I don’t understand people who fight with blood relatives. Maybe if they do it for some sort of weird “fun” … but my family isn’t like that.

I have always liked my siblings, my cousins, my aunts, my uncles, my nieces and nephews, and they have always been nothing but kind to me. When I was an ultra-shy little kid who rarely strayed outside the same three friends around our house, any sort of family gathering was about non-judgmental people who would accept me for what I was. Nothing to prove, no one new to meet. There was a comfort zone there I didn’t feel from the rest of the world.

So, yes, I was very pleased when my aunt and uncle landed in Dubai today … becoming the first members of my family to visit the UAE in our year-and-a-half here.

And I volunteered to give them the Dubai mini-tour in 3.5 hours.

My Uncle Phil and Aunt Colleen are on an almost-around-the-world cruise on an Italian ship named the Silversea.

They took ship back in SoCal, crossed the Pacific, stopped at various islands in Micronesia and Melanesia, saw New Zealand and Australia, worked their way north through the Torres Strait, got up to Hong Kong, Hanoi, Saigon, then down to Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Phuket and Bangkok, and then sailed across the Indian Ocean, stopping at Sri Lanka, at Kochi and Mumbai.

They have been on their Magellan-like voyage for 70 days, now, I believe they said, and I think they have another 50 or so to go — which will take them around the Arabian Peninsula, past the pirates of Somalia, up the length of Red Sea, with side trips to the pyramids and Karnak, and to Petra in Jordan … then around the Mediterranean (Athens, Sorrento, Rome, etc.), through Gibraltar and then up to Southampton, in England, where the trip ends.

Phil and Colleen are world travelers of the first order, and both of them are now in their 70s. I was enormously impressed by how much energy they have shown throughout their trip. If you’ve been on a cruise of any length, you know that when you reach a port you sometimes can’t find the energy or enthusiasm to get off the boat and partake of some onshore activity. I have stayed on a near-empty boat more than once, just chilling.

But they have been out and around everywhere. Listening to them tell me about just a fraction of their experiences made me weary.

So, I did the best I could to give them a sense of Dubai, where they had docked just that morning, after being in Oman (“lots of rocks and goats”) the day before.

I rented a car in Abu Dhabi and made the 75-mile drive up to Dubai, and then across town and out to Port Rashid, where I had to trade my Emirates Identity Card (don’t leave home without it) for access inside security and to their berth.

After quite a bit of thought and study, and after Phil had e-mailed me from sea to remind me that “Colleen does not do heights,” this is what I came up with: Taxi ride to the metro station at the World Trade Center; a look at either the huge aquarium at Dubai Mall or the indoor ski slope at Emirates Mall … with a metro ride across the width of the city … and lunch on The Walk, at Jumeirah Beach, where the islands in the shape of a palm tree are.

I had been thinking “world’s tallest building” at the Burj Khalifa, but we can try that another day. I don’t quite share Colleen’s opinion of heights, but I’m not far off.

Both of them are fighting colds. Another reality of a long time at sea is how illness can sweep a ship. Theirs is a sleek new vessel that can take 540 passengers (and a crew twice as numerous) but has carried fewer throughout their trip. About 70 of them are doing the whole L.A.-to-England tour, and they have made friends with about five couples, and they stay up talking, laughing and playing bridge into the night. Or Colleen plays bridge; Phil is powering through about 30 books on a Kindle.

They said that a parlor game, on the Silversea, was trying to figure out which traveler might have brought the illness on board, the one that apparently Phil was the last to come down with.

We got to the metro, which I had never been on, and I was stunned at how crowded it was. I believe the last time The National did a story on it, we were suggesting nobody rides the thing. But the car was so packed that we had to shoulder our way in, and we all stood, until a gentleman offered Colleen his seat.

We got off at Emirates Mall and this turned out to be a felicitous event, because while looking for a way out to find a cab to The Walk … we ended up inside the mall, and they were able to see the top-end bling that the big UAE malls cultivate. (Which is a key part of the Dubai experience.) Just outside the DeBeers jewelry store, we found a map of the place, and figured out the indoor ski hill was only a few hundred yards away. So we made our way down there, talking the entire time about their trip or about my impressions of the UAE and Dubai …

And there it was. A mountain of the white stuff, with kids sliding down it on boards, on sleds, on skis. It is astonishing, of course. Outside, it was a stunningly nice day, temperature-wise (high 80s), but you never, ever expect to see a frozen hill in this country … yet there it was. A sort of head-shaking moment, as we watched the ski lift take patrons somewhere up and back to … wherever the building ends. In a weird way, it’s almost a bigger “wonder of the world” than is the Burj Khalifa — which we saw quite clearly from out the metro window.

The other advantage of a metro ride is that it gives you a sense of the multicultural UAE as well as the number and size of Dubai’s high-rises. Hundreds of them, 20 stories and more, creating a Manhattan-like vista, and making riders in the metro feel like they are going through a canyon with skyscrapers forming walls on each side.

I pointed out the buildings left unfinished because of the financial crisis of 2009, and we lost count of how many cranes were standing, idle, waiting for the next building boom.

We got down to The Walk, which may be the epicenter of “things Western” in the UAE. A long row of First World-brand shops, with restaurants and hotels and scads of Euro tourists going to (or coming back) from the beach. Out in the distance we could see through the haze to the hotels on the “palm tree,” and imagine the ritzy neighborhoods below.

We had lunch at an Italian place called Bo-House, which normally has a great sea view. Sadly, the sea view was blocked by a temporary stadium that hadn’t yet been broken down. Lunch was nice (mozzarella and tomato wraps, and mango juice, for me), and we were on the patio — where no one will be sitting, a month from now. And I marveled over the map showing their itinerary. Did I mention it exhausted me?

I would love to do what they are doing, but I don’t know if I could handle being asea for that long. They told tales, with no relish, at all, about the 20-foot seas they encountered during their passage through “The Roaring 40s” from New Zealand to Australia, and I began to feel a bit queasy. “It wasn’t the seasickness that was the worst, though that was bad,” Phil said. “It was being thrown around all the time. It was impossible to sleep. It was not fun.”

Hmmm. Maybe not.

I gave them the Cliffs Notes version of Dubai and the country, and my impressions. We marveled a bit at how strange it was that we should be meeting in Dubai; all of us were born and raised in Southern California.

We caught a cab back to the port at 3, because they were planning to take the “Arabian culture” outing at 5 — a majlis in an enormous tent strewn with carpets, with all sorts of food and drink, and perhaps camel rides or dune-bashing (as off-roading is known here).

I was already wiped. We said adieu, promised to meet up (inshallah) at a nephew’s wedding in the Bay Area in July … and off they went, back to their gleaming ship, their home for four months, to get cleaned up and refreshed so that they could come back out for a trip into the desert.

Perhaps you’re asking, “OK, but what is their favorite part of the trip so far?”

I’d say their favorite part is the people they’re traveling with. Smart, sophisticated, mostly of a certain age. The cruise line brought in experts to give lectures for “days at sea,” and they like that. Dan Rather, former CBS News anchor, was staying across the hall from them for a while. “Perfectly charming guy.” And I think they also like the sense of being detached from responsibilities of daily life. Imagine decades of worrying about work or the kids or investments … and you just get on board and disappear, more or less.

They liked New Zealand, I know. And Australia. They were surprised by the changes in HK in the decade since they were there. They found Vietnam interesting. They are fans of Singapore. They also were deeply interested in the stops with urban poor, like Mumbai. They have done a batch of those, and I think they enjoy getting back to a port that seems closer to First World than Third.

It was great to see them. Phil has always been a student of world events, going back to when he was traveling the world as a navigator on a B-52 bomber, and Colleen is one of the most socially graceful persons on the planet. As I drove back to Abu Dhabi, trying to stay awake while driving into the sun, I thought that someday I will be happy to be back among them.