Life in the city we’d never heard of in 1990

Dubai
watercolour and marker
©1995 Charlene Brown

When my husband started working for Emirates Airline, the company had two Airbus 300 aircraft and one of his first jobs was to fly a third one down from the factory in Europe. The skyline of the city itself was dominated by its mosques, all facing directly west to Mecca.

Emirates now has hundreds of Airbus and Boeing planes, and the coastline shown in this painting is packed with shopping malls and skyscrapers including Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building. I’m pretty sure that everyone has heard of Dubai by now!

After a shaky start (the Gulf War just about emptied the place a few months after we got there) an astonishing amount of Dubai’s expansion took place during our ten years there.