And they cut down the trees...

(The building of the billboard- and the ad before they cut down the trees)

During my first year in Dubai (2007), I took a taxi to work everyday. That meant I went through most of Sheikh Zayed Road back and forth and I had the luxury to observe the road as I like and I always had my head turned right to the window. In one part of the road, there were a lot of trees and bushes to the side after the jungle of skyscrapers at the beginning of the road ends, and I always thought they were a nice reminder of something normal in the midst of all the modernity and construction. Then one day I saw workers building big metal scaffolds behind those trees. The work took a few days and it started to look like a huge advertising billboard starting from ground level, and I was wondering how people will be able to see the ad behind the trees.

To my not-so-big surprise, one day I was on my way to work and I realized they cut down all the trees and the bushes in front of the board. The place looked like a massacare scene with the tree bodies and branches lying on the ground and the trunks cut off near the ground. For some reason, I felt very upset. It was like a typical attack on nature for corporate interest. The banner was put up on the billboard afterwards and it was a huge ad for Tatweer projects (part of the famous Dubai Holding which is almost entirely owned by Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum). The place looked ugly to me now and it was no longer the nice. Every time I went by that place, I looked at the huge billboard and tried to see if the trees were growing back. I was worried that even if the trees grew back, they'd cut them down again. For a long time, the ad and the billboard stayed there. I moved to a different neighborhood and that road wasn't on daily route to work anymore.

Almost two years later, the big financial crisis hit Dubai. Real estate prices and rents dropped down to half of what they used to be and I moved back to the neighborhood I first lived. At that time towards the end of 2009, Tatweer was in a lot of financial trouble and Dubai Holding annouced it will consolidate all of it is subsidiaries under one company. Most of the Tatweer projects that were pictured in that ad were either postponed or cancelled. I'm not sure when but at some point the ad banner was removed from the billboard and all that remained were the wooden panels on the scaffolding.

In 2010, I started driving my own car so I couldn't look at the road side and the ads anymore. Today I was in a friend's car and I looked at that billboard for the first time in a long while. I noticed that the wooden panels were still there with no ad on them, and the trees are now growing back...