Dreaming in Dubai

Flynn slept through the whole business class experience although he did have fun playing with the seat (it even had a massage function), and checking out the show bag. Downstairs in the cattle club, Jason and Campbell had a whole row to themselves, so at least they were not too uncomfortable. We reached Dubai in a bit of a sleep deprived fog, but managed to get a taxi to our hotel reasonably easily. The roads are an experience. Our driver was speeding, weaving in an out of the seven lanes, breaking hard, and I THINK, praying to himself while he drove. It turns out that this is the norm for Dubai, as our next two cab trips were exactly the same. To our delight, the room was ready for us at the hotel, even though it was only 9 in the morning. We were upgraded to a four bedroom, six bathroom apartment that was larger than our house. We are on the 27th floor so we have a great view of Dubai from above. We are all feeling a little hazy so decided to give any challenging experiences a miss. After showers and a bit of a rest we walked over to the mall of the Emirates. We checked out the ostentatious indoor ski area and watched people playing in the snow through the wall of windows at our Cheesecake shop lunch break. We then wandered through our favourite kind of shop - a supermarket. In this case it was hard to figure out what we were looking at, given the Arabic script. The number of ways you could buy nuts by the scoop was pretty interesting- in the shell, out of the shell, chopped roughly and chopped finely. I was going to take a photo of the white robes and the black rope headpieces, hanging on hooks next to the socks and undies, but I thought it might be culturally insensitive so I refrained. We napped all afternoon and then went out for our final trip dinner, the Dubai Hard Rock. The local legendary burger changes with every location, and the Dubai one had dates, chutney and cream cheese. The mall where the restaurant was was full of people in all the varieties of robes and headdresses. You could see the shoes of the ladies when they walked, ranging from sneakers to sky high stilettos. Back at the hotel, we slept a bit more before an early pickup to fly home. I'm writing this on the plane with about three hours to go before we land.