Seven Arabian Nights

We are sadly coming to the end of our stay in Dubai, which has been full of food, drinks, sand, and relentlessly scorching heat. It has actually been quite educational to see a place that was built on top of a desert and designed solely for entertainment, a place where no one pays taxes, and every building, road, and island is brand new and squeaky clean.

We owe the success of our stay to our friend Salty (AKA Ahmed, Subhi, or Ahmed Subhi Hussein Ahmed - he is a man of many passports and many names), whom Ben has known since college. He's a native of the UAE and the best host ever, showing us around and taking us out literally the entire week. Without him, we would have scratched the surface of Dubai and probably still enjoyed ourselves, but with his help we've really had a full experience.

Dubai has over 20 shopping malls (including the Dubai Mall, the biggest one in the world), hundreds of skyscrapers (the tallest in the world, the Burj Dubai, is nearing completion here), and dozens of man-made islands that have been built along the coast, the better to build even more luxury hotels with Arabian Sea views.

There is so much over the top-ness here that I can't even begin to describe - the next big venture in the works is air-conditioned sand on the beaches. Air conditioned sand. Nice cool sand so you don't burn your feet when it's 112 degrees F. Craziness.

Anyway, we're loving it, and we're soaking it all up before we descend into Mumbai soon which will surely be another complete shock. Our first two nights here we stayed in a budget hotel, and then we moved into the home of Michelle, our lovely and extremely generous host that we found via couchsurfing.com. This is our first experience with Couchsurfing, and it has turned out to be everything our new friends in Egypt told us it would be. Michelle opened up her home, offered to show us around, and handed us a key, all because we met her on the Internet and told her we're not crazy. We are so grateful, and look forward to hosting visitors in NY when we're able.

Our first day in Dubai, we made the mistake of trying to walk to the souks which appeared to be very close to our hotel on the map. We learned two things: Dubai is much bigger than you would guess from a map, and no one walks anywhere. The sun beat down on us with such ferocity that a mere 3 blocks from the hotel we dove into the first cab we saw, and we have taken cabs ever since. There's not really any public transportation here (although 2 years ago they decided to build a subway system and it will be finished in September - very impressive. New York, take note.), and it's too hot to try anyway. The souks ended up being much smaller than the markets in Egypt, and so new and shiny that they were a little less interesting, although we did enjoy the huge diamonds and gleaming jewelry in the Gold Souk.

We also tried to get a little culture and history in by visiting the former home of Sheik Saeed, who ruled for over 30 years. The home is now a museum and features a lot of photographs of Dubai's development, along with a few artifacts. It was interesting, but we learned quickly that museums and history are not the strong suit of Dubai tourism. People come to shop, eat, and sunbathe.

So we changed course and went to the Dubai Mall, mainly to take advantage of the air conditioning, but once we got there we had a great time! There are over 1200 stores, an ice rink, a multi-story waterfall, and a top notch aquarium where we spent a couple hours getting nose-to-nose with sharks and staring at other strange sea creatures.

Right outside the mall is the Burj Dubai, so we took in the view of all 160+ stories of it. It's such a slender, elegant building that it doesn't look as tall as it is, but up close, we could get a sense of its proportions. It's an absolute giant, but really quite beautiful at the same time.

Right outside is a plaza featuring dancing fountains (of course, 3 times bigger than the one at the Bellagio in Vegas) so we enjoyed the show and headed home.

The best parts of our stay have been the evenings out with Salty. Our first evening, we had a terrific Arabic dinner of meze and kebabs (read: mountains and mountains of meat. Even this Texan was a little intimidated.) and then headed out to Mina A'Salam, which can only be described as Arab Disney. It's a huge multi-hotel complex with a souk and a few canals a la Venice winding throughout (stocked with multicolored fish and giant turtles!), all decorated with beautiful Moorish details. Every ceiling and surface is covered with Arabic decorations, the lanterns are all traditional copper cut-outs, and the arched architecture is very Middle Eastern, but everything is so new and perfect that I felt like an extra on "Aladdin." From one of the hotel bar balconies there is a perfect view of the Burj Al Arab, which glows in different colors at night, so we had a drink and took in the amazing view.

On our second evening, Salt took us to a "dive" bar, which was a beautiful garden courtyard within another hotel complex. We had another relaxing drink outside while other patrons smoked huge sheesha pipes, allowing us to take in the wonderful scent of apple tobacco to go with our cocktails.

The third night, however, takes the cake. As an amazing wedding/welcome to Dubai gift, Salt treated us to High Tea at the Burj Al Arab - the singular Dubai experience. We got all dressed up and headed to the Burj, situated of course on a man-made island in the Red Sea and glowing against the sunset. The building itself is spectacular, and the inside is spectacularly gaudy, all red and gilt and over the top. We took the glass elevator with Sea views to the Sky Lounge and for 2 hours feasted on delicious tiny sandwiches, delicate pastries and champagne. Moments like these, we don't exactly feel like backpackers.

Ben will take it from here - stay tuned!