#10 - Christmas & Dubai

Christmas

First off, Christmas sucked. It didn't look like Christmas or feel like Christmas. I'm used to Christmas having snow, but it's still in the upper 70s. There wasn't any hullabaloo surrounding Christmas, because so few people here are Christian. There was a little concert on campus the week before Christmas [pic], but it wasn't that great, and it was all Christian music (not Christmas carols). Also, only two other people from the US batch were here for Christmas, Syed and David. We went out to eat on Christmas eve to Southern Star (probably the nicest restaurant in town) and had their Christmas buffet [pic]. It was a nice evening, but didn't do Christmas justice. So basically I feel like Christmas didn't happen this year, instead of feeling that I missed it. My parents did send me some stuff for Christmas [pic], and that was nice.

Dubai

Eight of us went to Dubai for about a week: Alex, Geoff, Adam, John, Shiraz, Justin, Mark, and me. It was a great time. I went on a desert safari, rode an ATV, and went snowboarding. Snowboarding...in the desert!

The flight there

On the 26th, it was off to Dubai. With some aggravation beforehand. Our plane left at 6 in the morning, so I took the train to Bangalore in morning on the 25th [pic]. It was second class unreserved, the worst class. It consists of benches, three people to a bench. It was cramped, but it wasn't that bad. And it was cheap. The rickshaw rides to the Mysore station and from the Bangalore station together cost 5 times as much as the train ride itself. In total, 300 rupees (6 dollars). Around 5pm, I realized I had left my ticket in Mysore. This wasn't an E-ticket, this was a regular old paper ticket. I called up the travel agency, and they told me I had to have it to get on the plane. So I ended up taking a cab all the way back to Mysore and all the way back again to Bangalore, for 2800 ruppes (about 60 dollars). And it was tiring, 3 hours each way.
I went directly to the airport when I got back at around 2am. My friends weren't even leaving Infosys until 4am, so I had a lot of time to kill. I met this German guy named Karsten who was really nice. We talked for a while, killed some time. Eventually, I was on the plane, a Gulf Airways flight. The flight attendants wear hats [pic] with little veil-like things on them. Anyway, we flew to Muscat and then Dubai.

The first two days

As soon as we got to Dubai, it was awesome. After 5 months in India, it was a breath of fresh air (both literally and figuratively). There was space [pic], orderly traffic [pic], and clean streets [pic]. There was a ton of construction [pic1 pic2], evidence of Muslim culture [pic], TV shows involving kids dancing with fake AK-47s [pic1 pic2 pic3 pic4] or CG women in veils [pic]. And there were ninjas everywhere.
After we got to our hotel [pic], we relaxed for a bit and then went on a dinner cruise [pic1 pic2], which was fun, but the windows were covered by plastic sheeting that made it hard to see out as we went up and down the Dubai Creek.
The next day we went on a city tour. We had a Romanian Muslim tour guide named Mustafa [pic] who was pretty funny. We went to the Dubai museum [pic], which was ok, but we didn't have much time there. Then we went to see the Burj al Arab, the 7-star hotel landmark [pic1 pic2]. It wasn't that impressive. Then we went to look at the Jumeirah Beach Hotel [pic], a 5-star hotel right next to the Burj al Arab. We snuck up to the 11th floor in a back elevator [pic], and then took the main elevator up some more, much to the annoyance of security. Got some nice pictures, though [pic]. After that, we passed by some real expensive villas [pic1 pic2].
That evening, we went out to a restaurant with a friend of Shiraz's dad (and the friend's family) [pic]. It was great Arabic food, especially the juice cocktail - basically, they take a bunch of different kinds of juice (made thick from the actual fruits) and put them in a big mug, but don't mix it.

The desert safari

The next day we got up early to go on our desert safari. We headed out on the highway, maybe an hour and a half outside of Dubai (and since we weren't in India, that really got us someplace!) [pic1 pic2 pic3]. We were taken to an overlook near Hatta [pic1 pic2 pic3]. After that, they took us off-road [pic] to another overlook [pic1 pic2], and then to a ravine with a stream running through it [pic1 pic2 pic3]. A couple of guys swam there [pic], but I didn't.
After that, we went to the Hatta Heritage Village [pic1 pic2]. Pretty boring, actually. Not really that much to see.
From there we traveled to the camp [pic]:

We had lunch and then headed out to ride ATVs in the sand [pic1 pic2]. It was tons of fun, but I got stuck a couple of times and that really sucks. Fortunately, unlike mud or snow, if you're stuck in sand you just need to lift the wheels up and the sand fills back in under them - of course, it takes two people to lift them.
Then, we went dune bashing [pic1 pic2 pic3 pic4 pic5]. There's video (yes, another in-car video. It's long, but skip through it or whatever. I don't care.):


Later, we tried sand boarding [pic1 pic2], but it didn't really work. Then was dinner [pic] - apparently, dinner in the desert is pretty popular as we went from being the only people there to being among maybe 20 other groups. They all left again after dinner. We tried on traditional clothes [pic], hung out for a while, and then went to sleep [pic1 pic2]. In the morning we rode camels [pic1 pic2] and then headed back to Dubai.

The malls

There wasn't much to do in Dubai, since it doesn't really have much heritage (it's a very recent city in terms of importance). So we spent a lot of time in malls, especially since Mark loves to shop. They were very much like American malls, which was nice because it felt like home, but also it was pretty damn boring after a while. To kill time, we watched a couple of movies. I saw The Illusionist, which was alright, and Children of Men, which blew me away. We went to three different malls in total. The first is the Burjuman mall right near our hotel [pic], the Deira City Centre mall, and the Mall of the Emirates. We also went to the Gold Souk [pic], a market of gold shops.
Of these, the most interesting is the Mall of the Emirates [pic], since that's where I went snowboarding in the desert.

Snowboarding

The Mall of the Emirates has an indoor ski/snowboard park in it called Ski Dubai [pic1 pic2 pic3 pic4]. We planned to go there on Saturday and snowboard all day. Four of us have never snowboarded before, so we were going to take lessons that they provide.
We get there at 11am. Two guys stayed at the hotel, and were going to come later. The two guys with us that have snowboarded before get in line for their slope pass and head on in. We wait in line to get lesson tickets. Long story short, you need to have a decent amount of skill to be allowed on the slopes. Skill that they normally teach over four sequential lessons. And the first available time for the first lesson was 6:30pm. So basically, we were screwed. We couldn't go on the slopes because we didn't know how to snowboard, and our friends were already out there with no way to contact them. So we signed up for the first lesson (60 minutes) at 6:30, and the second lesson (90 minutes) at 8. We figured, we'd at least get to snowboard some.
So then we go to this place called "LeisureLand", some kind of fun park. It was pretty run-down and depressing, but we played a game of bowling [pic] and then went back to the mall and watched a movie.
6:30 rolls around and we're all suited up [pic]. They bring us out to the tiny bunny hill and teach us some really basic stuff for an hour [pic]. Then we wait for our second lesson. The instructor for this one was much cooler. He teaches us some more stuff, and then leaves most of the time open for us to just practice it. This is still on the bunny hill. At the end he says we can go up and do a couple of runs on the main hill (from the mid-station). A different instructor says that we can't, but we decide to try it anyway. We swipe our cards, and it says we have 120 minutes of slope time! So we had an extra two hours there on the main hill and a small hill to the side of it to practice. I did pretty good by the end, but I fell a lot for most of the time. I fell really hard on my butt at the bottom of the hill where it was mostly ice, and it still hurts. The next day I could barely sit down, which made getting in and out of cabs comical for the rest of the group.
The good pictures: [pic1 pic2]
And the video! This isn't my best run by far, but I think it best sums up my outing:


New Years & the end

After snowboarding we went to a pub and I ended up staying up past 4am. The next day (New Years' Eve), we went to a mall or something, and eventually to a New Years party. Getting there was an ordeal, but I'll spare you the details. The party was headlined by Paul Oakenfold. It was pretty good. I was still really, really sore from snowboarding, and so I didn't dance all that much. I got to bed after 5am. A pretty good New Years, all in all, even if it was exhausting [pic].
Our final day we did some stuff, and then went to the airport. It was a great trip, very relaxing, and a much needed break from India.