Dave Goes DubaiThe jewel of Dubai, the Burj al Arab
(its also the most expensive hotel I have ever seen)

Hi everyone, sorry about not posting for a while, but I was in Dubai. This website is considered a dating website by the UAE and so it is blocked in Dubai, hence no posts while I am there. I am back in the Netherlands for this week, after that I will return to Dubai for 3 weeks.

Dubai is a pretty amazing city. Its under constant construction, half of the skyscrapers in the city are under currently being built. This was also my first time in the Middle East. The funny thing about Dubai is it felt less foreign than the Netherlands. I think this can attributed mainly to the cars and driving style. You see more SUV's, pick-up trucks, and American cars, which are all pretty rare in Europe. I also was able to find a Taco Bell and Budweiser, two things that do not exist in Europe, so that was also pretty sweet. The weather was nice, though it did get up over 100 degrees in the last few days. There were some strange weather occurrences I hadn't yet expeirenced, such as orange fog, which is a mix of dust and fog.

I saw some pretty amazing sights on my time off while I was there, including:
-Indoor ski mountain inside the Mall of the Emerites
-The Burj Dubai, the tallest man-made structure in the world (wiki this thing, its pretty amazing)
-The Palm Jumeriah, the man-made island in the shape of a palm tree. There are two of these, but we only went on one of them
-The Atlantis Hotel, this hotel is one the Palm Jumeriah, it is the largest hotel I have ever seen. In it's lobby, it has a fish tank that is over 20 feet high and contains a whale shark.
-DubaiLand, the amusement part of the future, Today! When this thing is complete, it will be over 3 billion sq. feet. Take that Disney.

You might notice that I am posting this on Monday morning. There is a good explaination for this. I use an old cellphone of mine as my alarm clock, as the alarm on my Blackberry is completely useless and works like 25% of the time. I forgot to change the time on this phone when I returned to the Netherlands (3 hour time difference between the Netherlands and the United Arab Emerites) So instead of waking up at 7 am this morning, I woke up at 4, got ready, got in my car, looked at the clock are realized what I had done. So now I have a couple of hours this morning to kill before work. Which I decided would be a good time for this post.

Being back in the Netherlands is pretty nice, I am able to cook my own food again instead of the two weeks of eating at resturants. Ever since I began traveling rather regularly for my job, I have stopped enjoying going to a resturant. A good, homecooked meal is so much better than any meal I can get at a resturant. Though we did go to one very nice resturant while in Dubai.
Here is a picture of the restaurant. Its got the typical tacky gold-theme that you find in Dubai, but this place was pretty amazing. As you can see from the picture, Dinner also came with a live band and belly-dancing. It served traditional Lebanese cuisine, including hummus, grape leaves, and shrimp from the Gulf that were larger than any shrimp I have every seen. One could even call these shrimp Jumbo. It was off the balcony of this restaurant that I snapped the photo of the sailboat hotel pictured above.

Comments have been pretty thin lately, so I am not sure who is still reading this. If you are able to post a comment, please do so, I would love to hear from people who are reading this. The easiest way to post a comment is to click on the link below each posts that say's 1 comment, 0 comments, 2 comments (ect). This will bring up all the comments on the post, below these comments you will find a place where you can post your own comment. Simply select Name/URL in the field Comment As. A pop-up window will ask for a name and URL, all you have to do is write you name in the name field, then click Continue. Write your comment then click Post Comment.

Also, Happy Birthday Mike, forgot to call you yesterday, but I hope getting a "shout-out" on the DavegoesDutch blog will make up for this. Personally, I couldn't think of a cooler place to get such a shout out.