McGuire's of Arabia: Dubai

Yes, we had another week off of school. It may seem as though we never work, but that's because most of our days off are bunched together in these first 4 months of school. This time, we had off because of another Muslim holiday, Eid al-Adha. It's a Muslim celebration of the time when Abraham was going to sacrifice his son Ishmael but Allah intervened. Sounds kind of familiar.

During our time off, we decided to take a babymoon to Dubai. We have some friends that work there at the American School of Dubai. It was wonderful to see them again. Jake and Jen even let us stay at their place while they went camping in Oman. It was a time of relaxing and seeing the sights of Dubai. It is quite amazing how Dubai has grown in the last decade. They really do know how to go above and beyond everyone's expectations. If you didn't know, Dubai is home of the tallest building in the world. The Burg Kalifa stands 828 meters tall (2716.5 feet) with over 160 stories. We were allowed to go to the 124th floor which was high enough for me. It was quite amazing the view you can get of the city from that viewpoint. Malls are something else that Dubai sure knows how to do. There are a ton of malls in Dubai, but we only went to two of them. The first was the Mall of the Emirates. It rivals the Mall of America in size and also has a ski slope inside. Yes, a ski slope! You pay to rent all the equipment (snowpants, boots, goggles, skis, but not hat or mittens-go figure!). We were really excited to go into the snow park portion since we won't be able to go home for the hoidays this year. However, they wouldn't let us in because I'm pregnant. We tried to explain that we're from Wisconsin and know how to walk on snow, but that didn't seem to matter. I may of actually cried. The other mall we went to was the Mall of Dubai which has a cinema, aquarium, and underwater zoo in it. Plus, they have a fountain that performs a water show to music about 9 times a night. It truly was amazing.

There are still more authentic parts of Dubai, but they tend to be quite touristy now. They have sections of souqs (markets) that are grouped by what they sell. There is the spice souq, gold souq, and textile souq. These were neat to walk through, but not much different from our shops in Jubail.

One thing that we really enjoyed was going out to eat. You could say we indulged all week (I was even allowed a dessert a day!) We really love good food and Dubai had an abundance of amazing restaurants with a huge variety of foods. One of my favorites was Yum! where we got fairly authentic Thai food. I got a Thai chicken in mango that was so good I almost made myself sick eating so much of it.

That's about it for our trip. Below are some pictures....

Tara