I read somewhere that as many as a quarter of all the construction cranes in the world are currently in Dubai. For some years now, they’ve been constructing a futuristic, completely over-the-top city out of sand and oil, on a scale that simply boggles the mind. If you haven’t been paying much attention to Dubai, you might want to take a look at this brief overview of what’s been happening there lately.
Simply astounding, isn’t it? But now (actually a few weeks ago, but I didn’t notice ’til now) comes word that what promises to be the best — or at least the biggest — is yet to come: the Dubai Ziggurat.
What is it? Well, it’s basically an apartment building. But unlike any apartment building you’ve ever seen or even imagined.
You can’t get a sense of the size of the place from the architectural rendering above, so let me give you some clues: It’s (choose as many as you’d like) enormous, immense, huge, gigantic, colossal, mammoth, tremendous, stupendous, gargantuan, vast.
How enormous, immense, huge, etc. is it? Well, it’s going to accommodate more than one million people.
Yup, you read that right: more than one million people.
That’s 125 times the population of, just to cite an example chosen at random (or not), Wasilla, Alaska. If you tried to round up all those 8,000 or so Wasillaians and shoo them into one apartment building, well, they might “mistake” you for a moose and blow you away, because that’s just how they are up there. But anyway, an apartment building that houses 8,000 people would have to be a very large structure. Now multiply that very large imaginary structure by 125 and you’ve got the Dubai Ziggurat.
Think about that: a million people living in one building. A million. One-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh. In one building.
From what I’ve seen on TV, Wasilla, Alaska isn’t my dream destination by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m pretty sure I’d prefer it to the Dubai Ziggurat, which stretches my imagination way beyond anything I can cope with.