On the surface, Dubai looks like its old self again. Traffic thickens, restaurants fill up, planes land almost normally. But beneath that picture hides a far more complicated reality - the infrastructure works, but travellers' confidence hasn't fully returned. And it's confidence, not concrete, that's hardest to rebuild.

For decades Dubai built its global brand on a promise of stability - a luxurious, safe refuge while the region around it burned. But months after the conflict with Iran, which disrupted the airspace over the Gulf and brought drone strikes on some of the city's most recognisable landmarks - including a missile that hit the prestigious artificial island Palm Jumeirah - the emirate faces one of the biggest tests in its modern history.

The reaction shows in the prices. Hotels, airlines and caterers are now offering discounts and investing more than ever to convince visitors the return is safe. Some landmarks like Burj Al Arab are closed for "renovation," while the Fairmont hotel on the Palm has already repaired minor drone damage and is luring guests with special offers.

The tourists are there, but they're coming from other places. While several Western governments still advise their citizens to avoid travel to the UAE, visitors from Russia and Lebanon don't seem worried. For them, Dubai is a relatively safe refuge compared to home. "Dubai still looks much safer to me than Beirut," says Fatma Amar, a resident of the Lebanese capital who came to visit her sons. "Unfortunately, I'm used to war."

And that one sentence tells the whole story better than any statistic. Safety is a relative thing - it depends on what you compare it to. For someone from Beirut, Dubai is an oasis; for someone from the West, a risk to reconsider. The Balkans know that logic by heart: we learned to measure normality not by how good it is, but by how much worse it was before.