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The locals wear long, all-covering robes. They pray five times a day in one of the city's many mosques. Each year, they celebrate Ramadan, fasting from dawn to dusk.

Many expatriates, instead, love to hang out at the beach, often in skimpy bathing suits making the most of the year-round sunshine. They go to beach-side cafes to drink and eat with friends, enjoying the tax-free lifestyle of the sunny sheikdom-by-the-sea.

Only rub is expatriates overwhelmingly outnumber locals -- by more than eight to one.

Welcome to Dubai, the tiny, sun-drenched, desert sheikdom where a whopping 85 percent of the population hail from somewhere else, demographics unheard of anywhere else in the world.

And although the unusual co-existence is largely peaceful, friction can bubble up, like in the recent case of a British couple facing up to a month in jail for kissing in public.

The couple, a British man living and working in Dubai, and a British female tourist visiting the Persian Gulf city-state, were arrested in November accused of kissing and touching each other intimately in public -- violations of law against public indecency -- and consuming alcohol. The couple have been granted bail pending appeal. A hearing is scheduled for April 4.

The population changes have challenged the now vastly outnumbered Emiratis, though, raising concerns among the local population that the breakneck modernization of the sheikdom threatens their deeply conservative social and religious identity.

The case is the third of its kind involving Britons in under two years. Expats who live in the emirate say authorities seem to be increasingly sensitive to such culture clashes.

The British couple at the center of the current case were dining with friends at Bob's Easy Diner, one of a stretch of cafes on a popular strip behind the city's Jumeirah Beach, when an Emirati woman with her family reported their behavior to police.

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