Dubai - 10th to 13th April 2009

Dramas aplenty on the way to Dubai. We were unable to checkin online for our flight, so rang our airline at about 10.30am only to find out that the 9.30pm Thursday night flight that we had booked had been rescheduled to 10.15am. So we were put on the 3.30pm flight which meant we had to skip work for the afternoon, only to get to Heathrow where an abandoned bag caused a bomb scare and an evacuated terminal 3! Finally, we left London at about 5.30pm.

Arriving at our accomodation in Dubai on Friday morning at about 6.30am, we slept most of the morning before a lazy day strolling around the Dubai Marina area and having lunch at the Hilton on Jumeirah beach. This is where we stayed, right on the beach, with a colleague of Warrens.

View over the Palm Jumeirah:Ours was the big glass building on the right.
View of the Hilton/beach from our apartment:
We had an hour or so to burn at the pool in our apartment complex. This is the pool from the lift up to our 41st floor apartment: Friday night we had a drink and then dinner at a chinese restaurant at the Hotel Mina Al Salam (if you want a wine with dinner you have to eat at a hotel restaurant), looking across to the Burj Al Arab:

Saturday morning we got a taxi (the public transport is non-existant, but luckily taxis seem like the only cheap thing in Dubai) down to the Dubai Creek which is the old part of Dubai, although still skyscrapers everywhere! We jumped on a little boat and cruised up and down the creek.

If you look closely you can see our boat in the mirrored glass windows:

We then had a walk around the gold souk (market/bizaar), before heading out to the Mall of the Emirates, the one with Ski-Dubai attached.

We didn't have time for a ski, but had lunch watching some beginners making fools of themselves.After a quick walk around the shops, we headed back to our apartment for a snooze (Ange) or some R&R on the beach (Warren and his workmate). Dinner on Saturday was at the Jumeirah Beach Hotel, right in the shadow of the Burj Al Arab again. Then drinks afterwards were up the Burj Al Arab itself, situated on an artificial island you can only get to with a booking, and home of the world's most expensive cocktail!The Burj Al Arab hotel lobby:

Sunday was spent at the Aquaventure at the Atlantis Hotel on the top of the Palm Jumeirah. The Palm is the largest manmade island in the world, and added 520km of coastline to Dubai.
One of the slides goes through the shark/fish/sting ray tank!Sunday night's dinner and drinks were across the road from our Apartment at the Ritz Carlton.

Monday morning we had time for a couple of hours on the beach before our flight back to London.