By the Wonderful Sea!

Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
B-E-A-oooootiful buffet breakfast this morning. I even had Special K (yeah, yeah, whatver - YOU'LL love it too, when you go to China!) and real maple syrup! Not together, of course. But...hmmm....

You won't be surprised to hear that there's a mall attached to the hotel, but it's neither very huge nor very glamourous . They have an AWESOME party shop though, with the coolest Hallowe'en decorations I've ever seen. I wish I had a brand new, empty house that I could decorate with all that stuff for October 31st. Hmm again.... eh, Holly? :D

We got a taxi into the city after a while. There was supposed to be a shuttle bus, but it wasn't at the time we'd been told by the brochure in our room, and the taxi took aaaaages to get here, so I wasted all that sunbathing time. :( The driver was nice enough to Daddy (though as usual, he didn't talk to me at all, even when I asked him a direct question. It's very insulting), and he drove us past the Sheikh Zayed Mosque - enormous, and cost over half a billion dollars to build but only eigth largest in the world - and the Emirates Palace Hotel, the interiors of which are covered in gold and marble, the roof contains 114 domes, 6 suites reserved solely for Emirati royalty and dignitaries and is the second most expensive hotel ever build. Abu Dhabi just doesn't seem to be as serious about having the most "-est"s in the world as Dubai . Buck up, guys! Oh, but petrol is 1 dirham. ONE. DIRHAM. A LITRE. That's less than twenty cent.

We stopped at Marina Mall for a while, which is large and confusing, but ranges from Gucci and Louis Vuitton, to Etam and Promoda and would actually have been enjoyable if I hadn't forgotten my credit card (I didn't exchange any cash at the airport and I haven't much left over since last time.) :(

We went back to the hotel then, and got stuck in a traffic jam. Joy. I don't know if it was central Abu Dhabi we were in or not, but it's nothing like Dubai. Even driving through the old parts of Dubai you come out into something space age sooner or later. It seemed to be all older sort of apartment buildings here. The only part that was similar was the Etisalat building (the one with the golf ball on the roof), and they have two of them here for some reason.

Once back at the hotel, I headed off for the beach . The same British couple had left their child splashing around in the kids pool by herself again, but bless her, she's great at making friends. Even if they didn't speak English, she chatted away to them. I made tonnes of friends too, then I murdered them with my flip flop. Don't worry, they were ants. :P They were enjoying crawling over my feet too much for my taste.

I wanted Subway from the mall for dinner. I don't have a huge appetite in this sort of heat. Unfortunately I keep forgetting that there's no ham ham (or ham bacon or ham sausage) in this country, so there's only pretend BLT, and I don't like beef bacon. :P I had a tuna roll instead, but for D6 (€1.16) I also got a large drink, free refills and two cookies. Unbelievable. This whole country is not generally considered cheap, but for normal stuff it's still cheaper than Ireland. HUMBUG.

Bedtime now. Gotta get up airly (haha, typos are funny!) for my flight. Hope the Dublin gang aren't on it. :P

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