Dubai Big Bus Tour - Dubai Museum

First stop on the culture tour, the Dubai Museum. The museum is thought to be the oldest building in Dubai, being built in 1800, and it originally functioned as a fort. In 1971 they opened the Dubai Museum in the renovated space. At the entrance you get to walk through a typical Bedouin house and look at some of the tools that were used in daily life. Inside you get a chance to walk through the history of Dubai room by room. The good news is that the history of Dubai goes something like this - we lived in the dessert, then oil was found, YAY!Seriously, it only takes an hour to walk through the museum. Not much changed in the first thousand years prior to 1950, and even then, real development of infrastructure didn't happen until the 1970s. The museum does give you a sense of what life was like before everything started changing. In a nutshell Dubai was a port city where the main economy came from the importing/exporting business. In addition pearl diving and date farming were the other staples. Lisa couldn't stop laughing after we watched a brief history of Dubai on video. The music accompaniment that goes along with the video is distinctly Arabic, however when the pictures of the oil being discovered are shown the music literally changes to angels singing, I kid you not. A gift from heaven? Yeah, I'd say so.