Dubai Internet City (James' first guest post)

Ok, Chris has been making subtle digs on here that I should get on with posting to his blog about our trip to Jaipur, and he knows that I'm reading. Who am I to argue? In the spirit of this blog, I present to you an entry with a weird title and some rambling prose, made good through the addition of lots of pictures. I should add that I suck at writing and I also suck at photography so maybe just skip this altogether.

I started my adventure in Dubai. India was the point of everything obviously, but I have always loved tall buildings and I figured that if I was going half way around the world I might as well take advantage of an opportunity to see the Burj Khalifa. The Burj Khalifa is best known to people in our part of the world as the building that is way taller than the CN Tower. For some reason everyone thinks I'm talking about the "sail-like hotel", but that's the Burj Al Arab.

Let's come back to the Burj in a minute. My stay in Dubai was with a Spanish couple who live in the Dubai Marina, in a condo complex that looks and feels more or less exactly like Toronto (palm trees aside of course). The Marina itself is kind of neat- It's a huge loop around an artificial bay that was dug in the last 10 years. You can walk the loop outside on a neatly manicured foot path, and when it's hot there is a parallel inside path.

I spent an hour trying to walk the loop but eventually I realized I'd never make it all the way around in the few hours I had devoted to this activity. Most of the loop seems to be lots of the same: Modern condo buildings, cranes everywhere, and (at least at 10:00am on a Monday) an endless stream of attractive moms in yoga gear jogging with babies in jogging strollers. Like I said, Toronto.

On to the Burj. The tower itself is accessible via the Dubai Mall, where you buy tickets. It turns out you should buy these tickets online well in advance, but this hadn't occurred to me and all the tickets were sold out when I arrived. Frustrated at having come all this way for nothing, I inquired if there was anything I could do to salvage this and sure enough they do sell last minute "premium tickets" which come with their own elevator and waiting room and what not. She told me the price and I neglected to calculate in my head what I was paying. It turned out to be $150 CAD. Yikes.

$150 did get me some delicious sweets and arabic coffee at least.

Oh, and a spectacular view. The air was very sandy, as you can see.

A few more bits of Dubai: The Mall has a massive indoor fountain and a skating rink.

The other huge mall, the Mall of the Emirates has a ski hill.

It's very easy to get around this crazy city thanks to a brand new metro system. One weird quirk of the metro is that instead of naming the stations after streets or neighbourhoods near them, they mostly named them after nearby businesses who had presumably sponsored them. That's Dubai I guess.. My stop had the charming name of "DAMAC PROPERTIES" (the name was actually all in caps, unlike any others on the map for some inexplicable reason). Dubai Internet City was another fun name along the way (it's the name of a business park near the station).

Ok, I'm getting tired of writing, so I'm going to just hit publish and put the rest of these pictures into a later post. Thus begins the degradation of this blog.