Goodbye Dubai

Well we're at Dubai Airport. All ready to leave.

I'm printing out all our talks at this internet cafe. I'm going to use up the last of my Dubai money on this.

Yesterday was Wild Wadi day. This is the place with the uphill waterslide.

We woke up earlyish and sat around. The cleaners came to clean our room and laugh at Howie's jokes. They had a good time. It's a little bit embarrasing having someone clean up your mess while you sit there. I'd rather clean up after myself. But I guess they're used to it.

We got ourselves a taxi after that and headed off to the water park. It was on the other side of Dubai, so we got to drive through the CBD. this is basically a strip of tall, new, mostly ugly buildings that are mostly under construction, and mostly covered in advertising. We got to see the work they're doing on the tallest building in the world. It's pretty cool. Tall too. But mostly what I saw seemed pretty souless to me.

Wild Wadi was tops fun. It's like Manly Waterworks and Ali Baba combined. It's all middle eastern themed and made out of fake rocks and stuff. When you arrive you put all your money for the day on a waterproof wristband and then anytime you want to buy something you just get it scanned. It's way fun. It's like playing a really big, simulation game and you get to eat the stuff you get. It's well designed to help you part with your money. I had fun.

The uphill waterslide is actually a series of many uphill and down hill waterslides. You go in a blow up tube and get shot up a waterslide by high pressure jets that try to take your pants off. Dirty machines.

Then you get to the end and have a series of three other water slides to choose from, and from there you get a series of three more and so on, till you get fed into big fake river to take you on a leasurely float around the park. It's pretty fun. All the way along there are overly friendly life guards to push you down different slides and force you to have your photo taken.

Once we were bored of the park, and had eat well with our play money, we headed off to Mall of the Emirates. It's teh 23rd biggest mall in the world, and its the one with the indoor ski slope. Neither Howie or I went sking though. It would have been fun, but as neither of us have skied before, we would have had a lesson, and we're too proud to let anyone teach us stuff. Especially not on fake snow in Westfield on roids.

But the mall was fun. We went to an oversized Timezone and played racing games. And we bought toilet paper in the biggest supermaket I have ever seen. Much bigger than the one the day before. It had 90 isles and 58 checkouts. It was huge. It was the size of Cowan, but under flouresant lights.

We ended our time in the food court then headed home feeling sleepy.

At the appartment I managed to wash come clothes in the washing machine. It was all written in Italian, so I had to make it up. But after 3 attempts and way too many soap suds, we got clean clothes. And the advantage of having nights that are 35 degress outside, you can dry your clothes on the balcony over night.

Today has been short. Just prayer and airport really. Lots of lines in the airport. I think the airport is the only place I have seen locals actually working. Everywhere else it's imported labour, like Indians, Pakistanis, British, Philipinos, etc. It's an odd city.

I'm running out of internet time, so I should stop. Plus it's all most time for Kenya.

Golly gosh. What are we doing?

Pray for us.