Dubai - day 3

After a nice relaxing morning just chilling out, we finally managed to get organised to take the hotel shuttle to the old part of Dubai at 10.45. We had thought we would need to take a taxi back, but the shuttle driver said he was coming back at 3pm, so that sounded great. We have had a bit of a problem working how much money we would need here, so saving some seemed like a mighty fine idea.

It was nice walking through the old souks – some pretty amazing flowers, some of which were edible. Then I showed interest in some scarves – not always a good idea to show interest unless you want to be captured. So I bought 1 scarf there. Then we got stuck in a spices shop which had dried fruit – it was fun trying to guess what fruit they were, the avocado got us stumped. They also had various dried teas, so we had to buy some to test out in the motorhome. The price was 1 dirham per gram, ie about 40 cents. We decided then that we really did need to get some more cash, and found some ATMs by a bank. It took a while to persuade one to give up cash – didn’t like mastercard, but Jody had success with a Visa.

Then we took the little boat across the Dubai Creek and headed for the gold souk. I did get some gold chains shown to me, but decided against them – around $500 NZ for the one I liked. But later on I found a nice gold plated chain, and Jody bought a cute little silver fish and necklace. Then it was back on another wee boat, and we had lunch river side. The lamb was really tender – I quite like this sort of food, nice spicy tender meat with rice, yoghurt and chutney.

On the way back to the shuttle, we ended up in another shop as I wanted to buy some nuts. We tried more dried fruit there, and this shop owner was way less pushy and also sold scarves. We ended up buying 2 each, and liked the same ones, so just bought the same. Not likely that I will be going out to the same places as Jody with the same scarf.

Back at the hotel we had a bit of a quiet time, and then went down to check out the pool. It was quite windy, and not super hot. Jody had a swim, but I didn’t bother. Then it was back to the Dubai mall again for dinner and watching the fountain show. We think by tomorrow we might have cracked the code for how to get out of the mall, and are getting better at finding our way around. Though this evening we ended up in the Fashion Avenue which I hadn’t seen before. That is the quickest exit to get back to our hotel.

On the way our tonight there was a open top black rolls Royce with orange seats outside the hotel that we just had to admire. Then Jody asked if they were on their way to the mall? Hmmm, yep the answer was no!

We have to get up at 3.30am tomorrow ready for our special excursion. Am hoping to have some pretty great pics to share with you all from that.Read more