Pre-Modern Dubai

Growing up in Dubai was a totally unique experience in my life. When I was a young boy, it was mostly desert. However, it kept evolving and by time I was in my teens and early twenties, Dubai was the most famous city in Middle East and became one of the top visited place in Middle East. During the late 90’s Dubai had very few places that would attract tourists. I remember everywhere it was just pure sand and hardly any buildings that could have been seen from a far distance. It didn’t have any parks or any kind of malls, and even the airport hardly had any fences around the runway. All these malls and attractive buildings that are there now were not even imagined as ever being there one day. During my childhood, we were mostly unaware of any foreigners in the country as it was not diverse back then. For the most part, any foreigners were from South Asia, but very few were from any of the western part of the world. In that time, every visitor, regardless of nationality, followed their own cultures strongly, as if they were in their own country, and the locals never had any objections on that. The Emirati people are very welcoming and generous in their approach to visitors, which encouraged foreigners to move to Dubai. These were the few characteristics of the city that created interest among western countries in Dubai and its potential as a big city.