Dubai

Hey everyone!
I was writing this while sitting at the airport in Dubai. My laptop batteries died before I was able to upload this, so just read what I wrote a few days ago:
We got here this morning at 6am local time and our next flight to Shanghai is going to leave in a few hours at 2:50am. As you might have recognized, we have had a lot of time to spend here in Dubai so far and of course, we didn’t just stay at the airport. Luckily, we were able to store our luggage, so we only took our backpacks filled with swimsuit, towel, camera and a few other things and went sightseeing.
First stop: jumeirah beach!

By the way, it is not only hot over here (35 degrees Celsius = close to 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade), the humidity makes it feel even worse. You don’t have to do much and you will start sweating like crazy when you are outside. So the beach seemed like the perfect place to go.
The taxi driver was pretty nice and since he used a taximeter, I believe that the price was fair. At the beach we had the idea to spend the day at that part of the beach that belongs to the 5 star Hilton hotel. So we went ahead and asked how much that was going to be. The answer was “two fifty per person for the whole day”. In our eyes that seemed great because 2,50 AED equals about 50 cents and we decided to go in and pay. We also found out that towels were included in that price, also the use of changing rooms, showers and the hotel pool!! We thought that we were very lucky, but then it turned out that “two fifty” meant two hundred and fifty which equals 50 Euros. That was a little too much for our budget and we went to the regular beach. I admit, it was kind of naïve to think that we could stay at the Hilton beach for that cheap, but we were still pretty disappointed.
Anyway, we found a place to lie down at and it was crazy hot outside. There’s nothing wrong with that, just the fact that the water seemed to be even hotter than the air which made it impossible to cool off. That’s why we left the beach right after our last water bottle was empty and we decided to go to a place with air conditioning.
Second stop: Dubai Mall! The largest mall that I have ever seen and just the food court seemed to have the size of the mall near my hometown. Not only the 1200 stores inside this 4-story-building were very impressive, but also the humongous aquarium and the ice rink inside (!) the mall. All in all, it seemed very American, which was a little disappointing in my eyes. I got to eat at Taco Bell which I hadn’t done in quite a while, but that’s about it. All the other stores weren’t much cheaper than German stores. The fountains outside were pretty impressive. It reminded me of the fountains in front of the Bellagio in Las Vegas, but from my point of view the show in Dubai was better. The tallest skyscraper that exists on this earth is right next to Dubai Mall. It was unbelievable how high it was (800m). My neck started hurting after a little while. But I heard that the construction of a taller building in some other country is already in progress.
Of course, we were hungry by that time, but since “Ramadan” is taking place right now, Islamic people are not allowed to eat until the sun has set. This means that 4 hungry Germans have to wait until 7pm until they can buy anything to eat. Seems unusual to us, but there was no other way for us than to wait and eat when it was time for dinner.
We waited outside and watched the sunset:

After the Mall, we went to Dubai Creek, a small river that is situated in the middle of the city. We were told that a nice thing to do would be to cross this river by water taxi. So we did. Water taxi seems to be another word for an ancient small ship. It was pretty scary, but a nice experience and it only cost 20 Cents to go from side to another. Eventually, we took the taxi to the airport and took a shower at a hotel (man, this felt good!) and got some rest at the hotel bar. 10$ for one small beer was expensive, but they had wireless internet and we were tired so we stayed until it was time to catch our airplane. In summary, Dubai was interesting and there were many things that I hadn’t seen before, but I don’t think that I will ever want to live there. If you want to fill up your car, one liter of petrol only costs 0,30€ and the buildings were amazing, but I wouldn’t want go there for more than a few days. Now it’s time to go, I’m looking forward to Shanghai and I’m very excited!

Tobias

Here you can see us (me, Flo, Andi and Sven) in Dubai: