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It is of course still crazily hot, so we spend the morning lazing around the hotel's lukewarm pool.
We've booked late afternoon tickets to go up the Burj Khalifa, so we head off to the adjacent Dubai Mall, which we read is the largest mall in the world. Of course it is. Judging by everything we've heard to date, I'm sure that if any other mall somewhere had the temerity to try to outdo it, the Dubai Mall would just quickly tack on a couple more floors and restore the natural order. It is indeed massive, and we need to get a map to try to get our bearings.
There's a two storey high thirty metre long aquarium in the middle of the mall, and one of its walls is a single pane of glass. That's some bit of glass. I wonder how thick it is. Issy says she wouldn't want to be around if it broke and unleashed a bunch of sharks and stingrays onto unsuspecting shoppers. The aquarium is jam packed with a vast array of underwater creatures, and you can apparently pay money to dive with the sharks in full view of passing shoppers. We see
a man in a wetsuit swimming in among the sharks, cleaning the aquarium with an underwater vacuum cleaner. I hope he's paid well.
We collect our Burj Khalifa tickets and then line up to go through the same sort of security screening that you get at airports. We're told the lift takes only 60 second to get up to the 124th floor. My ears pop, but other than that it doesn't feel like we've gone very quickly up more than 100 storeys. The view is spectacular despite the haze. We can just see the group of man made islands offshore which looks like a map of the world. It doesn't seem to be connected to the mainland by any sort of bridge, so I suppose that everyone who lives there must have a boat. I'm sure they can afford it. It looks like the whole of the built up bit of Dubai is on a small strip of land no more than a handful of kilometres wide along the coast, and beyond that everything looks to be sand. If they want to expand they seem to do it by building more massive multi-storey buildings, rather than building further out
into the desert. There must be more massive multi-storey buildings per square kilometre here than just about anywhere else on the planet, which seems a bit strange in such an otherwise desert-filled country. Maybe they're trying to win a competition. They do seem to like to have the biggest and best of everything here. I wonder if the rulers had deprived childhoods, although on reflection this seems a tad unlikely.
Lots of people are taking photos of themselves with selfie sticks. I don't understand the obsession with these; do people think that no one will believe that they have been somewhere unless they can produce a photo of themselves standing in front of it? Emma bought one to go to New Zealand, and I threatened to use it as a golf club. We see a group of five people in full traditional local dress. The man is dressed in long white robes, and the four women are all covered from head to foot in black, including their faces. I can only just make out their eyes through small slits in their headwear. The man takes a photo of the four women, and we're left wondering how he will know
afterwards which one was which. Issy says that maybe he'll be able to tell by their heights. If so I hope one of them doesn't have a growth spurt.
Back on the ground we grab a spot on the edge of the lake next to the Mall to watch the spectacular Dubai Fountain show which runs for four minutes every half hour in the evenings. It plays to loud music, and the music and fountain routine changes every half hour.
We manage to get a table on a balcony at a middle eastern restaurant overlooking the lake. The food is excellent, and so too is the view of the fountains. The Burj Khalifa starts to light up, and the ever-changing lighting patterns are hypnotic.
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