Monday 30th May 2011 – First Day in Dubai
This is the start of my day by day blog recounting the events of my recent 4-week holiday to China including a stopover in Dubai. I mainly want to write down my experience for my future reference but thought however boring it may be nice to share my point of view as well, hence this blog.
I plan to write a blog post per day of my vacation, although they won’t appear on here on a daily basis as I’m often busy or just too lazy for that sort of commitment.
And so we begin. Our flight from Birmingham left on the evening of the 29th of May and we arrived in Dubai 7 hours later in the early hours of Monday 30th May local time. The flight was comfortable but the inflight entertainment system was broken so it was a very boring flight, attempting to get some sleep was unsuccessful as sleeping on a plane is not really something I have got the hang of, although it was no problem for Cecilia as she pretty much slept the entire flight.
Arriving in Dubai is an experience in itself. The view from the plane was spectacular, mostly sea as you approach but circling the airport you get a view of the endless desert and then in the distance some idea of the scale of the modern development of the city with skyscrapers and endless apartments coming into view. Once you land and taxi past the massive Emirates terminal at Dubai airport it impresses again with its scale and stunning design. Inside it is equally impressive, on arrive when you walk into the immigration control and baggage collection the scale of the place is beyond belief. The only thing I could think of to compare the scale to was thinking back to the Lord of the Rings and the scene in the film where Gandalf confronts the Balrog in the Mines of Moria with the massive high roof and the endless columns. I was impressed and had not even left the airport.
We had booked an airport transfer to our hotel so once we left arrivals there was a guy waiting for us. Now I was expecting a taxi or small mini bus as we have had previously on holidays when we have used the airport transfer service. However in this case we were ferried to the hotel in a brand new executive Lexus, nice extra gold star for our hotel on that one. Our hotel was a very short ride from the airport into Deira City Centre, which is the eastern side of the Creek.
Our hotel was the Radisson Blu Deira Creek, a stunning hotel with helpful staff and quality rooms, all with a brilliant view over the Creek. Our room was nice, was a bit surprised when we entered the room and the TV came on and the default channel was the Hotels own channel showing all their hotels around the world and on the screen was the Radisson Blu from Birmingham made me feel so much at home.
Another nice feature in the room, along with the comfy bed and nice views was sitting on the bed next to the hotel information and restaurant guide book, it was of course the pillow menu, which included 4 different types of pillow you could order if you didn’t like the ones provided, we however quite liked the big comfy pillows they had provided so had no need to order for this additional menu.
After breakfast at the hotel we decided to go out and have a look around. This was when we really got to a chance to face the heat head on. The week we were in Dubai the average temp was around 40 degrees Centigrade and walking out of the nice air con environment of the hotel the heat is like a brick wall hitting you as you step out the door. It takes some getting used to and even then spending more than 10 mins outside at a time is hard going, but you get used to it and it is just about bearable if you try not to think about it too much and drink plenty of water.
Since we only just arrived that morning we decided not to do anything much on the first day apart from exploring the area around the hotel. This included finding the local metro station, which was a five minute walk from the hotel and would be our main route to the big attractions later in the week across the western side of the Creek.
Our next stop was to take a trip across the Creek in a water taxi, of which there are two types, the first is the government transport network water bus, which is a modern water taxi with air con, with the other choice being the local Abra, these are also water taxis but are small traditional wooden boats and are defiantly the way to go as they are used by all the locals and only cost 1 dirham which translates to 0.20p per trip and are just much more fun to ride.
We took an Abra across the Creek from Al Sabkha to Dubai Old Souq. The old souq is where the fabric and spice souqs are, and also the Dubai Museum is just round the corner from here, which we would be back to visit later in the week. For the moment we had a browse around the souq but didn’t stay too long, it’s nice to see a traditional market like this but it gets boring really quickly after the 100th seller tried to sell us something we didn’t need or corral us into their shop.
One we did look in was a fabric shop and Cecilia was actually interested in some table cloths and cushions but couldn’t find the combination of colour and pattern she wanted, but the shop assistant didn’t let up. We were offered a table cloth for 250 dirham originally but as we left the shop they followed us and the price kept dropping and as we disappeared into the distance the last price that was shouted after us was 20 dirham, quite an impressive discount but we still decided to pass. It was quite a fun experience but we decided to head back to the Creek and get another Abra back to our hotel to plan the rest of the week.
And that was the end of the first day of our holiday, only about another 25 to go. All the places we visited during our holiday will be blogged about but I also plan to add locations to this Google Map, which will be nice to se once completed as I update these blogs.
