February 11-13
We weren’t really all that interested in visiting Dubai. We didn’t really like Las Vegas, so… samesies, right? Wrong. Really not even close and I’m not sure why that thought was in my head. After we ended up with a layover in Dubai, we extended it to be there for 36 hours. I grabbed us a nice hotel in downtown and Michael started looking into restaurants. As soon as we started looking into the city, we started getting excited for it. Dubai is awesome! Duck bananas!!
We flew in late and went straight to bed. We almost thought about going out but it was too late and we were too tired. Better to start fresh the next day. So we got up, Michael went for a run and I went to enjoy a fancy and free breakfast at the hotel. Afterwards, we went to the mall to see the famous ski slopes! Here’s a fancy/amazing waterfountain:
Here’s the aquarium complete with divers:
Here are the super fancy shoes:
Here’s the Souk:
Here are the beautiful/incredible umbrellas which I love:
It has famous fountains that overlook the tallest building in the world:
This mall is incredible! And has no ski slopes. What!? Apparently Dubai has two incredible malls and we got lucky enough to end up at the “wrong” one. So we were going to have to hunt down the ski slopes after lunch. Michael booked us at this delicious Chinese restaurant, Zheng He’s, that overlooked the sail building. Boom! Knocking GDM’s recommendations off the list!
So after a little more research, we found the second mall and the ski slopes:
It was cool, but definitely didn’t want to pay to ski. So we watched for a bit, Michael thought about buying this hat and then we went back to the hotel for a short nap.
So this hat is supposed to be a license plate. Apparently, the more important you are in Dubai (rich and royalty), the lower your license plate number is. Apparently one man paid $9 million for the number 5. We happened to have lunch in the same hotel that was hosting the World Government Summit, so that might have added to our luck, but we saw 18 and 3 and were pumped about it.
So back to that nap… afterwards we went to the top of the tallest building in the world, obviously!
The Burj Khalifa is 828 meters high and what I think is cool is that Michael worked with one of the engineering firms that helped build it. This was definitely a cool tour for Michael. He was geeked about all the technical stuff surrounding the erection of a building that height.
Plus… really incredible views. The pictures do not do this city justice. What I thought was incredible about the tour was that the pictures taken during the construction were so different than the way the city looks now. Just 10 years ago, the city was almost nothing comparatively speaking. It was incredible. Plus the Burj was beautiful from the outside too:
Afterwards, we headed to dinner at a Thai place called Thiptara that was right on the fountains and we had a clutch table right next to the water. Now I will say, this is similar to Las Vegas – the fountains at the Bellagio.
Apparently there are 12 or 16 songs that get rotated. We saw Michael Jackson’s Thriller (complete with spooky mist), two more traditional songs that we didn’t recognize and Time to Say Goodbye sung by Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman. Here are two small clips. Really incredible!
https://www.thatsonourlist.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/img_1024.trim_.mov https://www.thatsonourlist.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/img_1024.trim-1.movSo that was it for Dubai. I’m beginning to sound like a broken record, but we didn’t have enough time. The city was expensive (especially the meals) but I think we’d definitely come back. Everything was excessive and incredible.