The first day in Dubai

7^th August 2012

Shortly after arriving at our hotel we went downstairs to get some much needed breakfast. So down past the gym and the nice pool we found the hotel restaurant. To my delight it was a buffet! Baked beans, fried eggs, scrambled eggs, omelettes, grilled tomatoes, turkey bacon, porridge, toast and croissants. I’m not sure how long the croissants had been in their cabinet (it was kind of like the pie cabinet in dairys) because they had a really solid crust, like you could probably knock someone out with them if you fired it with a slingshot! Of course, we ate them anyway because we had just been on a 19 hour flight with all airplane food…

Next on the agenda was going to get Afghanistan visas for Greg and myself. Tony stayed at the hotel to do some work using the Wi-Fi they have here. Dubai has this new Metro system so we caught a train to the nearest station and worked out the pricing system and got these snapper card kind of things. When we got to the Afghanistan embassy I realised I had forgotten my passport, so we just went to Dubai mall instead. And that place is huge. And the wealth in it is unbelievable. The bottom floor of it is made up of all jewellery stores, watch stores, expensive suit, dress and shoe stores, and perhaps fifty gold stores! These were all on the bottom so that the rich people could leave the car park (valet parking for their Ferraris and Mercedes of course) and head straight into their exclusive shops without having to walk too far.

 Around 2 me and Greg started getting hungry, so we went to the food court. The whole place was absolutely deserted, at 2’oclock! And, to make things worse, the only food stores open were McDonalds, Burger King, Pizza Hut, KFC, and a place called New York Chips. That place was weird, its menu consisted of the normal punnet of potato chips, then it had various toppings for it; nacho topping, tomato sauce and even butter chicken! You could get butter chicken on top of hot chips… I can only assume that this place originated in America, probably New York judging by the name! We ended up finding a Thai food place so we got some food there and as we got it Greg realised that it is Ramadan at the moment! It is a month in the Islamic religion where you can’t eat or drink during daylight hours for the whole thing! And unfortunately it is going to last for another whole week! It makes it really difficult for a tourist because you can’t even eat or drink out in public! And it is reaching temperatures of nearly 50°C! I want a bottle of water! What we ended up doing was finding a corner to hide in outside because we couldn’t eat it in the mall, even in a secluded area because there were still security guards even there…

The walk back to the Metro station was one of the longest things I have done, though it probably only took 20 minutes. The heat was intense! We walked fairly close to the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, and it was an absolute monster! I think it is almost 850m high! It gets thinner and thinner as it goes higher and higher and looks like a needle at the top. On the way back from Afghanistan we are going to go up it and look out from the observation decks! I’m really really looking forward to it!

Every Dubai Metro station looks like this. It looks very modern.

The largest piece of Acrylic in the world with the amazing Dubai Mall aquarium behind it.