Drool, Drool, Drool..... The Gold Souk

Lacinda

A "must see" in Dubai is the Gold Souk.  More gold, gems, and diamonds for sale here than almost anywhere else.  There are several covered streets lined with small shops showcasing wealth that you can't imagine.  The rich of the world come here to play - middle eastern, african, indian, chinese, european - you name it.  And it shows.  You want to keenly feel how much you are NOT the .001% - come here and check this out...  It is quite humbling to be standing in front of something casually hanging in a window that you know may well be worth more than your house. 

And you may wonder if the color is off on my camera, but it's not.  Much of this is 22 karat gold.  Yup, you heard right.  In the US, the land of 10, 14 and 18, we don't see this stuff. It is almost orange it is so pure.  This is what they use in India, and we think much of this might be suitable for an Indian wedding as it reminds us of what we saw when we were there.  Beautiful stuff, even if you don't like yellow gold.  Though, they also had plenty of white, enough to make me drool.  

Some of the items on display are gorgeous and make you want to sell a kidney to get it. On the other hand, some of it illustrates how truly tacky one can be - if you can afford it.  Really really RICH tacky.  They have it all....  And I didn't get any of it.  We eyeballed some diamond earrings, but no go for Cindy.  I kept repeating in my mind "I got a new deck this year... I got a new deck this year..."   So no earrings, but lots of nice photos.

Marshall's face says it all....  :)

 

Arabian Courtyard Hotel + Dubai Creek + Gold Souk

Lacinda

Picture time!  Here are a few shots of our hotel - the Arabian Courtyard, which is in Bur Dubai, an older neighborhood, directly across from the Dubai Museum and a few blocks from Dubai Creek.  The other side of the creek is Deira which hosts the main "Souks" or markets, which are more old school and middle eastern in nature than the glittery new malls in the rest of Dubai.   They have a souk for various types of goods -  spices, fabric & textiles, gold, perfume, and a large covered one that we haven't checked out yet that I presume sells consumer goods and local handicrafts.   I hope to go there tomorrow, as heaven knows I need to buy some STUFF and I can't afford the gold souk.  Trust me, you'll see what I mean....

Dubai Creek is a hub for shipping both materials, and humans, up and down and across, connecting the neighborhoods.  Lots of boats from very fancy glass-sided dinner tour boats, to more traditional arabian dhows that ship freight,  to 'water taxis' consisting of no more than a shabby wood boat with a cheap outboard motor, which you can hop on for 1 dirham, which is about 33 cents.  Its a quick easy way across the creek, and the locals use it all day long, as well as brave tourists - like us, of course. ;)

Dubai Creek skyline - they have pics of sheiks plastered on everything here

We can't tell if these are freight boats or tourist boats, but they light up at night

Old school transportation via "water taxi" - we rode on these

New school transportation :)

I just liked this apartment's cool balconies

A view of the side docks and all the waiting water taxis...

Alive, tired, but determined....

Lacinda 12/28/12

FYI -  2.5 days, heavily jetlagged, is NOT enough time in Dubai.  Too much to do here, not enough internal drive.  :)  We'd prefer to lay by the pool, but as I may or may not ever set foot in this place again, off we go - much to Marshall's horror.   Especially when I pointed out that I'd love to go back to the markets, and don't feel comfortable going alone.  However, if you read his post last night about his obstructionist approach to capitalism, maybe I'd prefer NOT to take him. ;)  

We're heading to Burj Khalifa this morning (big tall building), and as you already know, we hit the Gold Souk (market) last night.  So I have pics, and will have more later, but no idea when I'll have time to post them.  At 2:30 today we leave for a desert safari, complete with camel ride, dune buggy riding, arabic dinner and belly dancers.  I presume it will be tourist cheesy, but fun.  Thus, more photo opps that I will try to get posted in the morning.

In the meantime, I'd have to say that Dubai is pretty cool.  Clean, traffic more Chicago than Istanbul (wasn't sure what to expect there), and the overall feel is Vegas/Phoenix with a lot more ethnicity mixed in.  The city was essentially started in the mid1800s, and grew from 800 tribesman to its current size of ~ 2 million.  Most of it is brand new, and we haven't even hit the opulent part yet.  That starts today.  Off to the biggest malls in the world.  With Marshall.  Yeah, that's gonna go well.  ;)   More on that tomorrow. 

Marshall 1

Marshall: 12/27/12
Okay, we have just made it through one full day of being in Dubai, UAE.  While I can still remember who I am and what I did today (I'm kind of tired), I'll fill you in on how we've been doing so far.  The getting here part was actually pretty good, given that we had to travel half way around the world.  Our fun started at O'Hare where we, for the first time, did not have any delays getting our flying fun started!!!! (I know!  GASP!)  We landed at Heathrow London 8 hours later on schedule.  It was my first time to Heathrow and I had no idea the place was so cavernously huge.  We took a bus to the train to our plane and other than another passenger dropping her duty free package, we boarded and took off with little incident.  The 5 hour wait before the actual flying part was by far the most painful part, but it was worth it to see the slightly large English woman walking by in her one piece captain jack outfit that was just a bit too tight for her figure... Ewwwww.
We took off from OHare at 6 pm.  We flew for 8 hours, sat for 5 more hours and then flew for 7 more hours to finally get to Dubai.  I don't sleep in airports or on airplanes, so I had been awake for, um, well, way the hell too long.  To say that my mind was in a fog would be to give it the benefit of the doubt.  While we waited in the customs line in Dubai it was quite amusing to watch the 20 something year old Dubai men and woman working the customs lines at 2 am local time.  They treated the immense lines like any proper government employee --- being annoyed at people without proper paperwork, chatting and wandering around with the other employees, and generally not really giving a hoot about the lines of people ready to pass out from exhaustion at any moment... The only fun part was trying to remember my flight number and where we were trying to go after we finally made it to the "getting a picture/video and stamping passport" stage.
We eventually were stamped and waved on to the taxi stage where the travel gods smiled on us and got us to our hotel with minimal issues and into bed before braindeadedness fully kicked in.

Needless to say, we didn't exactly wake up in time for breakfast this morning.  Hah!  I was and still am sleep deprived and jet lagged, so once we had some complimentary tea, we made some dinner reservations and walked across the street to the Dubai museum for a taste of some local culture.  I honestly can't remember more than a few vague things about our stumble through the museum.  It wasn't bad, I was just still trying to figure out if all my body parts were still attached because I kept feeling like I was missing something (and no, I did have pants on, so all of you thinking that was it can just go stick it! Hehehe)  After a lite lunch at the hotel pub (we got to watch some champions league cricket), we headed out to the gold souq (gold-sellers market) across the river or, as the locals call it, the creek.  Walking to the water taxis was a bit of an adventure as the city is not laid out on a nice grid like most US cities, but after a couple of turns, we finally found the river and boarded what might be called a boat, but probably more like a raft with a lawn-mower on the back.  Dubai may be the city of opulence, but a taxi is pretty much the same whether you're in the US, Ecuador, Turkey, or the Middle East (land or water taxi!).
Whatever, it was a relatively short walk to the gold shops once we departed our taxi and while I was accosted a few times about purchasing various handicrafts or T-shirts, the big winner today was for watches, bags, or of all things, sunglasses.  Apparently there is a quite heavy trade in the knock-off market for these goods in Dubai.  I am happy to say that I am a fairly seasoned world traveler and did not follow any of these hawkers to their shop...  Our traipse through the gold-sellers market was a walk through some of the tackiest, biggest, and most god-awfully expensive pieces of jewelry in the world.  It is wedding season in India, so the jewelers had all the appropriate displays to draw in the brides family.  And don't forget that gold is selling at $1700 an ounce.  So some of those displays had to be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars!  We mostly looked, but did visit two shops where we were quoted reasonable prices for some pieces, but since I was along, we walked away empty-handed.  I did see a pair of diamond earrings that I thought would look great on Lacinda, but $1000 was just too much.  We were given "best price" of $850, but I told the gentleman running the shop that $500 was my limit and walked away.  I may have gone for it if he lowered it to $750, but he didn't come after us so it was his loss...  Maybe tomorrow?
Anyway, we came back to our hotel and had some amazing Indian food (butter chicken as good as I got in Udaipur India!  and that is saying something!!!!).  In addition, we got to enjoy a good Sitar player and then the band showed up with the belly-dancers!  I'd like to say that we stayed around and partied like rock stars, but the fact that we had full bellies and a couple of cocktails each meant we were more destined for bed than anything else.  So here I am, falling asleep on this keyboard, and getting this blog started.  As I have already stated, the adventure has been mostly survival at this stage, but it is only Day 1, with many more days to come...

And so it begins....

Once again, heading out into the unknown armed only with pages torn from a guidebook, some anti-malaria meds, and a vague sense of adventure tinged with apprehension.  

Yes.

It's vacation time for Cindy & Marsh! 

Stay tuned.......