… but I ended up going to Dubai this past week­end. 20 hours to get there, 48 hours on the ground, and another 20 hours to get back. HM Customs found my itin­er­ary a little bizarre too, thus the hour-long inter­ro­ga­tion in the pokey little back-room upon my return to NZ.

Anyhoo, for those of you who haven’t been there, Dubai is an amaz­ing place. The shop­ping is great, archi­tec­ture aston­ish­ing, and clubs rockin’ (partic­u­larly those run by the Russ­ian mafia). 48 hours doesn’t make for much sight­see­ing, but I did manage to get out to the Emirates Mall (complete with an indoor skifield that leaves Snow­Planet for dead), the Gold Souk (home of the world’s cheap­est and most garish jewellery), and of course the Burj al-Arab.

To be honest though, my strongest memory of Dubai is a bad one, and a reason I’d encour­age you all to spend your tourist dollars else­where till they (hope­fully, one day) sort them­selves out. I captured this screen­shot while brows­ing my usual array of blogs from my hotel on Satur­day morning:

Some of you will wonder why I removed the URL of the blog in ques­tion from the screen­shot. You’ll say ‘It was prob­a­bly porn, you dodgy bugger!’ Ok, so think about this for a second — even if it was a porn site (which I can assure you it wasn’t) would that make it ok? Is it ok to censor stuff that some people find objec­tion­able? Which people? Define ‘objec­tion­able’? What about people that don’t find it objec­tion­able — don’t they have rights too?

As the man said, you either believe in free­dom of speech or you don’t. These guys don’t.

Some of you will think I’m over-reacting. If you do, give me a call and we can discuss it. I’ll share my reason­ing with you and listen to yours. I’ll hope to convince you with a supe­rior argu­ment — a logi­cal chain of valid premises, which you’re free to try and refute. You’ll prob­a­bly make some good points that will help me to under­stand the UAE posi­tion, if not sympa­thise, and we’ll both hope­fully walk away wiser and better people. You see — that’s what civilised people do.