Dubai

Well, that gives you an idea of how our day has been. We walked and walked, but Dubai is amazing and I would say no steps were wasted.

We ate breafast at the hotel. They put on a huge buffet of American, Middle Eastern, and Asian food for under $10 It was good, especially the mango juice!

Our first stop of the day was going to be the Gold Souq a few blocks from the hotel. We walked along the creek until we started seeing the shops up the street. The souqs are set up kind of like markets in a third world country, with all the tiny stores along the walkways with the proprieters standing outside urging you in.

I think the first place was actually the Spice Souq although I didn’t notice any signage. This picture is one of the spice stores, all the round bags are spices of some sort. A guy we talked to told us what a bunch of them were but I can’t remembe them all. Saffron is a big one here and he carried lots of other edibles, but also I think he had frankinscence (for burning) and oudh which is a perfume ingredient. Some of the things he said I may have wrong because their English is hard to catch. We did buy some tea from him and he sorta ripped us off because we forgot about bartering. But we tried to hone our bartering skills on his friend who we got kanduras from (but its possible he ripped us off, too, because who knows how much stuff is actually worth?) But I had wanted to get one anyways so I guess I was happy with the price.

Gold Souq was next. It is many little

shops all selling gold jewelry of all sorts. We just walked through and on to the next place.

We walked through a few more shops and down some back streets but it was all kind of the same after while. There was a little kabob joint that was supposed to be good but it was still soon enough after breakfast we skipped and headed for the other side of the creek.

Deira seems to be the old part of town. It seems third world-ish to me with none of the glitz you think of when you think of Dubai. The streets are narrow with little stores of all sorts and the buildings are mostly a tannish gray color. We saw a few white people in the Gold Souq but basically everyone is a local of some sort.

Next was an abra ride across the creek. It costs 1 dirham and the boats leave when they get full, usually within a few minutes, for about 16 hours a day.

We spent a little time at the Textile Souq and talked to some vendors selling scarves and other things. They were VERY pushy and you hardly get past them sometimes without a scarf around your neck.

Next stop was Palm Jumeirah. We walked to the metro, got day passes for like $6, and got on board. It took a little to figure out how it all runs because Arabic seemed the language of choice and the English directions we needed wewre hard to find sometimes. But we made it, even with a train transfer, and a transfer to the tram, and then to the monorail that runs along the middle of the palm. We grabbed lunch at a food court-y thing before the monorail, so nothing too exotic.

The monorail is an elevated train so it was cool to be able to look down at the residences along the fronds. It was high class.And we could see the Burj Al Arab quite nicely.

The Atlantis Resort is at the end of the

palm and includes a large waterpark also. The monorail is the track on the left. The road is a tunnel. The beach is all the back side, the front is huge rocks for erosion I suppose. There is a nice walkway at the outside of the island though, but you can’t get to the beach. It’s all resort with security guards at the gates. We did grab a geocache out there. Oh, Brent looked up the room at the top of the arch there, and I believe that site wanted $27,000 per night.

About halfway between the creek and the palm, the city turns into the modern city you think of Dubai as. The buildings are newer and nicer and fancier and everything just seems classier. The roads are wider, the landscaping is nicer, and the general feel is modern. There are also lots more white people, mostly Europeans .

We still wanted to go to a beach, so we headed for JBR beach which was within walking distance from the tram. It was a beautiful beach but with all the man-made islands out there, you can hardly see open water even. JBR (Jumeirah Beach Residences) is a high end apartment/condo complex behind the beach. The beach was quite busy even though it was very windy and almost cold.

The next stop was the Mall of the Emirates. It was a fairly short stop because our main goal was to see the indoor ski slope. Between jetlag and walking many miles, we were feeling tired and hungry so just grabbed another generic meal at the food court. We did watch a Chinese dance show thing in one the atriums that was pretty cool.

The metro got us back to the Al Ghubaiba Station that is close to the abra docks. We could have rode the metro to within 250 meters of the hotel but the boats are so cheap and so awesome that we boated back across instead even though it meant walking extra.

We came back past the freight boats again and I guarantee a bunch of those huge piles of stuff had been replaced with something different. I’m going to need to figure out wher that stuff comes from and goes to.

Both parts of town have their own intrigue but the old part definitely has more character.

Well, that about concludes today. Its night here, there is a fair amount of traffic going buy the open window, a few boats on the creek, the Burj Khalifa is lit up on the horizon, a radio is playing somewhere on the street, and the wind smells like grilled chicken!