Dubai Update #13 – The Last Word

Well I did sort of promise that update 12 was the last news from Dubai. However if I had not done this final update I would have received severe ridicule from my wonderful daughter in-law, Natasha. I would have been given the good old Aus. title of a wimp.

You see it’s like this, our daughter Amanda dropped us off at the Dubai Airport at 7.00pm on Saturday night with 3 hours to spare before the plane was due to leave. Always a good plan to get to the airport early for international flights. Now Dubai is one of the worlds largest airports so finding our way to our check in area was not straight forward but we did have 3 hrs up our sleeves or so we thought.

So we get to the check in counter and the lovely Arabic girl behind the desk prints our boarding passes very quickly, at which I asked her to check if we had at least one aisle seat for each flight. Dubai/Doha and Doha/Melbourne. So she starts looking at the screen once again and a lovely smile appears on her face and the girl on the adjacent desk looked across and also began to smile.  What’s the joke we are thinking, surely they haven’t upgraded us. Then eventually, through broken English we discovered that we were not indeed 3 hours early, we were one day and 3 hours early. Bugger!

Well we are certainly not going to ring Amanda and go back to her place. The kids would have been quite confused. They had just said all their goodbye’s etc etc. So what do we do; find a hotel of course. Not an easy job at Dubai Airport, for reasons that are a little long winded so will not elaborate. After some help from a group of Limo Drivers, we grabbed a cab and asked the driver to find us a Hotel in the Deira district.  Mainly because we had 24 hours to kill and that is a fairly interesting part of the city with a number of Souqs and it is relatively close to the airport.

Now you would think that finding a hotel would be relatively easy, but this time of the year is the Discount Shopping Festival and the city is very busy and hotels tend to be heavily booked. So after a couple of rejects we eventually found a hotel with a room that was also not at a premium price.  We realised quite quickly that if it is detected that you are a little desperate then the tariff is set accordingly.

The next morning we received a phone call from Amanda suspecting that we were indeed still in Dubai. It was a work day for her (assistant at the kids school) and when she signed in she realised the date and that we were not due to leave until the next day. It was really nice of her to take part of the blame for the error as she had just recently checked our itinerary to ensure delivering us to the airport did not clash with anything else. But on the other hand it means she thinks we are getting old and need caring for, as we cannot manage our own schedules. LOL.

But to be honest, we really have no idea how we came to make the error only to say that being retired leads one to not worry so much about dates.

So we spent the day wandering around the Souqs and cafe’s of Deira and having a relaxing day before our departure that evening.

I have included some photos mainly of the incredible Gold Souq area. Mostly the gold in the Middle East is very yellow and for the dark skin of Arabs and Indians it probably suits them, but for our western women folk it probably is not the best. There were a smattering of silver shops and a few gold shops that did have a selection of white and lighter gold.

The number of shops in the Gold Souq is really quite astonishing. If I had to guess a number it would have to be in the several hundreds, maybe even a thousand. The Souq stretches for some distance down a number of streets, lane-ways and covered walkways. The retail gold shops then give away to wholesale gold merchants.

We also found the main part to the Spice Souq that we had missed on our previous visit to the district.

Have also thrown in a photo of one of the fully air conditioned bus stops that are all over Dubai. All bus stops and railway stations are fully air conditioned.

And some photos from the Australia Day celebrations that were held on a local rich Emirati’s farm (most of them are rich). And yes we were able to have a drink.

 

Thought I would include a night photo of the Burj Khalifa building.

Definitely the last post on our Dubai trip.

Next travel blog update will hopefully be us in our camper setting off to some part of the Australian bush, so for now,

Cheers

Graham

PS – we arrived home 10:30 pm Monday night, the 28th Jan. And yes I am sure that is correct.

And finally

I should have a full gallery with slideshow uploaded in the galleries section in the next couple of days. I will advise.