We stopped in Dubai for two nights on the way home from Greece. It was very hot as we expected - so hot that we wondered if we should walk the 400 metres to the cool of Dubai Mall or use a taxi. In the end we decided we would be fine walking. It was ok but you would not want to spend any longer than necessary out there!
Our hotel was in downtown Dubai, near the shopping centre and the huge Burj Khalifa tower. The tower is enormous, at over 800 metres and 160 stories high. The mall is also huge, and it was so hot outside we felt the only thing to do was spend our day in the mall.
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| The Burj Khalifa, 800 metres tall. |
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| Arabic-themed Dubai Mall shop. |
We bought tickets and travelled to the 125th floor of the Burj Khalifa where there is a viewing floor and souvenir shop. You can get to higher floors (on a more expensive ticket) but I think the view would be much the same, by which I mean rather limited! The air is so hazy you cannot see further than a couple of kilometres. The view down feels rather like the view from an aeroplane.
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| Sue on the 125th floor. |
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| Looking down Burj Khalifa Lake and fountain. |
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| The outdoor viewing platform on level 124. |
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| Get photographed made up as a sheik! |
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| The mall aquarium, visible below a gigantic screen. |
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| The wall of water, complete with divers. |
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| Banana ducks in the street. |
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| The mall ice rink, with huge screens above. |
The huge screen in this picture (advertising the REEL Cinemas) has a wide window in it into a restaurant. The mall is huge, with about 1200 shops. As well as dozens of restaurants there is a movie complex, the ice rink (above), and a large aquarium where you can also scuba dive. Wikipedia says that in 2012 there wer 65 million visitors to this mall.
We soon realised that everything was rather expensive - up to twice what we might expect - so perhaps it's not such a great place to shop.
Around dusk a large crowd gathered around the lake to view the Dubai Fountain perform its nightly show. This fountain also provides many superlatives - it cost about 200 million dollars to build, and performs choreographed displays to music, shooting water up to 150 metres into the air. It was an entertaining display complete with funky arab music, and we were cooled down by the spray of mist drifting across us.
That night we watched the soccer world cup final in Moscow on big screens at the hotel, along with a noisy crowd of hundreds. France beat Croatia 4 - 2.
Time to go home!
