Day 214, Dubia, United Arab Emirates
We got to Dubai at 4 in the morning and had a 23 hour layover before our flight to Bangkok, Thailand. With that long of a layover, Emirates gives you a bunch of complimentary services including a hotel room, shuttle there and back, meals. Both breakfast and lunch were extensive buffets and friendly to many different cultures. I had spicy curry for breakfast along with my hashbrowns–it’s only for the brave.
From breakfast we had time to do one major thing. Cali said she wanted to jetpack around the Burj Khalifa, the largest building in the world. Would she really do it if we said yes? She would. There wasn’t time to do some kind of desert trek, and we have plenty of beaches in FL, so we all agreed we’d have to go up the Burj.
The only tickets still available for the day were for 8am. It was 7 and we were propped up at the table still having curry for breakfast. Seemed like we had plenty of time. But with the lack of sleep it’s possible we weren’t functioning on all cylinders. But we managed to find a taxi, who first had to drive us to an ATM so he could get paid, and then to the Dubai Mall. You have to walk through the mall to get to the entrance to the Burj Khalifa, and she’s a monster. There was everything there from a Cheesecake Factory to Pottery Barn, like we never left home. That, to us, isn’t a selling point, maybe if we lived here.
We were a bit late for our 8 am tour, which really wasn’t a tour at all, just an elevator ride. We rode the fastest elevator in the world, traveling three floors every second. At the top we got to see Dubai from above. Dubai has done most
of its expansion in the past twenty years. Everywhere you look, there are cranes. It’s as if the entire city is a construction site. The buildings are often small and very tall, like someone built them with lego.
There are some cities where you touch down for a few hours, and you get a sense there is depth out there that you’d like to come back to explore for a longer period of time. For me, this is not one of those cities. My first impression of the city, which could change if we stayed here for a while, is that it didn’t have much to offer past the shopping and beaches (which we have in abundance at home), and one incredibly tall building. I kept thinking, let us know when you’ve developed a real personality other than just being the new development in the desert. But hey, the building was tall, and the elevator, fast. So that’s something.