May 15 – Dubai, UAE

admiring the Burj

Weather – 43º

Steps – 9,755

Humidity – 55%

Burj sunset from our balcony

Seems like my blog update emails aren't getting through. I'm trying my iCloud email - who knows what'll happen. Based on the test emails I've done; messages seem to want to go to spam/junk. I'm not sure how to fix this…yet!

Anyway…Today was an uneventful day. We checked out of the Ritz Carlton and moved to the Edition Dubai. Part of our cruise fare includes one night prior to the cruise, so we moved.

We could have taken cash instead of the hotel night, but this new one is downtown, super close to the Dubai Mall, so we thought it was worth moving to check out a diffferent area of Dubai.

Even though the distance to downtown is only about 20 km, it took us over half an hour…traffic! In an Uber with little for AC, plus...I was on the sunny side of the car.

more Burj

The morning was spent having breakfast and hanging at the pool - rough life!

Once again, due to Chris’ Amex, we had late checkout – this really is glorious.

We planned to leave just in time to arrive at the new hotel at check in time, there's no use sitting around waiting in a hotel lobby if we don't have to.

No need to unpack for one night, so we took a nap and around 8 headed to the mall to watch the fountain show at the base of th

dinner

e Burj Khalifa tower (still the world’s tallest structure.) 

The walk is about 5 minutes from the hotel, and as we got closer could tell something wasn’t quite right – there was some kind of construction wall all along our route to the mall. When we arrived, we discovered that the fountains are closed for renovation. Kind of a bummer, but we didn’t have our hearts on a fountain show.

We went up the tower in 2011 (the last time we were here), so didn’t feel the need this trip.

There is a light show on the Burj that we watched for a bit. It was equally fun to people watch. The crowd here is different than the one where the last hotel was. More ethnically diverse here. We read that the largest group of tourists to Dubai are from India, but it didn’t seem that way to us until we got to this part of town. 

Another country who send lots of tourists to Dubai is Russia. We heard mostly Russian when we were at the Ritz.

and...another shot of the Burj

We had to pick up some Band-Aids…I have developed a blister. I brought supplies, but don’t want to run out. As soon as we approached the pharmacy, we were descended upon by a handful of workers. I’m not sure if they were actually pharmacists (not that we needed one) but they looked the part in their lab coats. $9CAN for 5 extra large Band-Aids- a bargain, no?

Next was a bit of a wander. We are not shoppers, at all. Chris wondered why we’d wonder around a mall if not to shop, I didn’t exactly disagree, but I figure it’s a cultural experience here – there are many of the same shops we have. I didn’t check prices, so I’m not sure how they’d compare.

Last we found someplace for dinner. We had many, many choices. Fast food (another Tim Horton’s, that in retrospect I should have tried), casual sit down places, fancy-schmancy places. We found a middle eastern place. I had a beef fette (fried flatbread, topped with thin slices of beef, yogurt and pomegranate seeds.) It was delicious. I knew I’d like it. This is very similar to something we’ve had in Turkey, that I loved. Chris had a meat and cheese pide (like a calzone). We washed this all down with a couple of cokes…no booze here. BTW, the Tim Horton's offereings were similar to what we'd get at home - however...a medium coffee was about $7CAD! Baked stuff was much less, a muffif or donut was about $2.

We ended the day back at the hotel watching the Burj from our balcony…the view couldn’t be much better.

The Burj Khalifa area is very fancy. Not that the Jumeirah Beach area was a slum, but around the Burj, the roads are very fancy - almost like marble, the tires of the vehicles squeaked as they passed.