Too busy to blog...

...that's a good thing, right?

I am way behind on this blog but wanted to post once more about Dubai since we had some neat excursions and learned a lot along the way. We're in Jaipur, India now. I will get to the India stuff soon I hope!


Friday, January 5

DUBAI CITY TOUR
We started the day with a tour of Dubai including “Old Dubai” where we walked through a souk (market) with spices, trinkets, sandals, and traditional Arab garb. I purchased a beautiful embroidered black dress that an Arabic woman might wear with a nice black head-covering which I learned how to wrap around my head! Luckily our tour guide, Asad, was able to help us negotiate. Also, my colleague Raj was speaking some Arabic and insisting the shops give us a good price because we are students (Yes, I can still pass for a student when I am mixed in with the others!) I paid 90 dirhams ($25) which is a good deal for a quality dress and head-covering. You will notice that I wore it later in the evening for our desert safari. A few of the guys in our group bought white robes and head-coverings as well. A few wore them to the safari at night.

Oh, backing up….we took a water taxi to get to the souk. We were only on them for 10 minutes or so but it was pretty darn cool. This reminds me...tipping is not expected at all in Dubai. It might be accepted by some but most won’t expect much at all or may even refuse.

We learned that clothes covering the whole body are not “required” for Muslim people; instead, it’s just a traditional Arabic style. Depending on how conservative the person is s/he will wear clothes covering the entire body or some parts of it. It’s mostly a modesty thing not a religious thing. Black is considered the most modest color for women. Those same people will wear westernized clothes at home such as jeans and t-shirts.

DESERT SAFARI
Our group was picked up at the Golden Sands 10 Hotel around 3 p.m. We split into groups of 7 and rode in SUVs. My group of 7 had a driver named Adil who is from Oman. He told us our SUV was new and the only one in the lot with a V8 engine. It sure felt powerful as we rode up and down the sand dunes.

The vehicles caravanned about an hour outside Dubai toward the desert. When we arrived, each vehicle had to deflate the tires to a certain pressure so it could drive on the sand. Alternatively, the tires had to be inflated when we left the sand dunes and drove back to Dubai on the highways. By the way the infrastructure in Dubai is state of the art....getting around the state was easy because it is highly developed, organized, clean, efficient, etc.

The ride was a roller-coaster to say the least. It was about 45 minutes of twists, turns, ups, downs, all-arounds! I started to feel a little warm toward the end of the ride and many others got sick. Luckily, we got out a few times to take pictures and breathe a bit.

Once we arrived at the entrance of the desert we were dropped off to see a falcon trainer. This guy was pretty cool (aussie or kiwi) ...he held some food on the end of a rope and swung it to get the faclon to fly around and put on a show for us. Pretty cool.

Next was more sand dunes and then finally a short camel ride. I definitely almost fell off the camel TWICE. Once when it went to get up and then when it went to sit down and let us off. Very scary but fun! It was literally a 100 yard ride since there were other tourists with our group.

Then, we entered a neat little safari area with carpets and pillows to sit and enjoy a beer, some wine and some shishka (sp?) what we call hookah. Dinner was served and the evening ended with a belly dancer and then lights out for star gazing. I felt like I was in a dream being there....so surreal.

We also got some henna tattoos (ink)...naturally, I asked for a camel!

I was not able to post any pictures (might be my internet connection) but will keep trying because those really tell the tales as well as some video footage I have from my little camera.

Unfortunately, that's all I have time to post tonight. Just a snapshot for now.

A little something to wet your appetite for the next blog.....

One of our students said this today about India: "Just when you think you've seen it all, you see something else that blows your mind!"

Lots of love,
ST