It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...

Before I left for Michigan, I spent a Saturday with 2 girls from my work, Ida and Katarina hanging out at an old fashioned Christmas market at Skansen. Skansen is almost exactly like Greenfeild Village (for those of you from Michigan who know what Greenfeild Village is).

The park has some great views of the city, so I had fun being a tourist. We ate some awesome Elk meat, and I danced around the Christmas tree with all the little kids to the "Little Green Frog" song:



Afterwards Blake called and said he wanted to take night pictures in Gamla Stan (old city), and I told him that I didnt want to be out late at night. Then he reminded me that it is dark by 3:30, so for once that whole no light thing worked out for us.

My favorite thing was this cool tree that digital water drops.. check it out:

Why? Might You Ask...

So this whole crazy trip was actually set into motion about 5 years ago in 2004 when I was living in Texas and I couldn’t afford to go home to Detroit for Thanksgiving and Molly invited me to spend Turkey day with her husband, Clifton and her parents. That was the first time I had ever had Fried Turkey, and Molly’s Sweet Potato Casserole is shockingly similar to my mom’s (both are equally amazing), so I was hooked.

I was back again the next year, which was the first year with little Jacob (well little for Jacob, who was never really little):

The next year I had to miss unfortunately because I couldn’t afford the money or the time off from grad school in Seattle, so my roommate Lisa and I hosted our own little Thanksgiving. Except that it wasn’t little and 19 people crammed into our apartment.

Although the party that Lisa and I hosted was awesome and fun, (albeit slightly dramatic), Molly and Clifton commissioned for me to come down for Thanksgiving in 2007 to paint incoming Maddie’s room in a Doctor Seuss theme, because I had painted Jacobs room, and you know how those Aggie’s are with their traditions:

But by the time I got to College Station, Molly and Clifton had accepted an offer to work for Texas A&M in Qatar, and they were planning on moving before the baby arrived, so instead of painting, I hung out with the fam and ate fried turkey (pretty good deal, I know). (And for whatever reason, pictures seem to have disappeared from this year...)

So in 2008, I found myself in Sweden, craving some fried turkey. What else was a girl supposed to do? Plus I hadn’t seen Molly in a year, and I was curious about the Middle East, so I started planning. Which brings us to now (or about 2 months before now, which isn’t really relevant, so please, let’s move on...)- Blake was interested in traveling there as well, and insisted on checking out Dubai while we were in the neighborhood. (Being a structural engineer and all, he sort of has a thing for big buildings... go figure.) This added quite a bit of cost to the trip, and I was pretty skeptical at first, because I just wanted to just visit the Griffin’s, but in the end I am super-duper glad we added Dubai to the itinerary.

And now that we have the motivation, we can move on to the actual trip!

Dubai! We made it!

When we left Sweden on Saturday night, there was about 4 inches of snow on the ground, which totally ruled out my plans to wear flip-flops to the airport. I refused to wear my winter coat and boots when I knew I wouldn’t need them at all once we got to our destination. So we wore as many layers as possible in order to make it to the subway. The plane ride was rather smooth on the way there (I highly recommend Air France btw), although it was an overnight flight and neither of us slept more than 3 hours, so when we landed at Dubai at 8:30 on Sunday morning, we were pretty exhausted.

I forgot to mention that on the way out the door from our apartment, we realized that neither of us had printed off any information about our hotel (mostly my bad) and so we swung by Blake’s office to print off directions to it. Well we managed to print off the reservation information, which was booked by some random 3rd party to get a better deal, but we could not find a decent address or a map to the hotel. We were in a hurry, so we printed off the obviously crappy map and ran to catch a metro. So when we hopped into a taxi in Dubai, we figured the driver would know all the hotels, and he claimed he did. He had just never heard of ours. We showed him the map, which confused him even more, since it was terrible and showed roads crossing where they don’t cross and landmarks in completely wrong areas, but he said he would drive us to the area and look around. We drove around forever, and he even stopped several times to ask people where our hotel was, to no avail. He was getting frustrated at us for not having a phone number or address, and we were just tired and hungry and now worried that our hotel didn’t exist. Finally Blake asked him to drop us off at an internet cafe and we would deal with it from there.

After about 20 minutes online, we finally found an address for the hotel through some other obscure website, but it was not easy. We saw that we were only about a ½ mile away, so we walked there. So we finally find the Grand Palace Hotel Apartments and we go up to the reception, were they take our printed reservations and tell us to sit down. Then they proceed to look at it confusedly and hand it off to several people who also look confused. I was so happy at first that the hotel existed, but now I was worried that the company I booked it through (which was admittedly sketchy) took my money and ran, and that we didn’t have reservations. After about 10 minutes of this, Blake asks them if there as a problem, and they say, no, just that our room isn’t clean yet. Ok, whew. So we waited in amusement after that because they sent about 10 people up to clean our room and there was a lot of yelling and commotion between them all. Finally, around 11:30, we got to our hotel room.

At first the hotel room seemed fairly nice. It was large, and spacious, but a few things were a little off. The first and weirdest thing was that there was very little toilet paper. Apparently they rely heavily on the bidet, and I think the tp was just there for show or something. Even when we ran out, they didn’t replace the roll. Luckily they don’t use napkins either, but instead they use Kleenex, so there was plenty of available material. TMI… I know. But it was weird and I feel like I have to share this sort of thing with you. Also, they had 2 huge closets, but no hangers, so there was no where to unpack.

Of course, there are other weird things about the Middle East, like no public displays of affection (PDAs), and the men there can’t touch women at all, so no shaking hands between men and women, women should dress conservatively, so no bare shoulders and visible thighs, no pork. A lot of rules. It wasn’t as bad as it sounds; you just had to be aware of it.

So the first day (after a much needed nap) we decided to check out Bur Dubai, which is the old part of town. We stumbled across an amazing restaurant where it seemed pretty authentic, where they kicked a guy out of a table so that we could sit down. We felt bad, but there wasn’t really much we could do about it, so, meh. After that we walked to the Creek, which separates Bur Dubai from Deira.

For most of the day we just wandered through the different souks and throughout the area. You can take a water taxi from Bur Dubai to Deira, for about $0.25, which was one of my favorite parts.

We didn’t realize that the whole city shuts down until about 6 pm, so a lot wasn’t open at first.

But we did run across this museum that showed historic life for native emirates that was pretty cool. The guide book said that they may offer you free food and tea, which we thought was a weird thing to say, but sure enough, they offered us tea and snacks! It was awesome! We hung out in a tent in a cute little courtyard drinking tea.

After that we went to the gold souks (which were finally open!) where people tried to sell us many Chanel handbags, Rolex watches, and every other fake knock off you can think of. We knew we were going to a souk in Doha with Molly, so we just window shopped.

New New Dubai

The next day we were determined to see the new part of Dubai (the rest of it, basically). So we took a taxi over to the Dubai Emirates Mall to go to Ski Dubai. Yep, first ski of the season is in the middle of a desert. It was pretty cool, they give you everything you need, snow pants, jacket, boots, skis, etc. I decided to go snow boarding, which was probably not a wise decision since I haven’t gone snow boarding in about, oh, 6 years or so.

The thing is, you can’t be a beginner, otherwise they won’t let you on. It took me about 20 minutes to get down the first run, and the workers kept stopping to ask if I was ok, and I had to convince them that I wasn’t a beginner, which I am sure I looked like. But after about the 3rd run, I was getting the hang of it, and didn’t fall (as much). It was nice because it wasn’t crowded, so we didn’t have to wait for the lifts. You pay for 2 hours, but we were sort of bored after about an hour or so, since the runs weren’t very long. Blake is a pretty good skier, so it wasn’t very exciting for him, but it was still cool to say you went skiing in the desert.

Afterwards we walked around the mall a bit. We had heard the malls were really big and cool, but the few we saw just seemed like normal malls, just bigger.

Later that day we went to one of the public beaches next to the Burj Al Arab (the big hotel you see in just about every ad for Dubai). The beaches are pretty touristy, so you can wear a bathing suit without fear or getting arrested or harassed. (I read that some of the beaches have problems with creepy people who stare, but I didn’t really see it.) I definitely like the idea of going skiing and then going to the beach. I could get used to that. The sun was setting and we got some amazing pics of the Burj Al Arab with the sunset.

Cool photo by Blake:

When the sun went down we still had some time to kill before we had a reservation at the Sky Bar at the Burj Al Arab, so we walked over to the Jumeirah hotel. There were a bunch of camel statues that I wanted to get a picture taken with, so I ran over to it to pretend I was petting it, and BAM! My leg is in a 3 foot hole. Turns out the statue was a fountain, and I missed the whole drain thing, and so not only did I scrape up my leg, but my leg was soaking wet, as we are about to try and walk into a hotel. In retrospect it was pretty funny, but the hilarity of the situation was questionable for a good 5 minutes.

After the whole leg stuck in a fountain drama, we got ready for our big night out at the Burj Al Arab. We walked into the Jumeirah like we owned the place, got changed out of our beach clothes and into our “baller” clothes at that hotel so that we didn’t show up to the 7 star hotel looking like we had just gone skiing and to the beach beforehand.

We made our way up to the Burj Al Arab and after several security checks, we were in! It was pretty crazy inside, super nice.

It was cool to be inside and at the sky bar, even with the $75 minimum. You would think after $75 worth of drinks, that would have made us pretty tipsy, but turns out, $75 only gets you about 3 drinks. They actually have a drink in there that costs about $8000 dollars, and is the world’s most expensive drink!!! I think that excessiveness pretty much sums up what it is like in Dubai... just excess. Even though it was expensive, we were both glad we splurged on it; it was part of the whole Dubai experience. Here is Blake’s best impression of Bill Murray in “Lost in Translation”:

Afterwards we had the taxi drop us off at a small little Lebanese restaurant, and he was pretty surprised to be dropping a customer from the Burj off at a cheap little restaurant. But it was delish!

Big Big Building

On our last day in Dubai, Blake hadn’t had enough of brand spanking new giganto buildings, so we hired a taxi to take us out to see the new, not yet finished, Burj Dubai. It is pretty unreal

It is hard to see just how huge it is, but this puts it in a little more perspective (Thanks to Byron who stitched this photo together):

After that we grabbed our bags and headed to the airport in Sharjeh (town next to Dubai) to make our way to Doha in Qatar to visit Lil Miss Molly and her family!

If you want to see a slideshow of all of our pics from Dubai, click here.

Doha!

First off, it was sooo soo great to see Molly and Clifton and see how big Jacob has gotten and to finally meet Maddie. If you want to see my slideshow of the pics of the kids (I went a little overboard, but they are soo cute!) Click here. Second, this part of the trip was amazing as well! It was a lot more relaxing- we didn’t have to worry about planning, or driving, or getting anywhere. Thanks Molly and Clifton!

The first day Molly wanted us see the campus that she and Clifton work at. They both work for Texas A&M at Qatar which is part of Education City, which is a huge campus made up of several other campuses.

It is definitely a different learning environment than I am used to. For example, one of the sophomore level English classes was having a poster presentation in the lobby. Oh that’s not weird, huh? Did I mention it had a DJ?!! Playing house trance?!! Yeah. A little different!

After we toured the campus, we went to pick up Jacob from day care and to go grocery shopping, which lucky for us was in a mall. Jacob was just excited because he got to ride in a shopping cart in the mall (note his cute Sweden soccer jersey that Blake and I got him:

Not a normal mall mind you, a mall that was designed to be a mix between the Venetian and Bellagio, and appropriately named the Vallagio. It was complete with a canal and boat ride… no joke!

Later that day, after getting some playtime in with Jacob

Molly took me to go get some henna done. (Editors note: I googled henna and the wikipedia showed me this awesome picture of a camel eating a hand covered in henna. Look here for yourself.) Her friend Heather came with us, and we went to the local Saloon, where absolutely No Men’s were allowed:

I couldn’t take pictures once inside (it would be disrespectful), but we sat in a room and I stuck my arms and legs out and had a girl on each arm and one drawing on my leg. They do the entire design free-hand and it only takes them about 10 minutes- it is very impressive. It is sort of like a thick gel when it goes on, and then you have to sit there for awhile so that it doest smudge. This is my arm while it is drying (you can see you thick it is at first):

We had plans to meet one Molly’s friend, Michelle, for dinner, so we didn’t have time to wait for it to completely dry, so we had to face the dangerous sidewalk barefoot, and so that the designs on our feet wouldn’t smudge (which mine did anyways):

We went to a nice restaurant afterwards, but by then our henna was dry, and starting to flake off. (The thick gel dries, and then flakes off, and then you are left with a pretty design) So by the time we were done there was a huge mess of black stuff under the table. Opps. Oh well.

Here is a close-up of some of the designs the next day:

A Real Thanksgiving!!

The next day was Thanksgiving!!! Molly had invited a few of the American grad students from A&M Qatar, so that they could have a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. All in all, there were 19 people there. And they even managed to have fried Turkey! Justin (who I used to work with in Texas) mailed the deep fryer all the way from Texas! Their neighbors were also going to be frying a turkey and built a quite nifty contraption to lower and raise the fried turkey:

The food was awesome, and it was awesome to have a real thanksgiving. After a lot of eating, we went across the street, where their neighbors in the compound were having a more formal Thanksgiving dinner, where we ate some more. Yumm… All of the Thanksgiving pics can be found here.

Dune Bashing

The next morning while we were getting ready for our big Dune Bashing trip, a funny thing happened. It rained. In the desert. Yep- I am officially the rainmaker! It has rained in every single desert that I have ever gone to. Ever. To put this into perspective, this was the first time it has rained since Molly and Clifton moved here in February. They were pretty excited:

I was a little worried, but the rain stopped before we left for trip to the Dunes. Our driver picked us up and we drove about 45 minutes to the other side of Qatar. When we got there our driver let out the air in the tires so that the tires got better traction in the dunes, or something like that.

Then the adventure began. There are really no words to describe the craziness of the dune bashing. We made plenty use of the “oh shit” bars, that is for sure. I still do not know how we did not flip over. This video doesn’t even begin to capture how scary it was:

We made a few stops along the way to enjoy the view:

After an hour or so of the crazy ride, we reached our destination- a private beach resort:

We hung out here for a few hours, had some lunch, went swimming, went sand boarding, rode a camel, you know, normal stuff.

Molly was the first to get on the camel, which was not very happy.

I was the next to give it a try. Blake took some video to capture the noises this thing was making:

After a few hours of relaxing, and watching these guys dance-

We hoped back in for some more dune bashing. Our driver wanted to show us where a lot of the locals go. They take their SUVs out to these mudflats and go crazy. Mind you, we thought that our driver was crazy (although we all had a lot of confidence in his driving), and our driver said that no, these people are crazy:

Last Day in Doha :(

Saturday was our last day, and Molly took us on a tour of downtown Doha and to the souks in the morning to get some shopping done. Downtown Doha is much bigger than I had expected it to be. There is a lot of construction here as well, like Dubai. Here is a view of the Doha skyline:

We had a lot of fun popping in and out of the little stalls in the souks where we bought all sorts of gifts and knick-knacks:

After getting some shopping done, we went to this Iranian restaurant which was pretty much made for me. It was so sparkly!

It was cool to eat traditionally and sitting on the floor with no table, but it really really hurts yours knees and bum sitting like that after awhile, I’m not gonna lie.

Sadly after that, it was time to go... :( It was sad to say goodbye to Molly, but hopefully (hint, hint) the Griffins can visit Blake and I in Stockholm on their way back home to the States one of these times!

If you want to see all of my pics from Doha, click here.