Burj Al Arab

Burj Al Arab (Arab Tower), a Jumeirah Hotel in Dubai

I'm watching a video on YouTube and an ad for a hotel pops up. Jumeirah? Sounds Arab, and it is. Pretty building, and a very expensive hotel. Built on artificial island. The builders had to dewater the island in order to build the foundation. Dewatering is done by drilling a series of wells around the perimeter, putting pumps in the bottom of the wells and pumping all the water out. On an island like this you will never get all the water out because the sea is constantly seeping in, but you can lower the ground water level, which is good enough, I guess. Seems like they might need to keep the pumps running forever to keep it stable, but maybe if you built a foundation that was big, heavy, deep and solid enough you wouldn't need the pumps anymore.
    Dubai is a really weird little place. It's over there with all those other Arabian oil empires (map), but it's really tiny, kind of like Monaco, so there's no place to drill. Money is flowing into the place and the only reason I can figure is that money attracts money. The picture is very pretty, but the place itself doesn't strike me as very nice. The climate is about like Phoenix, Arizona, and maybe a little worse because of the high humidity in the summer. I guess if you were rich you wouldn't hang around in the summer, probably go some place cooler, like Switzerland.
    Then you've got all the horror stories about not-so-rich people having problems like being thrown in jail for being raped or broke.