the projects in Saudi, South Korea and New York vying for the top slot. Only time will tell how soon the ads return...