Dubai: Day 2 (10/31/19)
Exploration day! It was was cloudless 95 degree day so I lathered up the sunscreen and threw on my dorky hat for a day checking out the city!
Took the metro (which is covered, elevated, and air conditioned like every building in this city it seems) about 40 minutes to the north side of town where I then walked half an hour to the Dubai Old Town. It was bloody hot but well worth the sweat once I got there. Very cool buildings that hosted a variety of historical spaces, stamp exhibits, old coins, and local artists. I learned that the towers on the top of each building are wind funnels used to bring a breeze inside during the sweltering days. Oh, and there’s sand everywhere! It just replaces the dirt I’m used to seeing, which on second thought makes perfect sense for a desert but it really does give being outside a different feeling. The shop tenders are also REALLY aggressive! They will come out of their store and harass you constantly to check out their wares which caught me totally off guard since its so different than what I’m used to.
I wandered around the Old Town looking at the historic exhibits and admiring the architecture before sitting down to have some lunch. During which a couple of guys came over and asked to take a picture with me. Guess I look a little different from the norm here lol. From the Old Town I wandered towards the river and over to the Souq (also spelled Souk or Sook), or covered market, unknowingly. Very dense, lots of people, got literally dragged into a shop and dressed up by a guy who wanted to take my picture and charge me for it, also got called “Jack Sparrow” like 30 times. I think that’s the term they use for all white dudes cuz they used it on some other tourists ahead of me that I took cover behind at one point. It really was cool and I wish I could have taken pictures and stuff but the handsy shopkeepers all up in my grill was just not in my comfort zone so I sped through it.
After taking a moment to recover in a mostly empty square I looped back around the outer Souq street to the Dubai Museum. Definitely a tourist trap but a fine place to spend an hour since it had AC and a decent amount on life and history in the region. From the museum I walked over to the nearest metro station and took a train to the Dubai Mall. And may I just say, HO. LY. CRAP! It’s a freaking megacity all on its own! Three to four floors, easily several square city blocks, and absolutely packed with a wild assortment of stuff!
Right in front of the metro exit (which is connected to the third floor of the mall via covered skyway) was a massive bookstore I crawled through. Glad to see the Books of Earthsea by Le Guin for sale as well as every Lord of The Rings related book in Arabic. From there I didn’t have a plan or anything so I just started walking. Every few hundred meters of storefronts there would be an atrium with some sort of huge new decoration (or perfume station). But the mall also contained a ton of gems like a THREE STORY AQUARIUM AND UNDERWATER ZOO that I didn’t visit because it was hella expensive and closing in couple of hours anyways. But damn did it floor me when I turned a corner to that!
The food court was nearby the aquarium so I got dinner at an Indian restaurant - very spicy biryani and pretty good for a food court meal. I had a had time deciding since there were like 30 different restaurants. Refueled, I continued my wanderings, eventually ending up at the waterfall part of the museum. Yea, just a 30 ft tall water feature in an atrium complete with statues and hundreds of rubber duckies. Then onto an active ice hockey rink, and underground souq, a dinosaur skeleton, and finally a Five Guys which made me smile. Some things never change.
I went outside for the 9pm water show, at the recommendation of the guy i talked to last night. Huge crowd made the bridge and terrace a nightmare to get throguh but I got to (mostly) see the Las Vegas-style waterworks with the Burj Kalifa in the background. Which is lit up like a big projection screen by the way! I never actually went up to the top of the Burj Kalifa since its actually rather expensiver and honestly I wasn’t that interested in doing so. Instead, I made my way back to the hostel by midnight, and chatted with an older guy from Pakistan who is a long term resident at this hostel. Busy day!
