Dubai doesn't have much oil of its own, they borrow money from Abu Dhabi which is like the province next door, they have to pay them back some of it when the revenue from tourism starts rolling in after they're done with most of their projects.
I lived in Dubai for a couple of years and my dad still works there, it's like living on a giant construction site, and it's true that there are more construction workers there than the actual inhabitants, but you eventually stop noticing all the trucks and cranes or the noise outside.
It's crazy the rate at which they're building those things, not just hotels and shopping malls but also residential buildings everywhere, they keep them for 7 or 8 years then they tear them down and just build new ones.
I've been to a few of the places like the Jumeira beach hotel, the underwater-themed restaurant at the burj al-arab, and some of the amusement parks like the wild wadi and wonderland. Most of the buildings are impressive, the rides are pretty decent, and the food is ok - nothing really special, if you find yourself in town it's probably worth taking a look at a few of their attractions but still nothing justifies the ridiculous prices they charge IMO.
You can make good money working in Dubai, but if you often go to all the places they have then you'll just end up spending every cent you make. They're mostly there to pull in the tourists who might be suckered in to coming and visiting such a thing as a 7-star hotel.
It was a nice change for me personally moving from suburban Sydney to a place where everyone lives in massive residential towers and skyscrapers and drives beamers and benzes and customised land cruisers. But the novelty does wear off after a few months, and you start becoming a little annoyed at all the downsides of living there as well. Like the sh*tty weather and how you have to be around an air conditioner all the time. And even though the city is extremely clean and tidy you can't help but get the feeling that so much of it is fake, like the grass for instance which they import from overseas and just lay down by the sidewalks like carpet. The economy is based on the sale of one commodity which does not employ that many workers. And even the people seem fake; because of the high incomes not surprisingly many of them tend to be quite materialistic, and you end up having lots of discussions about cars and cellphones and other overpriced gadgets which you'd get then hardly ever use, it kind of gets boring after a while.
But the most thing that bothered me was the inherent racism in UAE society, it's not that people walk up to each other and call each other names and such, but they have something similar to a caste system over there where some are treated better than others depending on what race and nationality they belong to.
Basically the locals (Emiratis) enjoy the highest status in the country, then come the Westerners (Americans, Australians, Brits) and other Gulf Arabs (Saudis, Qataris, etc), after that you have East Europeans and non-Gulf Arabs (Palestinians, Egyptians, Syrians) and some groups like the Chinese and Iranians. Then come workers from South-East Asia, and down the bottom of the pile you have the labourers from the subcontinent (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh).
So if an American, Egyptian, and Indian all had exactly the same jobs, the American will get paid the most and the Indian the least. People put up with this only because they're still being paid a lot more than they would doing the same thing back home.
Essentially a huge part of Dubai's success goes down to the fact that they can exploit cheap labour from abroad and pay them meagre wages and just send them back if they complain. A bit like what China does with it's own people.
But you should still find it's a good experience working and living there and interacting with the different cultures. But you need to keep in mind that working hours are generally very long, there's very few 9 to 5 jobs and it's quite common to have to head off to work at 7am and get back home past 9 or 10pm, and usually friday is the only day off if you work in the private sector.
And when you do have some time to yourself there's a few good places where you could go hang out, the Dubliner is one, but you should also check out the Irish village, and there's the iBo club, hard rock cafe, and a cool place called Aussie Legends bar & grill. There are new pubs and restaurants opening up all the time and it's sometimes hard to keep up with the pace of change. If you ever thought about staying in the middle east Dubai is definitely the place to be.
