Dubai's Burj Al Arab hotel is the world's only seven star hotel. Maybe one of these stars was earned due to the fact it can have a tennis court on its roof.

In 2005, Andre Agassi and Roger Federer even played a tennis match here, see the video below.

Dubai sports an indoor 22,500 square meter ski resort named Ski Dubai.

It features an 85-meter enclosed mountain with five different slopes including one 400-meter long run. It also has a 3,000 square meter fun park with sledding and an ice cave.

The temperature must be kept at 21 - 30 degrees Farenheit versus a scorching 100 degrees outside.

Dubai wowed the world with plans to build man-made archipelagos, one in the shape of a palm and another in the form of a world map with each nation being an island for sale.

'The World', shown left, could become a long-standing reminder of Dubai's excess.

Construction of 'The World' has frozen due to financial difficulties, leaving it right now as a haphazard collection of random sand piles marked with buoys as a shipping hazard.

The Dynamic Tower, or 'Da Vinci Tower', is planned to be a $700 million 80-floor skyscraper where every apartment can revolve independently -- by voice command.

This will result in a building that 'never looks the same, not once in a lifetime.' according to the Italian architect David Fisher.

Slated for completion in 2010, we wouldn't be surprised if the tower was now delayed.

The floors will only move 6 meters a minute, slow enough to avoid causing motion sickness.

Dubai's Jurassic Park Restless Planet is planned to be a 500,000 square foot theme park filled with over 100 animatronic dinosaurs.

The cost? $1.1 billion.

This amazing computerized fountain even does performances. Watch it play your favorite Hindi hit "Dhoom Taana".

When the city's stock exchange 'Dubai Financial Market' had its initial public offering (IPO) in 2006, it was 300 times oversubscribed due to ridiculously high demand for its shares.

The Bloomberg ticker for the stock is 'DFM UH'.

Despite a roller coaster ride for Dubai traders since the IPO, DFM's IPO buyers appear to have still made money.

The share price today remains over 100% higher than its IPO price of 1 Dubai dirham per share.

The Burj Dubai will be the world's tallest building, at a jaw-dropping 818 meters tall.

The $4.1 billion structure may have just dodged Dubai's latest crisis, as it should open pretty soon. It's the crown jewel of the $20 billion Downtown Dubai project.

Built by Samsung Engineering & Construction, who created Malaysia's Petronas Towers and Taiwan's Taipei 101, it was designed by the American architect Adrian Smith. As history shows, you know it's a hyped economy when Samsung is called in to build the next greatest tower.

It is pretty awesome though, check out the view from nearly a kilometer in the sky:

The Hydropolis aims to be a 220-room underwater hotel spanning 640 acres, nearly 3/4 the size of New York City Central Park's 840 acres.

While still under construction and many years behind schedule, it has already declared itself a 10-star hotel and plans to have Disney potentially stage live Little Mermaid shows outside its underwater plexiglass windows.

What is lacks in modesty it surely makes up for with passion:

Design Build Network: The original idea for Hydropolis developed out of Hauser's passion for water and the sea, and goes much deeper than just building a hotel underwater.... "Once you start digging deeper and deeper into the subject, you can't help being fascinated and you start caring about all the associated issues," he explains. "Humans consist of 80% water, the earth consists of 80% water; without water there is no life."

Hydropolis reproduces the human organism in an architectural design. There is a direct analogy between the physiology of man and the architecture. The geometrical element is a figure eight lying on its side and inscribed in a circle. The spaces created in the basin will contain function areas, such as restaurants, bars, meeting rooms and theme suites. These can be compared to the components of the human organism: the motor functions and the nervous and cardiovascular systems, with the central sinus knot representing the pulse of all life.

...

Dreams, however fabulous, remain unfulfilled without the cash to support the commitment. "The hardest part of the process was finding sponsorship to the tune of €550m," admits Hauser. "That's what brought me to Dubai.

The United Arab Emirates has a recently enacted media law which makes negative economic reporting a crime.

Drafted in early 2009 as a response to market turmoil, this must be a pretty difficult law to follow right now.

It applies to blogs as well. 

Nothing says economic bubble like ethical amnesia.

The brother of the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, was recently found torturing a business associate with whips and electric cattle prods in a smuggled video.

We believe a spiked plank may have been involved as well.

The Associated Press report below only shows the least graphic portions of the video, though it may still be uncomfortable at times.

A quick look at Dubai's population shows how unsustainable Dubai currently is.

A 2006 census counted 1.4 million people, 75% of which were male.

The majority of Dubai's population is comprised of South Asian laborers. Only about 15% of Dubai residents are actual local emirati citizens.

Thus you know its a bubble when a city has more people building towers than it has citizens.

What will happen to this population once the building boom ends?

Many laborers work in slave-like conditions, bound to employers by long-term contracts, living in squalid company-owned tenements, and forced to pay back onerous 'loans' they took with their employer just to get to Dubai in the first place. Human Rights Watch has raised serious concerns about Dubai'a labor conditions.

Ethical what? Did we mention they have a huge pink castle? It cost $1.5 billion.

It's the Atlantis The Palm hotel, and its opulent interior deserves an entire separate feature.

Ever wanted to see manta rays swimming in wall of your bedroom? Oh they have it. The Hydropolis is open, and claims to maintain 65,000 aquatic creatures inside its private aquariums.

Dubai International Airport just completed a $4.5 billion third terminal which is the largest building in the world in terms of floor space, at 340 acres.

Once fully up to speed, this terminal alone will be able to handle 43 million passengers a year. The entire airport can already do 62 million people, which is just shy of Chicao O'Hare's 2008 passenger volume of 69 million.

Yet Dubai didn't stop there.

The United Arab Emirates is planning a far larger airport, the Al Maktoum International Airport in Jebel Ali, a small port town just 35 kilometers from Dubai. Al Maktoum will be designed to accommodate 120 - 150 million passengers per year.

One wonders what they'll do with the 'smaller' Dubai International once it is complete, since if you combine both airports then total passenger capacity will break 200 million.

They'll have time to think this issue over.

Al Maktoum's 2017 completion date could be pushed back to 2022 due to Dubai's debt crisis. It will undoubtedly be a poster boy for the Dubai/UAE bubble. Its will cost 220 billion dirham, or $60 billion, for unnecessary airport capacity amounting to 100x the population of Dubai.

But if it doesn't, check out the 12 places to go if the world goes to hell >>