DUBAI, UAE--Thursday and Friday, April 18-19, 2013

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The ship left Muscat, Oman at 8:00 pm and arrived in Dubai, United Arab Emirates at 2:00 the next afternoon where the temperature was 99 degrees and the sky was very hazy with a layer of brown crap. The port was very modern with wifi available and diet cokes sold in the terminal’s mini, mini-mart.

Our original plan for the two days we were in Dubai, was to take a hop-on, hop-off bus to tour the city. We had also thought to get our hair cut and perhaps find a laundry-mat to wash up our dirty clothes. Heat and poor air quality called for a revision of these plans.

Got off the ship with no emigration card and walked into the terminal. We decided to check out the hop-on night tour as we thought it would be much cooler and maybe some of the haze would clear as soon as the sun went down. The tour provided a shuttle bus to a mall where you could then catch the “Big Red Double Decker Bus.” Since we weren’t to catch the shuttle until 6:00ish, we decided to finish up some of our blogs to have them ready to send the following day, and to finish packing, as we had to move staterooms.

Caught the shuttle bus and then bumped our way over numerous speed bumps and out of the port facility. Right in front of the port gates, across the freeway, was a huge Carrefour store, but we saw no way to easily get to it. The bus took the highway going the opposite way and headed into town.

Everywhere we looked were modern, new buildings most of them built in the last few years. Got off the shuttle bus and waited in front of the very upscale Burjuman mall for the double decker tour bus. We thought it was now cool enough and with the bus moving it should be OK to sit upstairs under a canvas top. If not, we could always move downstairs where it was air conditioned.

The English speaking guide gave us some information about Dubai as we started out. A hundred years ago, way prior to the discovery of oil, it was just a pearling village. Now it is one of the world’s fastest growing cities, an international center for free trade, and a luxury travel destination.

One of the things she mentioned was that 80%!o(MISSING)f the people who now live in Dubai are ex-pats—not native to the UAE at all. She mentioned how Dubai was trying to compete with everyone else by building the tallest, the most sumptuous 7 star hotels, and the most unusually designed buildings. For example, they got permission from England to build a tower modeled after Big Ben in London, but were told they couldn’t put a clock on the tower, so they built it twice as tall. New York has one Chrysler building, so Dubai copied the design, but built two, side-by-side.

She mentioned that plans are being made to build another building taller than the Burj Khalifa and construction has been started for an underwater hotel. It costs $150 for a reservation to go to the observation platform on the 124^th floor of the Burj Khalifa and about $4000 to spend the night in the hotel section of the tower. I forget the amount to purchase a condo there—I know it was millions.

We really enjoyed the 3-hour tour of the city looking at the unique architecture outlined in lights, the lights in street medians and around trees in the malls, and the busyness of the place. Traffic was heavy as we rode along the wide streets following an elevated metro line that covers the downtown area and has two separate stops for the Dubai Mall as it is 1 km long.

Further out we drove around the Burj Al Arab building that has a sphere off the backside that is a platform for a restaurant. You might remember the tv commercials of various tennis players and golfers playing their sports on the platform.

Then, we drove as far north as the Palm Island Jumeirah and drove down the “trunk” to where there was a turn around at the top near the Atlantis the Palm Hotel. Fronds (streets) come off of the palm “trunk” and villas, uniform in both color and style, line all the fronds that stick out into the water.

We started back south from there and then went onto another main drag and rode on the other side of the tall buildings so that we got a different view of them---just spectacular! Passed the Egyptian themed pyramid shaped building called the Wafi, but were not able to see the sound and light show because there was a youth conference in town and the Sheikh decided to cancel the show. Also were shown both the Emirates and Infinity towers.

We were returned to the mall we started from, and since the shuttle bus had stopped running, we shared a taxi ride with another passenger and got back aboard ship around 10:00 pm. We made it in time by half an hour to still get dinner in the Windjammer Café.

Friday dawned early, as a great many passengers departed this morning and we needed to have our baggage tagged and ready to be moved by 8 am. The view was clearer this morning and so Valerie went up to the 10^th floor deck and retook some of the pictures of the Dubai skyline that she had taken on the way in.

We spent the rest of the day getting moved and settled into our new stateroom and checking and sending e-mails from the terminal building. I think Valerie sent out 5 blog entries this day. Valerie was also able to purchase about 12-15 diet Cokes and some diet Pepsi since she bought out all the coke the store had. Sodas are $2.50 on board ship and are about $.75-1.00 per can on shore.

Our new room on deck 3 is configured differently than the first one we had right below it on deck 2. We do have noisy neighbors this time that we can’t figure out what they are doing that hits the side of our common wall sounding like someone hitting it with a fist as well as why they seem to slam their stateroom door. We saw them yesterday during our safety drill and they are just a normal looking couple---had thought maybe the sound was children in the bunk bed. This mini-bar refrig is superior, which is not saying much, since the one in the old stateroom didn’t get cold at all. We liked the cabin steward on the 2^nd better than our new one---I think his understanding of English is greater.

About 600 people are continuing with us on the new cruise on from Dubai with about 700 new people getting on at Dubai to cruise to Rome. We will spend 6 days sailing to our next port of call that will be Aqaba, Jordan.

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