We headed out of Austin on a Saturday night. I met Christa at the airport, and luckily, Riley was asleep when we pulled up to the airport, so it made leaving her a lot easier.
The Emirates Air airplanes are really nice, even in the economy section. Christa and I scored one of the few rows of seats with only 2 seats. So we didn't have to deal with any strangers next to us for 15 hours (yes, you read that right. It took 15 hours to fly there from Houston.). We didn't make friends on the plane, because when we got on, there was a family in the middle set of seats who had decided they were not only taking their overhead space, but ours as well. We let them know that was not happening, and luckily the flight attendant backed us up. Yeah, we suck. :)
The inflight entertainment rocked. We had our own TVs with on demand movies, tv, radio and games. There were so many options, and since we flew overnight, it was easy to stay relatively entertained in between naps. It had cameras under the plane and in front of the plane too, so you could see what was going on outside. Here's a pic of the system:
We got to Dubai Sunday night around 6:45 p.m., so we headed to the hotel to wait for Kristin. We had dinner and unpacked, and Kristin got to the hotel around midnight. We stayed up for awhile catching up, then we all headed to bed because we had tours planned for the next day.
Christa had tours/activities with her MBA class on Monday, so Kristin and I had booked a hop on hop off tour with Big Bus Tours. It's a great concept, because you are on your own schedule and can hop off at different stops and then 20 minutes later or so, another bus comes by and you can hop back on.
The red line was the city tour and the blue line was the beach tour. We did a bit of the red, then hopped on the blue figuring we'd take a look at the beach area and see what it had to offer. Little did we know we'd be on the longest leg of the tour possible (did not look that way at all on the map), so we spent the majority of the afternoon viewing the various shopping malls of Dubai from the bus. However, we did manage to hop off and see the Atlantis Hotel on the Palm Island. It was fabulous, but reminded us of the Bellagio in Vegas. Here's a pic of the ceiling and the aquarium:
After we escaped the blue line, we hopped back on the red line and hopped off to take a tour of a Sheikh Saeed Al-Maktoum's house. It was the grandfather of the current Sheikh, Sheikh Mohammed and is just a museum. We got free tickets as part of our bus tour, but finding the entrance to the house wasn't easy. There wasn't much there to see, mostly just pictures with bad titling (example: a picture had a man with a falcon. The caption was "Man with Falcon". Wow, thanks.). Here's a pic of Kristin the courtyard at the house:
We then headed on to the last stop of our tour, which was a free boat cruise on Dubai Creek. This turned out to be a fabulous event and began my and Kristin's love affair with Dubai Creek. I think we were on the creek almost every day after that.
We headed back to the hotel to meet up with Christa and get ready for dinner at Al Nafoorah. It is a Lebanese restaurant in the Emirates Towers, and was the best restaurant we ate at the whole trip. Others were good, but not like this one. I had lamb (the first of many meals with lamb) and we even tried a great Lebanese white wine. The restaurant is also one of the favorites of the current Sheik, but we didn't see him there. :)
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