Mugger: Crane Your Neck

Two Sundays ago I was sitting at the sky-view restaurant bar in Dubai's Burj Al Arab, having a smoke and espresso, when a waiter rushed up and asked his Japanese colleague for two glasses of Merlot. "I have no idea why they want this swill," he laughed, "but get it pronto, man." This young fellow was clearly European, but I couldn't identify the accent and queried where he was from and why he landed in this incredibly weird fantasyland of the Mideast. "I grew up in Paris, mate," once again mixing international colloquialisms into his patter, "and I came for the green, the dough, dude." He assumed I was German-a first for me-and expressed some surprise when I flashed a U.S. passport as clarification. "Ah, I get it, you're a business cat getting in on the money grab," he smirked and then zoomed back to the dining room.

A wise guess on his part, since the highway from Dubai International Airport to the Burj Al Arab has more construction cranes than you've ever seen, as well as fast-food restaurants and nightclubs, but wrong. As it happened, I was in the city as a mere tourist after a trip to Delhi, Mumbai and Hyderabad.

I'm not sure if David Dinkins would approve of the flashy, ostentatious wealth that envelops not only this "seven-star" hotel but Dubai in its entirety, but he'd have to admit that this UAE icon is one fine, fine, superfine "gorgeous mosaic." It's rather stunning: In the space of two hours, while wandering around this structure's inside and outside grounds, inspecting the absurd lineup of boutiques that makes 5th Avenue look like skid row, and taking a long walk along the Persian Gulf beach, I came across 25 people, representing almost as many countries.

It wouldn't have surprised me if Kofi Annan and Donald Trump (who would publicly call the Burj Al Arab a dump, but privately kick himself for not getting in on the action several years ago) strolled together in the lobby, picking at the platters of stuffed dates that elaborately costumed men and women push on the guests.

One of the hostesses for the underground seafood restaurant-The Oyster, where the cuisine is vastly overrated but the aquarium is top-notch, if not the kitschy submarine guests take to get there-was six months removed from Berlin, and she spoke to the party of five from Shanghai in impeccable English. One of the bellboys who lugged our bags was a two-year veteran from Morocco, and his gabby cohort grew up in Bangkok. An initially frosty waiter was a native of Bangalore and grew chatty when my friends and I mentioned that we'd just arrived from Hyderabad. He cupped his hand and said the food in India was far better than that of the Mideast, an opinion I concurred with after fiddling with overcooked medallions of veal and a dash of potatoes that contained what tasted like half a stick of butter.

The butler in our 21st floor suite spoke longingly of his home in Norway. I didn't come across anyone from Iran, which is way across the Gulf from the beach, but there's no doubt that many enterprising young adults fleeing from that country's tyranny were employed at the hotel as well.

This de facto United Nations crew was dizzying enough-not only for the stark contrast from India-but made perfect sense when considering the spectacle of the Burj Al Arab. It's a tourist attraction as well as a place to sleep, drink, shop and look beautiful, and while I don't think a return visit is in the offing, it's a pretty cool one-shot if you want to experience an LSD adventure without the downside. The hotel, which opened in '99, is smack in the middle of a man-made island, and is the tallest building in the world used for this purpose. It's shaped like a sail, as preposterous as that sounds. When you walk in the lobby, besieged by a phalanx of employees, the first sight is a vertical display where water shoots at random, often changing colors.

Remember when Wired first appeared on newsstands in the early 90s? It was founder Louis Rossetto's visionary magazine, one of the first tech/lifestyle publications to gather notice, and it stood out amongst the staid warhorses like Esquire, Time and Rolling Stone. Unfortunately, the articles (some worth reading) were completely obliterated by the amped-up art direction. The content of Wired-snapped up by Conde Nast in '98, saving it from the fate of binge-and-purge mags like The Industry Standard and Red Herring-isn't nearly as interesting anymore, but a flip-through won't cause an immediate change in your eyeglasses prescription. The Burj Al Arab is Wired on steroids.

The hotel, of course, isn't cheap: the 202 suites range from $1000 (a closet) to over $15,000 and are a technophile's dream. That's not me, and so the confusion when the butler took us on a half-hour tour of our three-bedroom dwelling, explaining the air-conditioning system, the flat-screen televisions that feature more than 100 stations as well as Internet service and scads of movies, the elaborate bathrooms and personal kitchen, I was lost. The new computer on our second-floor business center was manageable, and was convenient when I passed some time checking baseball scores on ESPN's website, but when it came time to turn in I couldn't operate the lights and slept with them on full glare.

Obviously, there was no traditional key to enter the suite-as a middle-aged traveler, I'm partial to the ornate metal keys found in places like Paris' Ritz or Bristol-but this electronic card was a horse of another color. You didn't just slip it in, which can be a challenge, but rather flash it at an electronic nerve center. We kept the butler busy on this score. The suite was filled with "gifts" from management, enough chocolates to delight an Upper East Side kid's birthday party, elaborate leather boxes of marzipan and pistachio sweets and the ubiquitous dates. Problem is, this hotel is not, to dust off an old phrase, user-friendly. It's possible that the thousands of tourists who come to the Burj Al Arab are tickled by all the gizmos, not to mention the complete line of Hermes lotions, potions and notions in the bathrooms, but I'm partial to old-fashioned light switches.

The next morning we arrived at the airport and it was a grind. Not that I'm complaining; in this part of the world it makes sense to have not one, but three separate security searches. While boarding the plane, I overheard an American say to his wife, "If you have to fly public, Emirates Airlines is really the only option." Emirates is indeed the class of the field, leaving the fleets of Singapore, Thailand, Japan and Germany in the dust.

I'm not sure, even if the capital was available, that I'd invest in the properties of Dubai. Yes, it's currently an over-the-top Las Vegas, where libertines come to indulge, but one killer bomb in the airport, say, and the city's economy will collapse. The Burj Al Arab is billed as one of the wonders of the 21st century, but how long it, and the dozens of hotels that surround it, lasts is a real question.