Looking more, at times, like a film set dreamed up by Stephen Spielberg or George Lucas than a modern city on the sands of the Arabian Gulf, Dubai begs to be noticed. And succeeds. Where Egypt built its monuments to the dead, Dubai raises its towers each bigger, broader and more brazen than the last to the living, as an iconic city eternally in search of itself and knowing the answer lives in the next amazing thing.

When Burj Dubai was first planned, it was to be a 90-storey structure, but Sheikh Mohammed asked us, Why stop there? Mohamed Ali Alabbar, director-general of Dubais Department of Economic Development, said in an interview.

The once backwater pearl-diving port found diamonds in oil development and turned those diamonds into golden sands that shape this desert in cemented steel and glass as one industry after the other makes its Euro-Asian hub on this Persian Gulf peninsula. Within the metropolis of nearly 2 million souls are such places as Media City, Internet City, Healthcare City and Studio City the largest film backlot in the world, as well as NASCAR City, Dubailand themepark city to add to Dubai Sports City, Industrial City and other superpods of commerce and entertainment. But tourism is Dubais true gold and it is manifesting its might through an unending lineup of five- to seven-star city and beach resorts, some five dozen luxury malls, a skyline filled with the tallest buildings in the world and construction projects counting more than a fifth of the worlds available high rise cranes.

The effect is dizzying. The iconic Burj al Arab, once the tallest building in the land, now nods to the Burj Khalifa Dubai, the tallest building in the world at 2,717 feet (consider what a half-mile straight-up might look like). At the base of the tower is Dubai Mall with 1,200 stores fronted by amazing water shows, courtesy of WET Design the force behind Bellagios fountains and Mirages volcano. The mall is only one of 95 luxury shopping megaplexes tucked away inside modern marvels of marble and glass throughout the city.

But why stop there?

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