Inside Dubai: Playground or Purgatory?

British expatriate workers in the Arabian Gulf like to tell new arrivals a bleak metaphor. “Living here,” I was once told after arriving in Qatar, “you carry around two buckets. Every day, one of them fills up with money and the other fills up with shit — the shit that you take from being bored and drunk and trapped in a compound. The minute that one of the buckets is full, you leave the country and never come back.”