We rented a car for the weekend and headed for a day trip to check out more sights in Dubai with Gary. We saw the Burj al Arab from Madinat Jumeriah and didn't get much closer this time as we weren't properly dressed for a visit inside the world's only 7 start hotel!

We took a walk through the souk at Madinat Jumeriah, went to the Dubai Mall which gives a great view of the finishing touches to the world's tallest building. Supposedley construction has been put on hold to finish this one up.


In the evening we headed over to the older part of Dubai, checked out the Bastakiya quarter (which was empty since it was Friday, prayer day), went to the 'knock off' souk (I didn't buy anything as I'm waiting for Bangkok next week!) and ended up eating dinner at a great Mexican restaurant in Jumeriah. The only thing missing were the margaritas. It's a bit off the beaten tourist track and not attached to a hotel, so no liquor...very sad. But the food was great and guacamole made at your table is awesome!

Nick and I took part in the Dragonboat Festival in April. We joined one of 5 Abu Dhabi teams who competed in the weekend. A couple we met invited us to join the team and give it a go. We only trained for about a month before the race and to be honest it's a bit of a un-natural paddling movement, that can cause some real kinks in your shoulders and arms :) We had 3 races during the weekend and was exciting getting out there on the water racing against the other teams. We even won one of our heats! This is a big thing considering most of the other teams train quite often together.

We've decided to take a break from the paddling as we've got plenty of other activities going on, but it was fun to give it a go!

Here are some pics from the races at Festival City

We went over to Dubai this weekend as Nick attended the TESOL Arabia conference. While it was a quick weekend and Nick had some presentation to attend we still got a chance to meet up with a couple colleagues from Japan and hit the spice and gold souk (market). We really didn't even do that much shopping, only one mall for us and only 5...10 stores were visited :)

It's about a 1 hour 1/2 ride to Dubai and Thursday afternoon there was very little traffic which made for smooth sailing. Thankfully our friend Tara drove and she's become quite the expert driving here. Nick did get his license though...so he's up next.

Compared to Abu Dhabi there is a lot more....a ton more building going on over there and when you hit the city it is much more sprawled out then AD and over all a much larger city. Although, lacking from Dubai which is a pleasant addition in AD, is the greenery, trees and flowers. Very few were seen in Dubai. I know that both cities are trying to increase the number of green areas.

Here are a few photos from our trip to the souks, more photos from Dubai can be seen on Picasa
The gold souk was filled with tons and tons of gold and diamonds...I am sure I won't have a problem picking out something from here in the future!