Anyone remember Dubai in 2008?
 

How many of you were in Dubai in 2008? Anyone remember what a weird, bizarre and unreal time it was? I was trying to explain what it was like to someone else over the weekend and realised that if you weren't there, you just wouldn't understand what it was like. Nothing that came afterwards, even the economic upswing of 2013-2015 compares.

Re: Anyone remember Dubai in 2008?
 

First came here in 1985 just a 2 week visit as my sister and brother in law were working here, then returned in 2000 to work here! Early days for me were the best, place has changed so much now!

Re: Anyone remember Dubai in 2008?
 

The good old days are now.

Re: Anyone remember Dubai in 2008?
 

We arrived in 2008 and it literally seemed like the place was paved with gold. Could not believe the upswing in disposable income; all our peers where buying high end sports cars, boats, bikes. Presents were insane, new jewellery, bags etc. Everything was 'world class' and it felt like an invasion, a gold rush.

12 months later, most of those peers had gone, everything sold for a knock down price etc. Don't think we'll ever see that crazy, frothy swirl of bubble again. I actually hope we don't.

Re: Anyone remember Dubai in 2008?
 

i arrived 31st July 2008....and couldn't believe how much it cost to rent an apartment....and then the crash happened in Oct.....rental prices literally halved over night.

Re: Anyone remember Dubai in 2008?
 

Oh yes. Started holidaying in 1996 and then moved out in 2005. The place is unrecognisable now. I still have a copy of a magazine which Gulf News pulished back in 2006 or 2007 called "Dubai From the Sky" - it's fun to look at occasionally.

Re: Anyone remember Dubai in 2008?
 

I know people who were borrowing money to put into higher interest saving accounts. Funny money.
HSBC's esaver was giving 6% then, and that was an average rate!

Re: Anyone remember Dubai in 2008?
 

Absolutely. I first got there in 2008. The place had the feel of a gold rush. By 2010 it had already made 2008 unrecognisable.

In 2013, from my perspective, the place had noticeably started leaking air from the tyres.

Re: Anyone remember Dubai in 2008?
 

Nope.

Re: Anyone remember Dubai in 2008?
 

Had a stopover for a while in 2009 I think it was.
Stayed at the Bonnington which had just opened, no proper road to access it. Metro only went as far as MOE. Booked the Burj Khalifa only for it to cancelled until the next day due to a problem with the lift.

Re: Anyone remember Dubai in 2008?
 

I used to play a game in the 2006-2008 period which was to count the floors added to the (then) Burj Dubai following each short business trip. You could almost watch it visibly grow. As there was some issue with the cladding that I don't recall, it was a very tall skeleton before they started adding the cladding rather than cladding as they went.

I do not miss 2008: that was trough Dubai (is that a thing - opposite to peak?). Maximum idiocy and off-the-scale hubris. Horrible traffic, everywhere over-crowded, ridiculous prices for everything, even more half-built and crammed full of tossers than now.

And of course everyone was ginned up on all those ridiculous and now abandoned projects: obviously the Waterfront and Palm Jebel Ali and Palm Deira. But what about Jumeirah Garden City (resulting in the famous "The End of Satwa" cover of Time Out), the Opera district on an island in the creek with the bridge resembling two Sydney harbour bridges side-by-side, Zaha Hadid's dancing towers, Nakheel harbour and tower (to be the tallest in the world and commemorated in the name of a metro station), the Arabian canal which was supposed to be 17km long, Bawadi and Asia Asia: the world's largest hotel, the tower that was supposed to look like a bloke in a khandoura... Any more plums that anyone can remember?

Re: Anyone remember Dubai in 2008?
 

How about Falcon City of Wonders? With the wonders of the world even bigger than the originals :)
Not sure how that would have worked with the Great Wall of China...:blink:

Re: Anyone remember Dubai in 2008?
 

But they've kind of built some of that: certainly many of the houses as there is a Falconcity (sic) in that spot. And isn't that where that oft-discussed over-scale replica of the Taj Mahal was going..? Though now that you mention it, what has happened with that?

Re: Anyone remember Dubai in 2008?
 

Ah yes, I well remember ;) I went to CityScape 2008 and there were these Russian / Eastern Euro women completely painted in grey paint and pushing these strolling tables (?) with promotional materials on off-plan properties to invest in. And the fabulous fly through video for Jumeirah Garden City. It was insane. I'm glad Satwa survived (whatever happened to the model for Jumeirah Garden City? sitting in a dusty warehouse somewhere?).

I had office mates who pooled funds to buy whole floors of off-plan properties in unbuilt Ajman towers with the idea of flipping them in a few months (no need to tell you what happened to them). I had mates who traded in barely used 4x4 for the latest model, just because. And I remember watching rents seemingly go up 5k per week.

There are plenty of great memories of that year but it was insane too. I'd never seen any place so blatantly desperate to be "luxury" this and "luxury" that.

Is anything ever going to happen to Palm Jebel Ali? Or will it crumble back into the sea? Why didn't Nakheel start developing it when the economy swung back to life?

Re: Anyone remember Dubai in 2008?
 

left end of September 2008 just before it really started to crash. Didn't really help though as we moved to Singapore where there was also a crash.