Dubai, United Arab Emirates Day 1 of 2

Dubai, United Arab Emirates. This is the country that was thrown out and stopped from running six US seaports sold to it by Great Britain. Another strange and very interesting place.

As we disembarked the ship, there was a bag pipe band playing all kinds of music. The men were all wearing white dresses and white rags on their heads with black rings to hold those rags in place. It was quite a warm welcome.

There are a few old buildings from the 50s and 60s but most of the city is less then 20 years old. Construction is everywhere. There are very high sky scrapers in many places, and again, all very new. They are presently building world’s highest building. It is being built by the same people from Chicago that built Sears Tower. There are also many new houses. Both look very American. Roads are all new and in good shape. Traffic is heavy but not nearly as bad as the Chicago or Miami areas. The vehicles look like they would in the States. A good mix of large American cars and Japanese.

We took a tour that started at about 9:00 this morning. We started by going by a new residential area of all villas. Next we went to the Jumeira Mosque. This is supposed to be the most beautiful Mosques in the mid east. This was one of the few that lets non Muslims enter but we could not as there was some kind of Saturday morning tour going on. Next we drove by several hotels and older homes owned by merchants and then on to one of only two museums in the Emirates. This one was mostly underground with many strange displays.

Next we had to cross a river they call the Creek. There are several ways to cross by bus but were going the fun way. By boat. This was a service provided by the government and cost about ten cents US. These are old wooden canoe like pieces of junk. They are totally unpainted and look terrible. What do you expect for ten cents? You might think their drivers must be good at what they do as they have been doing the same short crossing for many decades. Well forget it. These camel jockeys couldn’t drive anything straight to save their lives. Slam into the dock. Slam into the concrete sea wall. Slam into each other. We thankfully made it off and walked a couple blocks to the gold and spice souk. Souk means area.

There was one store after another with the same junk. If we were going to buy jewelry it wouldn’t be this very low class stuff. The mixture of people was something to see. From Arabs all in white dresses to Americans and everything between. After spending far too much time there, we walked a couple miles back to the bus. This was supposed to be very light walking.

It was just a short drive back to the ship. Tomorrow, maybe we will take a shuttle or taxi to a nicer shopping mall.

Gold Souk Sherm Out.

(Posted on behalf of Sherman Rootberg)