As I mentioned here, my wife took some video with her camera of one of the fountain shows.  She’s not always focused on the fountain, so you get a view of the surrounding buildings too.  It’s actually a nice little video, and it’s fun to hear the crowd reactions.

I usually wrap up my trips with some general thoughts and comments, which I hope aren’t (and won’t be) too boring for people.  A number of things have run though my head over the course of my trip and these past couple days back home.  I know I’ll never be able to get them all down, but I thought there were a few comments that kind of put a bow on all this.

This trip was kind of the end of an era and the start of a new one.  To my recollection, this is really the first time I’ve ever traveled with someone, at least by air.  With as much travel as I’ve done — especially these long flights over the past couple years — I’ve gotten really good at entertaining myself and otherwise passing the time.  My wife… not so much.  So this was really a different flying experience for me, and given that I’ll be traveling more as half of a couple going forward, I expect it is something I will need to get used to.  (Hopefully, at some point, my wife will become jaded by the window seat and I can get that back.  I really prefer the window — not so much for the looking, but because there’s a little additional shoulder space there for me.)

This was also a notable trip because it occurred to me that I’ll probably never again be the sort of tourist I have been in the past.  In this regard, I suppose the era actually changed during that week my wife and I spent in Kiev, but it wasn’t until this trip that I actually knew it.  In the past, I’ve never really liked hitting the tourist spots.  Some of them are nice, sure, but for me, the real fun in travel is understanding the people and lives of the places you visit.  I’m not adverse to going a bit off the beaten path and getting a better glimpse of how people live.  When I visited London years ago (my first “real” tourist trip), I remember how enjoyable it was riding the Tube and doing a load of laundry, just like a typical Londoner might have done.  Visiting the British Museum was great, but staring at mummies doesn’t tell you what it’s like to live there.

Much of the Dubai trip was hitting the traditional tourist spots and/or doing the traditional tourist things.  Had I been on my own — assuming that I would have even gone — I almost certainly wouldn’t have visited the beaches (well, maybe once, just to look out on the Persian Gulf), and I probably wouldn’t have wandered around the souks or souvenir shops as much.  I wouldn’t have shunned all the touristy things — the safari was fun, and it probably would have been cool to look out from the 125th floor of the Burj Khalifa — but I definitely would have tried to get a better sense of what life for people living there was like.

I had read beforehand that despite the significant wealth of the people of Dubai, there was also a wide disparity of wealth between richest and poorest.  I would have liked to understand that more.  I definitely didn’t see any homeless people and didn’t encounter any people begging for help, but maybe I wasn’t in the right parts of town.  Wealth was definitely evident (some of those private homes looked pretty nice), and from the trips on the Metro I did see what I would consider to be the more middle-class of Dubai.  Whizzing past a housing development with row after row of the exact same townhouses proved that not everyone could have a McMansion on The Palm, but was this as low as it went?  Is there a lower class to Dubai society?  I know that there is a lot of immigration to Dubai from Southeast Asia; where do these newly arrived citizens live and how do they get by?  I would have liked to find that out, but I probably won’t now, and similar questions for future destinations will probably also go unanswered.

The two big questions for most any trip are, did I have fun and would I go back?  For the “did I have fun” question, I refer you to my previous posts.  As I said at the outset, Dubai had never been on my list of places to see, and even if it had, I likely wouldn’t have picked a hot time of year.  Of course, it was great spending time with my wife, so that mitigated some of the non-fun of the trip, but I honestly don’t know if that would be enough to push it to the positive side of the scale.  Sunburn?  Not fun.  Silly jokes with the wife?  Fun.  So it’s hard to say.

The question of “would I go back” is actually a bit easier to answer.  It might surprise you, but I would consider a return trip.  There would be conditions and considerations for such a thing, but from some of the discussions I had with the natives, there are some things I wouldn’t mind seeing.  The winter months are supposed to be quite pleasant, temperature-wise — almost like summer in Portland, perhaps even a little cooler.  And apparently Spring arrives around February; I would like to see Dubai with greenery and blooming flowers everywhere.  I probably wouldn’t go for a full week; there’s only so much to do in Dubai if you’re not big on shopping or hanging out at the beach.  But it seems like it would be nice to see at least one.  So I might consider a return visit, for contrast and comparison.

Plus I never did ride the camel on our safari.  Gotta go do that…

There was a movie named, “If it’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium,” which kind of explains how these past couple days have felt. In the span of two days, I’ve been in four different countries and covered 12 time zones. Except for brief stops and relatively short layovers, it has been continuous travel. And I’m back to the office tomorrow morning…

Sunday morning started at the ridiculous (when compared to the preceding week) hour of seven, which was necessary for us to get up, get ready, get a bite of breakfast, and get to our airport transfer bus by 8:30. Then it was a ride almost the full length of Dubai through rush hour traffic, and about 15 minutes out in what seemed like the middle of nowhere; all told, about an hour to get to the airport.  If you have the option, you’d want to fly to the much closer DXB Dubai International, not DWC Al Mahktoum.

The two-hour wait at the airport was cut a little short by my explanation of what a “duty-free” shop was, and my wife picked up that souvenir booze that she just had to have, plus a couple other curiosities for the folks back home.  (Of the combined weight of our baggage, mine accounted for only about a third. I was getting worried about how she’d get it all to Mariupol.) Our wait was followed by a five-hour flight  back to Kiev.

(A quick word about the temperatures in Dubai.  I didn’t know how warm things were most days — other than “too hot” — but I was able to see the temps on the day we left.  When we boarded the transfer bus at 8:30 it was already 34 C — 93 F.  It was at 37 C when we got to the airport — 98 F.  The expected high for the day was 39 C — 102 F.)

We got into Kiev no problem, and got through customs and passport control no problem.  (Zhulyany is a dinky airport compared to every other one I saw on this trip, but at least now I can say I’ve been out of both the Kiev airports.) The shuttles between Zhulyany and the train station don’t run on Sundays, so we had to grab a taxi.  Between Dubai and Kiev, I have to go with Kiev for which city has the most nerve-wracking taxi service.  But we got to the station in one piece.

my wife’s train back to Mariupol was not until the next evening, so we got a room at the passenger hotel.  We had some dinner at the nearby (and apparently, new since last November) Pozhata Hata cafeteria, and then had a couple hours of rest before I had to catch the shuttle bus to the Boryspil airport.  So my first and last evenings in Kiev and with my wife were the same — separate twin beds in the passenger hotel.  Oy.

The airport shuttle doesn’t run as often in the middle of the night, so I had to go earlier than I would have wanted.  (But that meant that my wife could get a good night’s sleep before her day in Kiev, so there was a small upside.)  I had a couple hours to wait before I could check-in for my flight, and then a couple more hours before the flight took off.  I was pretty tired by that point, so even though I had an aisle seat for the flight to Amsterdam, I was already dozing off by the time we took off.  I think that may have been the first time I ever slept through a take-off.

The flight was OK and we got into Amsterdam a little early.  I only had two hours between flights, so I was able to get checked in almost immediately.  A little more waiting, and then it was an uneventful 10-hour flight back to Portland.  The real disappointment was that, yet again, my bag was not in the first 10 that got to the baggage carousel.  If my bag is ever number 1, I’ll have to do something to celebrate.

After traveling for about a day and a half, the thing I have to do now is try to stay awake.  I’ve jumped across 12 time zones, so this time it might be a little more difficult to get back into the right rhythms.  This is one of the times I wish I still drank caffeine…

I’ll do my usual wrap up and get the photos up in the next couple days.  (One of the nice things about the extra time in Kiev was that I was able to see the photos my wife took while in Abu Dhabi.  She had said that the camera stopped working, but she still managed to get some very nice images.  I hope I can describe them appropriately.)

I’m all packed, but my wife is busy trying to cram everything she has acquired over the past week into the larger suitcase I brought with me.  I was quite the pre-trip challenge to find a good sized bag for my stuff that would fit inside the larger suitcase that I had purchased in Mariupol last year.  (My wife wanted that suitcase so she could start packing her things to move to America.)

A quick note on Abu Dhabi before I get to today.  That was quite the bust from what my wife has told me.  In Abu Dhabi there’s this be Ferrari complex (“Ferrari World”), and apparently a couple of the tour people decided that they just wanted to stay there, which delayed the rest of the tour group, and as a result, they didn’t get to visit a couple of the advertised locations.  A couple of the sites were nice and impressive (I’m told), but overall, my wife was not pleased.  Glad I decided to pass on that one.  (Trust me, it wasn’t just because it was in Russian, but that was definitely a major reason why I didn’t want to go.)

Yesterday was yet another beach.  Oy.  I have had enough sand for the balance of the year (which was another beach trip).  Yesterday it was out to Al Mamzar beach, which isn’t one of the big ones that most tourists visit.  I liked that part of it.  It was, of course, hot; the water wasn’t back, but it was actually a little warmer that Jumeira Beach.  However, in all other respects, it was like any other beach.  After a couple hours of that, it was back to the hotel for a siesta, which was pretty good.

The evening was souvenir shopping, which I probably could have lived without.  My wife loved it, though, and got lots of goodies for her family.  I’m not really a souvenir guy, but I picked up a couple stupid things.  (I’m not sure “restraint” is a word in my wife’s vocabulary — definitely not the English one — but let’s see how her packing goes.)  After we got back, there was just enough time to visit the pool on the roof.  That I liked.  It still wasn’t cool, but with no sun, it was quite tolerable.  A nice breeze made for a pleasant evening.

Evening is usually the best time to do anything.  The worst time to do anything is 11am – 3pm, which is when the sun is the hottest and there is almost no shade.  My wife never caught on to this, which is why I was getting snippy when she dragged me over to yet another beach today.  This was the worst, not only because we had to take the Metro and then walk 20 minutes to get to it (in the blazing sun), but also because there were no amenities anywhere.  Most of the public beaches have a vendor or two around, selling water and umbrellas and whatnot.  This place, because it was surrounded by private beaches for the exclusive use of hotel guests, had none of that.

I won’t go into it all, but it utterly sucked.  I think today was the hottest day of the week, and I’m pretty sure I could actually hear my skin sizzling.  I managed to get us away from there after an hour or so (an hour or so too long), and after another long Metro ride and a mid-afternoon slog through the heat, it was siesta time again.

As our final outing this evening, we went fora walk along Dubai Creek.  Of the time we have been here, there have been two sweltering evenings, and this was one of them.  Last night, it was actually quite pleasant out once the sun went down.  Tonight, it was sooo humid, it was really oppressive.  So naturally we went to where there was even more water around.  It was actually kind of nice, at least when the breeze came along, which wasn’t nearly as often as I would have liked.  But the view was really nice.

The Old Souk and Textile Souk are right there, so we wandered through those as well.  Like the other souks, there were plenty of carney types calling out their deals and trying to get you into their shops.  It’s really quite the experience.  My wife was much better today, passing up nearly everyone, but did manage to get sucked into one textile shop, where she bought an Arabic headdress for her son.  (I doubt he will ever wear it.)

After that it was back to the hotel for packing.  We’ve got to get to bed soon, since we’ll need to get up around 7-ish if we plan to have breakfast before heading out to the airport.  I wonder what that flight will be like, since we still don’t have anything for my wife to read.  Oh well, back to Kiev, and after a few hours there, I’m on my way back to the US.

Obviously, I leave out a ton of stuff in these posts, because otherwise I wouldn’t have any “color” to fill in with when I’m talking to people later on.  Also, it would be really tedious to read. And write.  As always, if you have questions, let me know.  But for the last post of my free day, here are a few small observations.

1. I am a terrible husband, because it failed to occur to me that this is our 6-month anniversary.  I blame all the travel and time changes and stuff, because I simply did not know that this was the 29th.  And how is my wife spending the evening?  A long bus ride to and from Abu Dhabi.  Maybe we can do something nice tomorrow.
2. The bus shelters are air conditioned.  They kind of have to be, wouldn’t they?  Apparently the AC isn’t on all day, but if you’re out walking and need a little break, look for a bus shelter.  (Even my wife, who complains about being cold if the temperature is below 22.5 C — about 72 F, has found the shelters to be helpful when we are out walking.)
3. I have yet to see any advertised price for gasoline.  There are cars and gas stations everywhere, but I haven’t seen any signs listing the price per liter.  It may be that gas is just so cheap that if you can afford to own a car, you won’t have any trouble buying gas.  Or maybe it’s free.
4. I don’t think I’ve seen a fast food establishment that wasn’t right next to a gas station.  Perhaps these folks take the “fast” notion a little too strictly.
5. In addition to Burger King, McDonald’s and Pizza Hut, you will also find Wendy’s, Fuddruckers, Hardee’s, Dominos and Round Table Pizza here in Dubai.
6. Despite the predominance of English speakers, Americans are still something of a rarity, if the reactions I’ve gotten from people are a true guide.  I hear British and Australian accents around, and I do know that there are some Americans staying in the hotel.  But any time I’ve been out and someone has asked where I am from, they seem genuinely surprised at the answer.
7. Apparently, I have the type of skin that simply cannot be blocked by sunblock.  So if you hear a report of a quiet American man who spontaneously combusted on a beach in Dubai, you’ll know that was me.

As I mentioned in the first post I made after getting to Dubai, we’ve been running around a fair bit.  Which is actually a little curious, since my wife told me that holidays were to “eat and sleep and eat and sleep.”  Maybe she meant for the “a” in those “ands” to stand for “activity.”

Despite this not being a pedestrian friendly city, we’ve been doing a lot of walking.  By which I mean some walking, but since the temperatures are crazy hot, it feels like a lot.  We’ve also hit the hotel pool a couple of times.  Here, though, is a run-down of our big activities so far.

Most of our first day was just getting familiar with the city and hotel, but my wife wanted to see the Dubai Fountain.  She had done her research (and talked with her travel agent friend) and wanted to see the “dancing waters” show of the Fountain.  So we walked over to the closest Metro station, and caught a train to Dubai Mall, which is also the location of the Fountain and the Burj Kalifah.  It was around dinner time and we hadn’t eaten since the morning buffet, so we snagged a table fountain side at one of the Mall restaurants (a TGI Friday’s of all places).

The fountain is supposed to do these shows every 30 minutes beginning at 6pm, but I think things got a little off when we were there.  We definitely had to wait for more than 30 minutes before we saw anything.  But we did manage to see a couple of the shows (each show appears to be just one choreographed musical piece).  My wife got some video of one, which I’ll post when I can, but here are some links that will give some notion of what it’s like:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5S8WcK3VDU and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoxxK-8MeWw. (We didn’t see either of these numbers.)

Something that sounds like more fun than it actually is, is a ride on the Palm Monorail.  Dubai has expanded its shorelines by building islands, and one of the biggest of this is the Palm.  As the name implies, it’s in the shape of a palm, and much of that engineered space has been taken up with ritzy resorts and homes.  I mean, there’s a Trump Tower there, so, you know…  Traveling up the “trunk” of the palm tree is a monorail, which will take people from the “mainland” to the Atlantis Hotel and Aquaventure park at the far side of the palm.

I think we got there far too late in the day for it to be interesting.  The sun was already going down when we grabbed a taxi to go there, so things were already dark by the time we actually rode it.  (That was definitely a steamy evening; because of the temperature and humidity, my glasses and camera both fogged up the minute we stepped outside.)  There weren’t a ton of things to do when we got there, not at that hour.  My wife has been told there was a big (and free) aquarium in the Atlantis, but I’m quite sure she was misinformed.  There is an aquarium, but it cost 100 AED (about $28) to get in.  I told my wife we could go, but I think she was disappointed that the free one wasn’t there.

Yesterday we were wandering around the souks of Dubai.  The souks are kind of like “wholesale districts,” where you can find a ton of similar shops grouped together.  The best known are the Spice and Gold souks, but there seemed to be a bit of everything around.  As it turns out, my wife was on a mission in visiting these souks:  she was shopping and ended up buying one of the most incongruous things for Dubai — a fur coat.  Don’t even get me started.  But she wanted it and she actually brought money for it.  Apparently, even with airfare, it is cheaper to buy it here than in Ukraine.  I really don’t know.

You do have watch out for the “helpful” people in the souks.  There are a lot of shills for the different stores, so if you’re looking for something, they are more than happy to be your guide — at least as far as their store.  The general souk that we were in does know its audience, because there were Russian signs in many of the windows.  And three of the “helpful” people we met were fairly well versed in Russian.  (One of them, a Chinese immigrant from what I could tell, was able to take us to the fur shop that had been recommended to my wife, and he spoke Russian the entire time.)

Honestly, the souks aren’t my thing, because price haggling is expected.  Even so, I think I helped my wife get a good deal on a watch for her son.  The guy wanted 600, and my wife was going to counter-offer 400.  I suggested that she offer 200 instead, which the guy thought was far too low (for that particular watch), but brought his price down to 500.  That’s when we started to say no and that we were going to leave, and voila, the price came down to (a grudging) 400.  I’m pretty sure that, if that had been my wife’s counter offer, she would have paid more.

And finally, we went on safari.  At least, that’s what it’s called, but there were no lions or elephants.  (I’m sure that safari has some general meaning of wilderness adventure.)  This is a very big tourist thing, and as a result the process is very well defined. I thought it sounded interesting on paper, but given the polished process, I really wasn’t expecting it to be as fun as it was.  It’s a bit of a trip — about 30 minutes outside Dubai, which is probably quite a good ways out, given the very straight highways — but it goes by pretty quickly.

Once you get out to the target area, the first activity is “dune busting.”  It’s just like it sounds — you cruise around the dunes in SUVs (Toyota LandCruisers in our case), going up and down the dunes, and sometimes making hard turns at the crests to really kick up the sand.  It is rather exciting, but 20 minutes is almost pushing it.  Would you want to be on a roller coaster for 20 minutes?  My wife was starting to get queasy by the end.

Then it was off to the “Bedouin” camp for some Arabian snacks and entertainment. You could hold a falcon, get a henna tattoo, try a hookah, get into some traditional attire for photos, ride camels, or if the dune busting only got your juice going, ride around on some quads.  After some time for that, there was a belly dancing show, a buffet dinner with a good variety of Middle Eastern foods, and then a final show with a guy that I could only describe as a whirling dervish.  It was really all a lot of fun, and we had a great host and driver (an Iranian who has been in Dubai for almost 30 years).  It was still a little warm for my tastes, but it was still a great evening.  (If I ever come back to Dubai — preferably at a better time of year — I would definitely do this again.)

I think the agenda calls for another beach tomorrow, but maybe that will change since the week is already running short.  (Thursday already? Oy!)  We’re definitely taking photos, and I’ll get them up as soon as I can.

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the Citymax Bur Dubai hotel.  In case you were wondering why the lobby is always busy (unless you check in around 1:30 or 2 in the morning), it’s because they have a pretty nifty arrangement that keeps them full.

I’m not sure how Citymax and Alpha Tours (dba “Natalie Tours” in Russia and Ukraine) hooked up, but hooked up they have, and as a result, there are tons of Russian speaking people here.  There are three room service menus here — one in English, one in Arabic and one in Russian.  Most of the staff speak a little Russian as well, sometimes not much more than the basics related to their jobs, but still some.  English is still the better language to know to get around, but this place had made it very easy for Russian speakers to visit.

They were down to a single non-smoking room by the time we arrived.  It wasn’t in the best place — first floor (which is the second story of the building) and right next to the elevator.  Plus the window looked into an unused courtyard area.  We could have gotten a smoking room that might have been a bit better, but I didn’t want to be smelling smoke all night.  (I don’t care how thoroughly you clean a room; if people regularly smoke in it, you’re gonna smell something.)  Fortunately, we were able to grab another room the next day, 5th floor, with a westward looking window.  There’s a lot more traffic noise, though.  Traffic noise or people/elevator noise — sometimes you just can’t win.

The hotel is OK.  Kind of a Motel 6-y sort of place, but with a pool on the roof.  They do have three restaurants and a bar, though, and I don’t think Motel 6 has gotten to that point yet.  Small rooms, but OK; if you’re not really attached to the person you’re sharing the room with, you might want to get a second room.

Here’s something crazy:  wi-fi is free in the public areas of the hotel, but you have to pay for it in the rooms.  However, the wired internet is free in the rooms. That just makes no sense to me.  Things work, though, so I can’t really complain about that.  Fortunately, I had brought along a laptop that I was planning to leave with my wife.  If I had just come with my iPad or iPod, I would have had to spend a lot more time in the lobby.

You know how most of the lower cost hotels have a free breakfast for you?  You know — toast, muffins, a bit of juice and coffee?  Well, this place definitely amps that up.  Free breakfast here is a real breakfast, and is included as part of the tour package.  (Like I said, Citymax and Alpha Tours.)  Every morning there’s a breakfast buffet, which makes their main restaurant a busy, noisy place.  There is a good variety of stuff, including some common items from the American breakfast table.  No bacon, I’m sorry to say, but then again, this is an Islamic country.  (They don’t even sell bacon-flavored potato chips in the stores. And the ham here is turkey ham.) This morning, in addition to some of the more common fare I prefer, I tried this Indian rice and corn thing.  It was something like grits and it tasted pretty good.  The other morning I sampled a spicy vermicelli; I liked it, but my wife’s not big on the spices.

This is a 600-plus room hotel, but so far, the staff has been pretty prompt and attentive to any questions or issues.  I’m not saying that if I found myself in Dubai in the future, I would absolutely stay here, but it’s not bad, and I’m sure there are other places that are worse.