Fatimaaaa... So I was wandering around Dubai's Indian Quarter and got totally hooked on this melody. The guys actually sing it even better than the original. But it's definitely not for everyone. If I googled it right, it's popular among Kerala's Indian Muslims.

A couple years back, some of their countrymen opened the first Hindu temple in the Middle East, somewhere between Dubai and Abu Dhabi. It's huge and really interesting, but you can't get there without a car. And for some reason they don't let you take photos with a normal camera. Instead, they make you take off your shoes and walk barefoot.

And here are some more classic Emirati shots to wrap things up.

Not all buildings abandoned by locals end up housing migrants, like in Umm Al Quwain.

The small village of Al Marjan has been literally swallowed by the desert. Buildings are buried in sand—it's even made its way inside them. Though locals have a superstition that djinn are to blame for it all.

For some reason, the village was enclosed with a wire fence, but on one side it's completely buried under sand, and on the other they just stuck a gate ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

PS. If you ever end up going, there's an excellent coffee shop nearby. I honestly wasn't expecting to stumble upon a specialty café in the middle of nowhere.

I'm running a bit behind on posts.I was in the Emirates in mid-February, when nobody was shooting there. I prefer not to travel to places where things are actively flying in. Peace to everyone.

When you think of the Emirates, you usually picture massive skyscrapers, golden bazaars, and all sorts of riches. But not the entire country is like that.

I stopped by Umm Al Quwain, the poorest emirate, and some of its neighborhoods look pretty run-down: shabby houses, broken roads, lacking infrastructure. The photo shows the old city, and while in Europe this is usually a well-maintained historic center, here it's half-abandoned with mostly migrants living there. The newer districts look a bit better, and they even found money for a huge cathedral mosque.

Umm Al Quwain wasn't lucky with oil. Unlike its wealthy neighbors, there's practically none here. And for tourists and businesses, Dubai and Abu Dhabi are much more attractive. So the emirate survives on federal budget subsidies.