Dubai

So there is this conference.

The Insight Dubai Conference to be more specific.

Turns out my university is sponsoring for 5 female students to go.

I need to be one of them.

I've been reading all about it and literally get chills thinking about how incredible it would be.

60 female students from ALL around the world.

Matched up with 60 students who attend the Dubai Women's College.

Learning about things like inheritance under Sharia law, Arabic governance, promoting peace, and combating human trafficking.

I could learn SO much at this conference. 

I'm absolutely certain my life would change because of it.

And of course their campus looks like paradise...

Wow. I'm applying.

Pray for me to write the best 1-2 page essay of my life.

Oh and feel free to read and learn more about Dubai.

Thank goodness for Wikipedia or I would know nothing.

Basically a summary of what I just learned about Dubai is that it is a city and an emirate inside of the United Arab Emirates in the middle east. 

Dubai was discovered a while back by a tribe and then when oil was discovered in 1966 there was a mass immigration and the population grew by 300%

Yeah, everybody wanted in on that. 

Currently their economy is still booming regardless of the oil.

There is a lot of controversy as to why the country is named Dubai.

My personal favorite is that they traced the origins of the name back to the word yadub which means to creep.

The area is deemed a geographic safe zone because it is far away from any fault lines and the Persian Gulf isn't deep enough to have a tsunami. 

What an ideal location to travel.

It's located in the desert so it stays hot most of the year, but March will be prime to visit because it's an average of 82.8 °F.

There are a lot of issues with human rights in this country.

From what I gathered there are a lot of foreigners who come from work then get treated as slaves.

The ratio of gender is over 1 million men to about 400,000 women.

This leads to a lot of prostitution.

Arabic is the official language, but English serves as the lingua franca.

Islam is the official religion, but other religions are allowed to be practiced in private.

If anyone is caught proselyting, or distributing religious literature they can be thrown in jail and even deported.

They have some of the most impressive architectural structures I've ever seen.

Construction is huge their and a lot of their style is a modern twist on Islamic architecture.

Dubai is home to the tallest building in the world, Burj Khalifa.

They also have a rotating skyscraper. 

There are wind turbines between each floor and that can produce up to 300 kWatt of energy (fully powering not just the tower, but a few surrounding city blocks as well).

Read more about it here.

Several sets of artificial islands have been created.

The Palms:

The World Islands:

Yeah, after spending 2 hours looking at all of this architecture and goodness I REALLY need to get myself to Dubai.