Sand surfing, corn munching and people watching...

The "Desert Safari" we went on boasted of several activities - sand surfing, dirt bike rides, belly dancing, camel rides, henna painting etc.  However, as we quickly discovered, this place could use a woman's touch in management.  You get dumped off and left to your own defenses til dinner starts, which is about 2.5 hours later.  And dinner was a mad melee, with no rhyme or reason to it, served buffet style where they ran out of meat.  Oh well, we didn't come for the cuisine.  :)

So we wandered about and amused ourselves as best we could.   Marsh tried sand surfing, I snapped photos of people who weren't looking, and we tried some local corn - we were highly amused that they were doing a corn boil here, 3,000 miles away from home.  Though, I can safely say that Iowa is not in danger of losing it's place in my heart as the best sweet corn on earth.  This stuff sucked.  Big time.  :)

Marsh and Cindy - Camel Jockeys

What is there to say?   This is the part I most desired to do - camel rides.  Granted, it was a get on, go around in a circle, get off affair like a kids' pony ride at a state fair.  But better than nothing.  :)

Dune Bashing - the rollbars of death

Every now and then, Marsh and I are reminded in full color that OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration - that pesky group that enforces safety in the US) does NOT exist in other places.   Hotel windows on high floors that come WIDE open so you can fall straight out, rusty metal railings, open pits in the street, creaky staircases, wet steps, etc.  We are constantly shown what a letigious, and thus safe, country we reside in.

So when we went "Dune Bashing" on our desert safari, I was a wee bit concerned with the roll bars installed in our Land Cruiser.  And I was probably right to be concerned.  (early spoiler, nothing bad happened, other than a few screams and an occasional desire to barf on Marshall)  We were picked up at our hotel with two other couples, one from Barcelona and an Indian couple from Manchester, and off we went.  They drive about an hour away then for 15-20 minutes into the desert REALLY fast, up and over and around the sand dunes, roaring at crazy angles in 4WD with you clinging to the seat and praying they don't flip over.   Our driver said, not very reassuringly, that "no one has ever died".  To which the group collectively thought... "No one died, but there were several very serious maimings...."

But it was fun, and they drove us out to our camp for the rest of the evening's entertainment - camel rides, sand surfing, a GREAT male bedouin dancer and a so-so (we all guessed Russian) belly dancer.

World's tallest..... disappointment

Not to let down our blogging audience, but Cindy didn't plan very well, and upon our arrival in Dubai we found that ALL tickets to visit the Burg Khalifi - world's tallest building - were sold out for over a week beyond our stay.   Granted, 3 days BEFORE we showed up?  Plenty of tickets.  So score one for high season and me being an idiot.  Sigh.  Oh well.  We could have gone up - last minute - at the cool price of $250 for the two of us.  Sorry Charlie, I'd rather buy jewelry. Plus, with Google Images, I can see the view for free.  So can you.   Isn't technology wonderful!  :)

Burj Khalifi, previously Burj Dubai (until the Emirate got neck deep in debt and Abu Dhabi, whose ruling Sheik is named Khalifi, had to bail them out) is the world's tallest building at 2,722 feet.   Construction began in 2004 and it officially opened in 2010.  As you can see from this skyline pic I found on Google (too hard to shoot such a photo from a moving cab), it dwarfs everything around it.

At the base of Burj Khalifi is Dubai Mall, and a series of "dancing fountains" like the ones at the Bellagio in Las Vegas.  Though, in true Emirati style, it is "25% bigger".  :)  They don't mess around over here.  

What's under the burka.....?

We're just guessing, but this amused us.  In a country where you have to wear long pants and long sleeves to the mall, this was a very exotic and provocative display.  And the photojournalistic opportunity to catch it in the frame with a local woman, and then her husband, was just too enticing. :)   Marsh and I have joked that maybe that is all they wear under those burkas and hijabs...  super naughty lingerie.   Who knows!   Explains why there are a lot of Victoria's Secrets here....

Though, as a cultural side note, next time I want to travel with a trained anthropologist in my pocket who can explain to me the various types of burkas, hijabs, head scarves, dresses and attire adorned by the wide world of muslim women that frequent this emirate.  You have women from the middle east, Indonesia, Africa and Pakistan here - and they all dress differently.   Sometimes within the same family group!  I saw one where there was a man, three kids and two women.  One woman - full burka, just the eyes showing.  The other?   Long dress, head scarf, face showing.   What gives!  I desperately wanted to know.  First wife, second wife?  Wife or daughter?  Wife and mother-in-law?  Time to get a book or dig up a professor at UW to explain all this to me. But the clothes and the various dress was a feast for the eyes, whatever it was.  Just wish I had more pictures, but I do attempt not to be rude.  Unless I can do it when they don't see me, as below.... :) 

The worlds biggest mall, designed to make you feel poor

Friday morning we ventured over to the Dubai Mall, promoted as the world's largest.   To give you an indication, it boasts five floors, an enormous indoor aquarium, and pretty much every luxury store you can think of, and a lot you can't.  My first inkling that this was not your mothers mall was the Harry Winston jewelry store.  Harry Winston, as in the store that Hollywood starlets, with millions to their name, BORROW stuff from to wear to the Oscars.   Here that kind of bling hangs in the window as, we presume, people actually BUY IT!   Disturbing thought,  but when you'd see the sheiks, with their wives (and we do mean that in the plural,  at least sometimes) you remember that yes, there are people in the world who can buy a multi-million dollar bauble and not think twice about it. 

So we wandered the mall, more than we wanted as we got lost more than once. Though, with money comes tech.  This mall has the coolest "You are here" type info boards you've ever seen.  Since there are a zillion stores, restaurants and attractions, they need a robust way to get people around.  So each kiosk, the size of a Buick - Arabic on one side, English on the other - is fully interactive.  You type in the first letter of what you want, scroll through til you find it, tap and it literally lights up an X where you are, then tells you both verbally and visually if you need to go up or down a floor, where the escalators are, and draws a red line right to your store. 

 

Awesome, and fully useful even if you don't speak the language.  Folks of all races know what Jimmy Choo or Tiffany's is, so they know what to at least search for.  :)

 

I didn't take a lot of photos, as its hard not to capture locals and other people in them, which is considered pretty rude here.  They also have a "dress code" at the mall.  The Emirati locals are not happy with how decadent their tourists dress, they prefer below-the-knee and shoulder-covering dress at all times.  As they guide book says... "Men in shorts at the mall will be considered as having forgotten their pants"   I wore a long dress.  And Friday is jam packed with locals, as Friday & Saturday is "the weekend" here.   The people watching was beyond superb.  Women in burkas with kids in the food court!! Oh the sights I couldn't photograph to share!

Note - the whole mall does NOT look like the first couple pics, it looks more like the middle one - like a mall.  Just a very expensive one.  This area was just interesting, arabic, and somewhat lightly populated so I could take photos.   And the wall sculpture of the diving men was just too cool not to snap pics of. 

Karmic retribution.....

Sorry for the serious lack of interesting posts and updates, but we've been traveling without decent internet for days.  We have lots to share, just need time to sit down and do it!  And now, alas, we might have some time but not necessarily in the way we want.... :)

I've determined that either Marshall or I must have some serious bad karma to work off.  Maybe we're being punished for not blogging properly.  :)  Lots of stories, but this trip has had a series of small misadventures, and at the moment we are experiencing the kind of crap that makes a lot of people not want to travel....

Instead of arriving home today at 1:30 pm in Chicago, we are back in a hotel in Dubai. British Airways cancelled two back to back flights to London last night, so after arriving from Sri Lanka at 9:30 and spending two hours getting out of passport control and retrieving our bags (we changed airlines here), we find our 3 am flight cancelled.  We then spent til 4:30 am in line with a hundred other exhausted bedraggled desperate travelers trying to get rebooked.  I "sort of" have a flight out on Wednesday but as we were an American Airlines code share partner they could not actually print me new tickets, so now I have been bounced from American to BA and back, since no one seems to know how or be authorized to actually re-issue the tickets.  And it was a struggle to even FIND one to rebook.  It was scary.  They were telling people the next flights into London, on ANY airline, were not until January 12th!  So UK people were searching for flights to anywhere in Europe - Rome, Athens, Helsinki, Copenhagen, Amsterdam etc - and hoping they could take a Ryan Air or some other cut rate carrier home.   To the US, there was absolutely nothing, they couldn't even get people home sending them East via Hong Kong or Singapore, which we obviously didn't want to do anyway as we just came from that way, and it would take 36 hours to get home.  The main problem was that anyplace they looked, they could get you there, but not connected through beyond that to home.  It was bedlam.

So long story short, we have a tentative flight Dubai to Zurich, Zurich to JFK, JFK to Ohare on Wednesday, but with a razor thin 1.5 hour connection in JFK, which we will likely miss and then be stuck in New York.  Thank god Marsh doesn't teach til Monday, and hopefully I won't get my ass fired by this.  Also happy we bought travel insurance to cover some expenses.   Bright spot?  BA put us up in an airport hotel.  I was terrified, as I"ve seen "airport hotels" near Ohare - bedbug infested hell hole.  This place?  Holy batman, it's nicer than most of the hotels we've been in on our whole vacation.  And FREE!   I'll say this, if you have to get stuck somewhere, Dubai doesn't suck.  :)