Do Buy - Dubai - Due By

No Chapels, No Problem

Fr. Mitchel and I decided on our way back to the States to do a long layover in Dubai. Our flight from Johannesburg to Dubai was an overnight one, eight hours in length. It was long enough for a good bit of sleep…if you are the type who can sleep on a plane. I’m not, so I approached our 18 hour layover running on about an hour of combined sleep. We arrived at about 8:30, intending to say Mass before we started out into the city. We saw signs for prayer rooms, which meant only Muslim prayer rooms, some for men and some for women. No chapels, anywhere. Really? I wonder if the ALCU would actually do anything about this if it happened in the U.S. Probably not.

We improvised and celebrated Mass out in the sitting area on an end table of a row of seats. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that it was the first time Mass had been celebrated on that table.

Brunch – Way Up

After this, we made our way to the Burg Al Arab hotel, which is the tallest and perhaps nicest hotel in Dubai, sitting on an island on the shores of the Persian Gulf. You probably have seen pictures of it. It is shaped like a sail of ship.

We ate a brunch in a restaurant perched at the top of the hotel, looking out over the Gulf. We looked forward to the food, but the view of the manmade islands was supposed to be stunning. Unfortunately they had a sand storm the day before, so we couldn’t really see much of anything. The food was quite impressive, though. I was so impressed by the spread that I actually ate lobster, oysters, and clams (my family could tell you how much of a feat that is.) We took our time to get our money’s worth, but eventually we couldn’t cram anything else in and had to move on. The restaurant manager took us around to show us another fancier restaurant and some of the other eye-popping features of the hotel. I’m pretty sure I couldn’t afford a night’s stay there, but it was great to be able to see it from the inside.

The Persian Gulf

We thought that eating in the hotel’s restaurant would give us access to their beach, but that was not the case. So, we had to go to a public beach. It was not at all fancy, but we got into the Persian Gulf and avoided getting fried, so the mission was accomplished.

104

By the way, the temperature was 104. Can you say oppressive? Sure, I knew you could. How people lived here before air conditioning is beyond me.

Dubai Mall

Dubai has several large malls, but two of them seem to stand out as fixtures of the city. We first went to the Dubai Mall. All of Dubai is like Vegas on Red Bull, and the malls are no exception. This has an indoor aquarium, an ice rink, and a link to the tallest building in the world.

The Official City Bird…

…is the crane. I have never seen so many buildings being built in a city. And this is true, even though the city is scores of billions of dollars in debt. Feed a cold, I guess. It would probably be a wonderful city in which to own an architectural firm.

Dubai Museum

Lots of wax figures demonstrating the commercial and social history of Dubai. The only interesting thing I can remember is that somehow the wax figures hadn’t melted.

Emirates Mall

We decided to watch the Brazil-Portugal game in the other big mall. This mall’s claim to fame is its indoor ski slope. Yep, snow skiing…indoors…when the outside temperature is 104. When I first looked in through plate glass windows, I saw a bunch of kids in identical ski jackets. I just figured that they were all taking lessons together. It took my sleep deprived brain several minutes to realize that everyone was wearing the same jacket…because it is Dubai…where no one needs a winter jacket…except when skiing indoors. They were standard issue when you paid to ski.

I thought it was funny to watch everyone in the snow. They all were fascinated with making snow balls, though they often ended up as snow pancakes. Some were almost more interested in making snow balls than in skiing. I can understand. Taking the effort to get carried up the hill to ski down in 45 seconds would get tedious. Regardless, it was pretty cool to see people skiing indoors.

Way, way, way up

We finished our day outside the airport by going up in the tallest building in the world. Fr. Mitchel wasn’t keen on going, but there was no way that I was going to be that close to an architectural marvel and not go up. The observation deck is on the 124th floor, which is really high, but the building has another 76 stories above that. The building is literally more than a half-a-mile tall. A HALF-A-MILE. Try getting your mind around that. It’s height blows every other tall building out of the water, by a lot. I don’t see it being rivaled anytime soon, especially in this economy. I could go on and on about architectural stuff, but I won’t bore you anymore. By the way, Fr. Mitchel was very glad we went up.

It was nice to go up at night, though many of the other skyscrapers were not lit up very well. During the day would be ideal, but since the air was so dusty, we figured we wouldn’t have seen much anyway. There is a fantastic fountain show between the mall and the skyscraper that you can see from the observation deck. It was awesome. So awesome that we decided to go down and see it again a half hour later from the ground. Both views were stunning. I’m sure it more than rivals anything in Vegas.

After gelato, we made our way back to the airport, where we watched Spain win and Fr. Mitchel lose…his camera. This meant we lost a lot of good pictures from the day, but in his usual optimistic way, he shrugged it all off as being the unimportant thing that it is.

Tears on a Plane

On the way home, I actually dozed, until the two-year-old in front of us threw his twelfth tantrum (praise God for celibacy). In my wakefulness, I decided to watch the movie Blindside for the first time. It was great. I cried less than two minutes in and kept crying through most of the movie…and I’m not ashamed.

Finally, we made it home…to New York. Then Detroit, where the whole airport became deflated after the U.S. loss to Ghana. Then, it a bit of somber resolution, we flew home to KCK. It was a great trip, but it was good to be back home.