Training went well on Wednesday.  I ran in to some guys I knew from the other product teams after the session I gave so we went out for dinner with some of the locals that night.  Dubai has this thing where almost all restaurants are in hotels like India so we didn’t have to leave where we were staying, just went to the top of the building.  It stays pretty hot at night and it’s so humid that the windows fog up after the sun goes down so being high up didn’t offer us a view because of that.  Thursday morning I had a breakfast meeting with some of the locals since they are taking me to visit a Saudi customer in Bahrain on Saturday morning.  After all the work stuff I took the afternoon to do some site seeing finally.  I hit up the Mall of the Emirates first which is kind of like the Mall of America in size but instead of Camp Snoppie in the center they have a indoor ski slope.  I suppose when it’s ridiculously hot outside it’s a fun thing to do.  The mall had a hop-on hop-off tour bus that went around the city so I got on that for a few hours.  It went by the Burj Dubai (tallest building in the world), the palm islands, marina and business districts.  There is so much money in Dubai it’s kind of mind blowing between all the shopping and houses.  And you can’t legally own land unless you are an Emirattee so all of it is being rented.  The motivation is that there is little to no tax on everything including cars which is why almost everyone has really nice cars.  There is a larger disparatiy in the classes though since the people that don’t have cars are usually the consturction workers who they pack in buses to bring to the sites.  There is so much construction that I imagine they make up a decent amount of the population.  Most of them are expatriates as well.  At night I went out with a bunch of locals again and one of the girls from Lebanon taught me how to belly dance.  I definitely looked like an idiot doing it since a guy should probably not be belly dancing in the first place.  The whole sales team in the middle east is pretty young so we all related well and I was glad I could see the cities night life.  Almost all of them are expat’s (Egypt and Lebanon make up the most).  I still don’t get the music they play, it was like in Europe – Wham, Men at Work, Village People.  Basically anything that was in the top 40′s prior to 1990.  Tonight I’m staying in Bahrain to meet with a Saudi oil company tomorrow.  Friday is a holy day so the UAE weekend is Friday/Saturday (they work Sunday) and in Saudi/Bahrain the weekend is Thursday/Friday so hence me working on Saturday morning.  Everyone has been awesome over here and I’m really impressed at how nice things are (people and environment).  If it wasn’t so fricken hot all the time I could definitely see myself living here.