Big Hole in the Wallet
Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007Well, our 3 days or so in Dubai have definitely made a dent. I just realized in the last post I put that it was $50/night…. it’s actually $50/night/person… so it was about $100/night for a room at a guesthouse on the outskirts of town… taxi rides cost us over $100 in total… food wasn’t that expensive but things add up. Sigh…
Yesterday, we didn’t do too much… we slept in again… then we booked a desert safari for the afternoon. It was actually pretty fun… we got picked up in a modified SUV and then headed out to the desert. It was a little bit like a rollercoaster going up and down the dunes… pretty scary at some parts. Even though we were out in the middle of the desert, there was still bits of garbage everywhere… just kind of sucks how us humans are everywhere… hehe. Anyway, we drove around until the sun set over the desert… then we stopped at some place where you could ride ATVs and Camels. John whipped around the sand in an ATV and we rode yet another camel. It was pretty cool. We WERE supposed to be able to sandboard down a hill too but get this: It rains like 5 days a year in Dubai and John and I happened to catch 2 of the days…. so the sand was too wet to board on 🙁 . Crappy. Oh well, we had dinner in the dessert in a little tent set up (tourist trap) and then watched a belly dancer… and then headed home. It was pretty cool.
Today, we spent a hell of a lot of money on taxis. First, we went to see Sports City… little did we know, Sports City at this exact time, looks similar to our desert safari… yeah, they haven’t really built much there yet. It’s supposed to be complete sometime in 2008… damn. So then, after driving way the heck over there, we headed back to media city… which the driver failed to tell us, is a block of commercial buildings where companies have offices…. really nothing to see. SOOOO, we finally got him to drop us off in some rich residential area. We basically just walked around taking pictures of the crazy buildings… then walked to the beach and saw a bit of one of the palm islands… it’s not so cool from ground level. Then we went to that big 7* hotel (Burj Al Arab)… there’s a lot of security around it and you can’t actually go in but we got some pics from the outside. Yeah… we also so the indoor ski hill and went to the mall of emirates again to walk around. Being broke kind of sucks here.
Basically, without money, there is nothing to do here… but with money, you can do anything you could imagine.
We fly out to Dehli tomorrow morning at 5am… see you in India
cheng.ev