Under a street lamp in the car park, Tina Lockie leans against the door of her 4x4 and stretches her hamstrings.
It is about 7pm on a Sunday. The sun has long since left the sky, and yet scores of the city's exercise enthusiasts continue to arrive at Dubai's Safa Park, armed with an enthusiasm that even the most humid of evenings cannot dampen. Six weeks ago, Ms Lockie joined their ranks. Back then, the 44-year-old British expatriate insists she was barely able to run 700 metres before collapsing in a nauseous heap. It was her first attempt at jogging, and her first real attempt at starting a fitness programme. Last Sunday, she celebrated running five kilometres without stopping.
"It's hot," she says, laughing as she stretches after her run. "People say I'm mad for doing it when it's really hot, but I like coming here - I like to know I have a start and finish line and can see how far I'm running each time." Ms Lockie, a housewife and mother, is referring to the cushioned jogging track - with distances marked at regular intervals - that runs the 3.5km circumference of the park and attracts hundreds of runners and walkers every day.
Among the regulars are women dressed in abayas and sporting trainers - power-walking with their friends - who leave a fragrant trail of Arabic perfume for the runners who pass them. An Indian mother, dressed in a sari, strides ahead with her young daughter, while her husband follows behind, pushing another child on a plastic tricycle. Elsewhere in the park, which opened in 1975, two men and a woman perform jump squats under the watchful eye of a personal trainer.
While Ms Lockie cools down in the car park, Rishika Yata, 20, and her friend Ambika Dhall, 22, park their car and begin their nightly walk. "It's close to home, and it beats the gym prices," says Ms Yata, who was born and raised in Dubai. "Since they made the walking track, it's been really great. And seeing so many people here is motivational." Ms Lockie agrees. She runs with two friends, whom she says are "really fit" and give her moral support.
"You see the same faces," she says. "There was one guy who would run laps of the park and, when I first started coming, each time I came I wanted to still be running when he ran past me. That took two weeks, and now he gives me a little nod, as if to acknowledge my improvement." Just 36 hours earlier, as the sun rose over the park on Saturday morning, joggers found themselves negotiating crowds of bargain hunters, who had begun queuing at 6am for the first outdoor flea market of the season.
Rosel, a Filipina expatriate who declined to give her family name, was among the early arrivals, accompanied by her husband and three-year-old son. "We have been coming to the outdoor Dubai Flea Market since last winter," she says. "During the winter months, we come here by 6am, because the queue gets very long and the parking is a nightmare if you come later." The family brings refreshments and a mat and enjoys breakfast in the 64-hectare park before browsing among the hundreds of tables laden with clothes, accessories, appliances and even furniture.
"At first, the prices are too high, so we come back again when the people have gone so we can get something for two or three dirhams or even buy-one, get-one-free," she says. "It's a nice day out and we get to enjoy the park." For traders, the pace is hectic - particularly as this is the first outdoor market of the season. Behnoosh Felix, 38, who is from Iran, has brought her daughter along to sell her old toys. "It's been tiring," she says later that morning. "The people negotiate too much, but it was fun. We didn't sell as much as we would have liked, but it was nice to be outdoors."
For Greg Taylor, a 42-year-old British expatriate working in the learning and development sector in Dubai, the flea market was an opportunity to offload unwanted items and make a bit of money in the process. "It's less about the money and more just trying to clear out stuff," he says. "It's been reasonably successful. We got rid of stuff I'd have classed as junk, to be honest. But one person's junk is another person's treasure."