How to use the online alarm clock
Five in the morning is when the metro starts. The first trains of the day pull out around five on weekdays, which makes this the earliest hour at which a commute across Dubai can be done without a car, and the timetable is precise enough that the difference between a 5:05 am alarm and a 5:20 am one is a train.
It is also sunrise for part of the year. In the third week of June the sun is up shortly after 5:30 am, so a five o'clock alarm in summer gets you outside in the only genuinely pleasant hour of the day. In January the same alarm happens in complete darkness, with the sun still two hours away.
Runners, cyclists heading for the Al Qudra loop and golfers chasing an early tee time all cluster here for that reason, along with anyone whose commute crosses two emirates and who has learnt what the Sheikh Zayed Road looks like an hour later. The minute pages here work like the rest of the site: open one, leave it open, and it will sound.
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