Thanksgiving Weekend in Dubai

Over Thanksgiving weekend, Jenn and I decided to take a vacation to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. We will blog in more detail about some of the specific things we enjoyed there, but I thought I would do a post about our trip overall and our impression of Dubai.

We absolutely loved Dubai! It is a very modern, very clean city that prides itself on having the newest and the best of everything. It has the largest building in the world, the largest man-made islands in the world, two of the largest malls in the world, the largest dancing fountain in the world, the world’s first 7-star hotel, etc. Everything there is just really, really nice. Besides the big things, there were lots of little details that made it a really nice city. Road tolls, for example, are taken automatically by a sensor that reads the bar codes that are on everyone’s windshield. When we returned our rental car they let us know the total number of tolls we had gone through and how much we owed.

The Burj Kafila

The area we spend most of our time was around the Dubai Mall. The Dubai Mall is the largest mall in the world, with tons of really nice stores and great restaurants. Right next to it is the Burj Kafila, the tallest building the world, and right between the two is beautiful pool with the largest dancing fountain in the world (that plays with music every half hour in the evenings). We ate most of our dinners in that area, spent several evenings enjoying the spectacular fountain, and went up to the observation deck of the Burj Kafila.

The Burj Kaflia and fountain

On Thanksgiving we spent all day at the Aqua Adventure waterpark. It is part of the Atlantis resort which is on the tip of the Palm Jumeirah Island, one of the gigantic man-made islands off the coast of Dubai in the Persian Gulf. It wasn’t a traditional Thanksgiving, but we had a great time in the water on a beautiful sunny 87 degree day.

The "Leap of Faith" Slide






The Burj Al-Arab, the world's first 7-star hotel

We also visited the Mall of Emirates, another huge mall in Dubai. It also has tons of great stores and restaurants, but what sets it apart is Ski Dubai. Ski Dubai is an indoor skiing and sledding slope. We didn’t pay to go inside (people were sledding for free that whole week back home), but it is visible from the mall. It was weird to see people playing in the snow in the middle of the desert. If we had stayed longer, we probably would have gone in…maybe next time.

Ski Dubai

On our final full day in Dubai we went on a desert safari. A driver in a Toyota Land Cruiser picked us up and our hotel and drove us out a ways to the desert. Then he took some air of the tires while we got out and took pictures of the sun setting, and we were off driving up and down the sand dunes. After a very fun and bouncy ride we arrived at a large camp where a bunch of other people in other vehicles were also arriving. They had some activities available (like snowboarding down the sand…I guess that would be sandboarding). After a bit they opened a great buffet of traditional Arabic food.

Like I said, we will have a couple more blog posts with more details about some of our favorite things. We were just really impressed with Dubai. Maybe that is partly because we have been living in India, where nothing is clean and most things don’t go as smoothly as they could (like driving), but Dubai seemed like the cleanest and most modern city we have visited. Next we leave for a longer vacation in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (and day and a half) and Phuket, Thailand (seven days). We’ll try to be quicker in getting blog posts up. In the meantime you can check out our pictures on the pictures tab.

View of the city from our hotel pool