Dubai

Dubai has spent a fortune teaching the world to picture it a certain way: the tallest tower, the biggest mall, the brunch, the gold. Arrive expecting that and you will find it, and you will be slightly bored within a day, because a skyline is a skyline and a mall is a mall wherever the marble comes from. The city only gets interesting when you stop looking up. Nine in ten people here came from somewhere else to work, mostly from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Philippines, and the Dubai they live in, down on the Creek and in the back streets of Satwa and Deira, is the one worth your time. The official version is built to be photographed. The real one is built to be used.

When to go

Practically, the answer is November to March, when the heat lifts to the mid-20s and you can actually walk outside. Everyone knows this, so you'll pay twenty to thirty per cent more for a room and share the beach with the same crowd that has read the same article. Summer is the honest season in its way: 40°C, soaking humidity, the streets emptied into the malls, and prices that finally admit the place is hard to love in July. Come in winter for the comfort, but don't imagine you've discovered anything.

What it's actually like

Forget, for a moment, that any of it is record-breaking. The thing to do is get down to the water. Wooden abras still cross Dubai Creek between Deira and Bur Dubai for a single dirham, five minutes each way, around the clock, loaded with commuters rather than tourists. On the Bur Dubai side, the restored Al Fahidi quarter is the last of the pre-oil city: coral-and-gypsum courtyard houses and wind-towers built by Persian pearl merchants in the 1890s, when catching a breeze was an engineering problem rather than a marketing one. Tucked into it, the Sheikh Mohammed Centre for Cultural Understanding runs sit-down meals where Emirati hosts feed you machboos and answer whatever you actually want to ask, which is the closest the official city comes to admitting the real one is its people. It is small, and it is the only part of Dubai that wasn't finished last Tuesday.

The neighbourhood you want

Bur Dubai and Deira, the old quarters on either side of the Creek, are the characterful and cheaper base: souks, street food, the abra stations, and the metro to everywhere else. Downtown is the postcard, walkable to the Burj Khalifa and the Dubai Mall and little else. Dubai Marina and JBR are the beach high-rises, fine if sun is the whole plan. The driverless Red Line links all of it, which matters more than it sounds when it is 38°C outside.

Don't miss

Ravi Restaurant in Satwa: Pakistani, open since the 1970s, plastic chairs and cash only, chicken karahi with dal and naan for 25 to 40 dirhams, dinner for two around 80. It has outlasted half the glass towers in this city and will outlast the rest. Order a karak chai for a dirham afterwards, the sweet condensed-milk tea that does more cultural work here than anything in the duty-free. Skip the tower-top buffet and eat where the people who built the towers eat.