I cannot imagine two more different places.

Thailand is inexpensive. It is three to five times more inexpensive than the States. Dubai is easily as expensive as the States, and in some ways, mainly housing and food, more so.

In the Middle East, gas is cheap, so people drive big cars. SUV’s are quite common, as are four wheel drive land rovers, jeeps, muscle cars and luxury sports cars. In Thailand, gas is expensive, and the poor cannot afford cars. Even if they become wealthy enough to buy one, they still don’t properly learn how to drive, but rather get a license and begin the process ad hoc. In Dubai, on the other hand, a drivers license in difficult to obtain without expensive and lengthy training and testing.

In Dubai, people drive fast and honk if you displease them. Even after the moment of danger has passed, they will honk to chastise you, to make sure you learned your lesson. In Thailand, almost nobody honks, ever, for it would display your lack of serenity. Since no one in Thailand really knows how to drive, or what the rules of the road are, they conceive of driving as a group process. Like extremely elderly drivers in the States, Thai drivers slowly drift in an out of traffic, expecting and hoping that those behind them will look out for them.

An aside: in Viet Nam, Thailand’s neighbor the Northeast, everyone honks his horn every two seconds. I rented a motorcycle, and the guy showed me where to insert the key and where the horn was. Otherwise, they drive like Thais, as a big group experiment, like fish in a school.

Women who appear in public here in Dubai are often completely covered, leaving only their eyes visible through a little rectangle cut in the fabric. Some don’t even have that, and peer through somewhat sheer black cloth. There are separate sections on the bus and metro for women only. Due to the large number of Indian men who are in Dubai without their families, men outnumber women in public by five to one.

In Thailand, men are almost invisible. Women are everywhere, shopping, selling, sitting behind desks and counters in offices. I don’t know where they men are. This is especially true after the age of fifty. There are almost no men over fifty visible anywhere. My hunch is they’re all back home in the village, taking care of their grandchildren.