To continue our day of reminiscing we took a stroll around my old haunt Mall of the Emirates. Here Andy discovered how boring English shopping centres could be - this one had a snow park in it!
I was also reminded of the sheer wealth of Dubai when we joined the taxi queue with the rest of the plebs and had fun spotting these (and these were only a couple of them!):
Our day of 'Kirren's teenage life' was rounded off by visiting our family friends Anup and Isobel. We had a lovely evening of catching up, drinking, and cooking on a giko (Kenyan BBQ).
The next day (after hauling ourselves out of bed horrendously hungover) we both became proper tourists and visited the water park at Atlantis, The Palm. This was absolutely fantastic! I'm afraid we don't really have any photos as we locked the camera away and just decided to have fun being big kids for the day! The rides were great fun (though we weren't brave enough for the bigger ones!) and I had to literally drag Andy away by the end of the day as my last half hour of the day consisted of 'just ONE more ride... LAST one I promise...'! The Palm itself was pretty cool with the majority of it all done and built on. They were currently working on building a mall there (because Dubai doesn't have enough already) so Andy enjoyed looking at the foundations etc from the monorail overhead. Oh and there was a gold ATM at Atlantis. As you do.
We had a lovely evening strolling along the Marina and dinner at a nice Lebanese restaurant. The Marina definitely seems bigger than I remember - I'm sure it wasn't 7km long when I last went! It's still as shiny and sparkly as ever though, which is exactly my memory of Dubai :)
We continued being tourists the next day and visited the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. We went up to the 124th floor and that wasn't even the highest! The views were spectacular all around Dubai and we even managed to spot Splendour Villas (thanks to the 'Disney' mosque!).
Following that we had a wander around Dubai Mall, one of the world's largest malls (they missed a trick there!), where even I discovered you could always fit more into a mall! This mall contained an aquarium (with a massive window so you didn't actually have to pay to go in if you didn't want to!), a zoo, an indoor sports court (I think I saw signs up for that), an ice rink and a waterfall as well as all the normal things like shops, restaurants and a cinema! It was very easy to spend a day there without getting bored! In the evening we watched the fountain show outside the Burj Khalifa which was apparently designed by the same person who designed one at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. I'm not normally a massive fan of fountain shows but it was actually really good!
After all the excitement of the last few days we thought we would make the most of the hotel and have a pool day.
For our last day we went to visit the desert on a desert safari. The dune bashing was fantastic with our driver raving up and down massive dunes and then slamming on the brakes when the 4x4 in front of us hadn't moved on as quickly as we were! It was great fun and the views were awesome. All my stories to Andy about previous desert safaris where the drivers got high before taking us out were unfounded which led me to believe that dad always booked us on dodgy tours in the past! The dune bashing was followed by entertainment in the form of a Whirling Dervish and a belly dancer and a delicious dinner under the stars at the camp.
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