Dubai, 11.00am of a Friday. I find myself wondering if the second-largest city in the United Arab Emirates isn’t also the…emptiest? Later in the day, our tour guide runs the numbers for us (incidentally, he’s a Sri Lankan stat machine non pareil, who, we joke among ourselves, could probably address us in binary): 3,900 square km, and 300 people per square km.

Sure, those numbers mean as little to you as they do to me, but regardless of the population density, this much is true: I am staying in the hub of Dubai — the cutting-edge of “new,” here — yet wherever I turn, there is nothing but elbow room. Arguably too much of it.

Case in point: this morning, as I again walk through The Dubai Mall (I need to replace a vital tech accessory that I managed to leave, I just know it, at home on the coffee table), I am afraid of yawning lest the echo crush my eardrums. Not to say that the space-ageness of the place is boring; it’s just that The Dubai Mall is…big, too big for its own good. You could shoot second unit for a remake of Logan’s Run here, with principal photography at the airport. Stats tabled later will invoke comparisons to football fields (over two dozen) and stores (some 1200), and there’s no doubt that spatially this is the biggest mall — currently! — in Dubai, but in terms of occupancy, I’d say: 60 per cent of stores occupied and…2 per cent of shoppers?

Still, I take some small comfort in the beanbag chairs at the heart of the place. It’s the little things, y’know?

I should add that my tech excursion leads me to discover that there are two locations of the same electronics chain, Jacky’s, in the mall. Qualify that: at least two. Dare I mention that neither of them had the part I needed? So much for the admittedly massive mall’s semi-presumptuous “Everything” tagline.

(Though there is a Starbucks. In fact, later in the day, at the far end of a deluxe water park, in the area known as Dolphin Bay — where humans can swim with their finned friends for about $300 — there will also be a Starbucks. Do Flipper and co. really command enough traffic to warrant that? And do they drink free?)

The day is dedicated to touring, um, hotels. A bit unconventional, but by no means boring. Our agenda has time for three destinations altogether, each defining “swank” on its own terms. (Bonus: one more luxe shopping concourse, conveniently, some 500 feet away from The Dubai Mall!)

Honestly, I say this not to be snarky, nor to suggest that it all isn’t interesting in its over-the-top luxuriousness. The Burj Al Arab hotel (pictured at the top), in the truly chi-chi Jumeirah district, is so gold-adorned that, when a colleague leaves behind her sunglasses during a tour of a $2,000/night suite, we joke that they have probably been taken to the basement for plating service. Meanwhile, the Palm district’s Atlantis hotel — the biggest in the city, with 1,500 rooms — is a huge hit with the boys in our group, because its katrillion-ton central aquarium (pictured below) has windows looking onto two of the suites. Or do the suites look onto the aquarium? Regardless, humans pay extra: $3,000 per night, and up.

Finally, a guided tour of the unplumbed depths of our own hotel, The Address, reveals that so popular is the, ahem, address in question that, having been operational for barely half a year, a second location is being built some hundreds of yards away, atop my favourite shopping centre. Catchy name on this one: The Address, Dubai Mall. It opens this summer.

Meanwhile, the original Address looks undisputably spectacular at night. Particularly when shot from the pool. And when I say from the pool, I mean, in it:

There is one other guest in the pool at the time of the shot. I make a point of informing her that I am using the Olympus Stylus Tough-8000 for the exclusive purposes of good. So non-plussed is she that it’s obvious: 12-megapixel underwater digital cameras are old news. Ah, but of course, silly me — I somehow forgot that I was in Dubai.

Tomorrow: a desert safari. And I will be allowed to wear shorts. Because, apparently, there will be even fewer people to see my far-from-tan Canadian legs.