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!