Some months ago, for work I've spent 32 hours in Dubai.
I had to travel there to try to obtain a service from a mass media that operates from there. I arrived at night, went to the hotel to sleep 4-5 hours, wake up and go across the city (more than 30 Km) to reach the office where I had the interview... It was a meeting of more than four hours. The company I was working for was trying to gain the possibility to offer a service, unfortunately we did not won, we were finalists... but not the first one. Nobody remembers the 2nd...it was a pity. Fortunately the trip was paid by the company.
My plane left very early at the next morning, so I had until that moment to do some sightseeing.
I went to the Burj-al-Arab (Tower of the arab), the super luxury hotel.... but unless you have a room rented, it is impossible to go near, so I went to visit Burj-al-Khalifa (Tower of the Khalifa) and I was able to reach to touch the wall.
It was a impressive situation. The highest skyscraper of the world at the reach of my hand.
This shows you that with resources and determination, almost everything is possible. Few decades ago, this place was a desert of sand, now it's an oversized city with some of the weirdest things like the biggest shopping mall, an indoor snow ramp, ....
It was a city I did not enjoy, I did not liked it a lot, maybe, with more time I'll be able to find it's nice part, but what I saw with that short time of tourism, I did not liked a lot. Yes, I went to the gold bazaar, the clothes bazaar and the species bazaar, crossing the river with a typical small (fishing?) ship, after all of this, return to the hotel, sleep a couple of hours and go to the airport.
The impressive place is the skyscraper. Yes, there are the palm-tree islands... I was just in front of one of them for hours, I did not liked it. It really impressed me the building because of the possibilities that implies building something like this.