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8 - Orono Weekly Times Wednesday, May 20, 2009 Basic Black by Arthur Black Gulf. One building, the wretchedly excessive 23 Marina (which may or may not be completed this year) is 89 storeys high. It contains 288 apartments, 57 of which have private swimming pools. On their balconies. Not surprisingly for a country where the temperature routinely tops out over 40 Celsius, Dubai has a thing for swimming pools. The Atlantis Hotel which opened with a launch party costing $20 million (you read right) last year, boasts a whale shark in its swimming pool. Not so long ago, it was reported that 25 percent of all construction cranes in the world were chugging and hoisting away around the clock in Dubai. Workers, from navvies to engineers, streamed in from all over the world - so much so that they outnumbered native Arabs Dubai: looking dubious So your investments have cratered. Your love life is a sick joke. The car engine makes a funny tickety-ping sound every time you accelerate, there's a brassy taste in the back of your throat when you climb the stairs, your pants don't fit, your Visa's maxed out and there's a note in your In Box saying the boss would like to 'have a word' with you after work. Look on the bright side - at least you're not stuck in Dubai. Dubai is, not to put too fine a point on it, a mushrooming hell hole. The bottom of the empty oil barrel. The end of the world. A snake pit, except it's too inhospitable for snakes. Mind you, that might not be your first impression of the place. Dubai perches on the edge of the Persian Gulf shimmering out of the Arabian Desert like a shiny, impossible mirage of steel and glass. It has the world's tallest building, a seven-star hotel, a huge seaport, a brand new airport even its own stock exchange. It has Palm Jumierah Island, a man-made archipelago of sand that added 4,000 residences and 78 kilometres to the Dubai coastline - in the form of a colossal palm tree fanning out into the Persian eight to one. The streets were chrome and steel rivers of Hummers and Mercedes. The malls were full of jet-setters and celebrities. And why not? All that oil money, right? Wrong. Number one: oil prices went south along with the rest of the world economy; number two: Dubai doesn't have any oil anyway. It relies on real estate and well-heeled tourists - and those are very soft commodities these days. All Dubai's got - when you remove the glitz and gloss - is sand. The bad economic news is better known outside the city limits than within because for most of the past two centuries Dubai has been ruled by the iron-fisted and pathologically conservative Al Maktoum family. It is forbidden to bad mouth Dubai in Dubai. You can spend an unspecified length of time in a very nasty jail if you indulge. But it's not difficult to find yourself on the wrong side of a Dubai jail wall. All you have to do is lose your job. It is illegal -- and punishable by imprisonment -- to be unemployed in Dubai. That explains a phenomenon seen more and more in the parking complex of Al Maktoum International Airport. What you find are cars - almost new and obviously abandoned -- by workers who've lost their jobs and had no prospects of getting another. Some of the cars have notes of apology taped to their windshields. Their ex-pat owners have fled back whence they came with whatever they could pack in a suitcase. At last count airport parking stalls held more than 3,000 unclaimed vehicles. Not surprising. Jobs in Dubai that have not outright disappeared have been downsized pay wise. Just a short while ago a civil engineer with four years experience could expect to earn 15,000 dirhams a month. Now, the maximum is 8,000 dirhams - about $2,000 US. Not enough in a town where the rent for even a cheesy apartment can set you back $5,000 a month. Two hundred years ago the poet Shelley wrote a poem about a vanished desert kingdom once ruled by a 'king of kings' named Ozymandias. All that remained of it were 'two vast and trunkless legs of stone' and some rubble. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away. Sounds like a pretty fair description of the view from downtown Dubai in the not so distant future. 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