Three days in Dubai

We flew from Casablanca to Dubai and arrived in the UAE at about 2am. When we originally moved our flight we assumed that we’d be able to find something reasonably priced in terms of accommodation but we had not taken into account the dsf…

The Dubai shopping festival is a month long sale where all the malls here are open until 2 am and people fly in from all over the world. Once they arrive, they take up all the cheap hotels and buy all the tickets to everything in advance, so our brilliant plan was initially  looking a little less brilliant than we thought.

To solve the accommodation we used a site called airBNB which is basically a more classy and expensive version of couch surfing. We ended up finding an awesome couple who had a spare bedroom right in the middle of the cbd. We paid about $110 per night which would have otherwise got us a similar room (2without the kitchen or pool) 40mins from the cbd, or 1/5 of a similar hotel room in the same location.

Here’s where we stayed…. Business Bay, Executive Tower M:

We had a slight heart attack when we first arrived, leaving the elevator on level 31 to discover there was no apartment 7… Turns out it was accessed from a different lift lobby. Here’s our room:

Here’s the view from our room:

While we were here we did a lot of fun first world stuff which was great because after Morocco? We needed a holiday.

So we went to the aquarium inside the Dubai mall, which is huge and full of all sorts of awesome animals:

The we got some real food that wasn’t tajine or cous cous:

I don’t have any photos but I also went snowboarding at ski Dubai in the mall of the emirates, which was awesome and slightly surreal. We also took a trip to the highest building in the world, but unfortunately the only spot we could get was 10:30pm:

No matter the time of day the views from 150 floors up are pretty amazing:

And here’s the plaza outside the mall at 11:30pm:

People everywhere… I just love the retail culture of this place, and the fact you can get food from any ones of a hundred restaurants after 10pm.

On our last day we went down to the marina and took a cruise:

Before heading back to the apartment where we discovered we had lost Penny’s passport.

Nope, just found it.. It was tucked down the back of her daypack. Crisis (and heart attack #02) averted.

We’re heading off to the airport now… See you all soon and thanks again for reading this 2013/2014 round of our travel blog… We hoped you all enjoyed it as much as we did.