Dubai

Hello from Terminal 3 of the Dubai International Airport. We have spent the last 2 nights in this very different city, taking advantage of our flight stop-over to see what this "Las Vegas of the Middle East" is all about. Dubai is modern, organized, clean and friendly. We took the shiny new metro to our budget hotel and spent the first evening at the Dubai Museum inside the old city fort. It had a fascinating and interactive display about Dubai history and life. We enjoyed some Indian food for dinner, strolling 'Hindi Lane', as our neighborhood is primarily a South Asian area. The 12-hour time change hit us hard around 8pm so we called it an early night. The next day was spent learning about old Dubai in the morning and new Dubai in the afternoon. We toured the many 'Heritage' sites, old traditional homes and forts that have been beautifully restored and filled with historical artifacts, documents, photos and recreated scenes. The museums had a lot of informational videos and dioramas, depicting traditional games. We were offered free coffee, tea and sweet dates at several places too! We took a people water taxi across the Creek to see some of the sites, on a very traditional wooden boat, the main mode of pedestrian transport across the river, as there are no bridges, just an underground tunnel for cars. In the afternoon we traveled out of the old center of the city to the new high-rise zone, which struck us as the Miracle Mile from LA. We passed the Burj Khalifa on the train, the tallest building in the world. It is super beautiful and shiny, and especially impressed Janet, but as the day was rather hazy we decided not to go up it. Instead we went to the Mall of the Emirates, the largest and most over-the-top of the many shopping malls that make Dubai famous. Inside this indoor wonderland we viewed the famous indoor ski slope and many, many high-end shops. We also walked from the Mall to the most iconic hotel, the Burj Al Arab, shaped like a sail and set on a man-made island. We couldn't get close, but did discover a Disneyland-esque Aladdin shopping center, full of Russian tourists especially. We headed back to the old town on the bus, Luc stopping off to see the Jumeirah mosque, one of the most beautiful of the thousands of mosques spread across this city. Overall, Dubai was an interesting mix of tradition and ultra-modernity and was worth staying the extra night to see. And now on to Johannesburg for another overnight and finally back to our little Tete airport on Friday.