Ancient Tylos: Urban Renewal in the Time of Alexander the Great

Dubai, February, 2021. With a laptop in one hand and a pina colada in the other, I wandered around Jumeirah Beach, searching for a sliver of shade under a cabana to hunker down for an afternoon of solitary writing. My gaze lingered on the distant spectacle of Dubai’s Atlantis resort, a mirage on the horizon of the Palm Islands, while my mind danced with echoes of the previous night’s desert revelries — the whirling dervishes, the belly dancers, their movements like desert winds. At this particular moment, under the Dubai sun, I felt a swell of gratitude. It was a curious feeling, rising in me like the desert heat. After months of relentless toil on a new project in Saudi Arabia, often in isolation or quarantine, I had finally managed to take a short leave from the project for some time off and much-needed doctor’s visits in Dubai. Since leaving the United States, in those naive days before the world knew of COVID, I had cast myself adrift, but here I was, still standing — afloat and not adrift, still clinging to some semblance of sanity in such dystopian times. <a href="https://medium.com/citizen-one-an-urban-exploration-podcast/ancient-tylos-urban-renewal-in-the-time-of-alexander-the-great-837af5ed12fd">Website</a>