Yesterday - Friday - is the Dubai equivalent of Saturday, and the expat community here has stumbled on the phenomenon of 'brunch' as an afternoon-long activity which involves limitless champagne. We went to Yalumba, which was where the infamous 'Sex on the beach' case kicked off.
I kid you not, for the three or four hours we were there, if our glasses were even down to an inch from the top, an army of Asian waiters would descend on us and top up the Tattinger.
It's an all-you-can-eat, all-you-can-drink example of gluttony writ large. I lost count of how many glasses of fizz I had, ditto the number of oysters, prawns, lobsters, slices of rare roast beef and sashimi that were presented to me.
As the above picture shows, the result is not exactly pretty: the room is drunk by about 2pm, and it's at around this point that it struck me that there was a massive divide between the fat affluent expats and the incredibly dutiful - mostly Indian - waiting staff.
Thankfully I didn't witness any flagrant displays of rudeness directed towards them on this occasion, but they are so good at looking after you that you can see how forms of racism can be almost institutionalised. Just the expectation that someone will pick up your napkin, pour your drink, do this, do that - it's not good. Too many hints of a nascent apartheid.
But it's what Dubai is built on - a massive underclass of underpaid Asian workers who work 24/7 building the hotels for expats to get pissed in.
It's not something I like about this place.
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