After a long day's work on Tuesday, there was another dry party aboard a dhow - a traditional boat.
As our sponsors are governmental organisations, they are not allowed to sponsor anything involving alcohol. We sailed down the creek and looked at the Dubai scenery (skyscraper with flashing lights, mosque with flashing lights, skyscraper with flashing lights, mosque with flashing lights). I've not actually been able to see anything in daylight yet. It was quite a social experiment to see a large group of people (±200) who are used to drinking a lot of booze put onto a boat and given nothing but orange juice. It was a quiet, energyless few hours and as soon as the boat came to the harbour there was such a stampede for the gangplank that I thought the boat might tip over. People were muttering about finding some beer, and fast.
So, we got back to the hotel and went to the rooftop for some beers and shisha, where I discovered the one great thing about being female in this country: you never have to wait at the bar very long. The rooftop bar is obviously not used to hoards of sweaty geeks who have been alcohol-deprived for several hours turning up en masse, and there was only two people behind the bar and so getting drinks was taking quite a while. Up I waltzed to get me and Ana our plastic-pool-safe-tankards of beer and stood there for about 3 seconds and whoooomph, "How can I help you ma'am." Oh the looks I got from the blokes who had waited there for 20 minutes already. Unfortunately, they had the last laugh because, being a bit woozy from working my ass off all day, I made a big gaffe and said "Have you got any local beer?" There was a huge eruption of laughter and I went very red. AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
There was a duo playing arabic music and, after getting a bit stoned on strawberry shisha, I tried to work out whether the scantily clad ladies dancing with the arab men in robes were their hookers or their wives.
I felt sorry for the shisha guy because, for every shisha that he prepared, he had to take several puffs of it to get it going. Poor guy's lungs are going to look like the inside of a coal mine after a few years. The I left the hardcore alcholistas to their fun and went to bed.
On Tuesday I had a couple of hours off and wanted to get out of the hotel. I couldn't go far, so I decided to walk to the Reef Mall which is about 400 meters away. In the intense midday heat, it took me almost half an hour to walk it. Every time I passed a building, I slumped in its shadow. I thought I was going to die. I had visions of myself crawling on my knees, my tongue hanging out and foaming at the mouth. By the time I got there, I didn't even care about what was in the mall, I just needed to be in the cold air. I wandered around in a daze for a bit, found a bookshop - the only Arabic books it sold were Qarans; everything else was in English - and tried to get my body temperature back to normal.
Charlotte's collecting dolls from around the world for her daughter, although since Liddy is only one year old, I think that it's more likely that it's actually Charlotte who is collecting the dolls, and so I popped into the toy shop to see what I could find and there I found Fullah.
There's a whole range of pink and girly Fulla items - basically a sanitised, morally correct and anatomically incorrect version of Barbie. Fulla dolls come in many ranges of covered-upness, but all wear ankle length skirts and long sleeved tops. I bought the most covered up Barbie-in-a-Burka I could find for the novelty factor. They even had a moralised version of bratz dolls too. Although I think it was meant to be 'arty', I found this window display with the mannequin's heads covered with bags rather amusing considering the country I was in.
Tuesday night was the first social with booze, and we went to a club called Jambase in the Madinat Jumeirah again. People were frothing at the mouth with the thought of getting their grubby little paws on some alcy.
Location update: I'm now cruising at a sickeningly large amount of feet and shivering in a static filled itchy blue blanket.
Although the UAE is a strict muslim country, where for example, it is illegal for a man and woman to live together unless they are married, it wants Dubai to the be the 'world's favourite holiday destination'. To maximise the profits it can make from hot sun, humungous resorts and clear blue sea, it's turned a blind eye to the fact that alcohol is something that is forbidden according to muslim rules. All bars and clubs must, however, be in or attached to resorts, hotels or sports clubs. Booze is expensive everywhere, at around 7 Euros for a beer and 50% of this is tax. Only two companies in the country are licensed to sell alcohol.
If you are an expat, you can apply for a liquor license and can consume precious booze in your own home - one license per household, and the amount you can buy is determined by how much you earn. Bars are forbidden to sell booze to muslims, but apparently no one really gives a crap about that law, as I saw lots of young men in robes quaffing, or rather knocking back, tankards of beer like the rest of us.
So, back to the social. As usual, the geeks had a great time happy snapping with their powerful picture-takers and flinging sweat around on the dance floor. There was a quiz, which Fergal won, which was amazing because he did all the answers out of his own head while most of the geeks resorted to looking up the answers on the Internet on their i-phones.
On Wednesday the meeting ended early and chaos was caused by a line of 50 sleek white jeeps outside the hotel waiting to take us into the desert.
Our driver was a nutter and I feared for my life as he weaved in and out of the dense traffic like he was on a race track. We drove into the desert and proceeded to drive up and down sand dunes and get chucked about like rag dolls. It was all good, giggly fun. For the first 15 minutes. Then everyone began to feel a bit queasy.
When we stopped to take in the desert sunset - which did not melt away like most other sunsets I have seen; the sun just sank as a giant ball and then slunk out of sight. I have to say I was a bit disappointed - everyone was quite quiet and a few people were very green.
We arrived at the desert camp and ate, drank and were queasily merry for a couple of hours. Ana and I smoked the strongest shisha I've ever smoked and I was pretty stoned for half an hour.
This is a picture of Alix just after the camel lunged at him while he was poking the poor beast in the head for some reason. I don't think I've ever seen a frenchman move so fast. I almost hoped he'd scream "SACRE BLUEEEEEEERRRRRRR" but he didn't and I must learn to believe less in stereotypes...
There was a belly dance show - I hope someone had forewarned the girls about the paparazzi that would result when they began to gyrate their half naked selves in front of the shutter-happy sweating masses...
All that being thrown about in the jeep had rendered me knackered and so I was really glad to get back to the hotel and relax for a bit.
Random interjection: Adverts on some websites are tailored according to the location you're surfing from. I laughed my ass off when an advert for a UAE 'dating site' popped up because instead of a dating site, it was called a 'marriage matching' site. Lots of websites are blocked by the 'authorities'. For example, Flikr, the photo website, is blocked. Not sure it's because there's inappropriate content on there, or because the word 'Flickr' is also the slightly misspelled Dutch slang word for homosexual. Hmmmm.
The meeting finished on Thursday and that night, and since there's nothing to do in Dubai except eat, drink, shop, eat, drink, shop, oh and eat drink and shop, we went to the Mall of the Emirates, a massively huge mall, inside of which is an indoor ski slope with real snow. When we arrived I almost died when I saw the queue for taxis at the drop off point, 200 people at least.
There's not much of a public transport system in Dubai. They are building a metro, but the only realistic way to get anywhere at the moment is to go by car. I've spent a small fortune on taxis this week. I asked about the bus to the mall but they told me it would take at least two hours and time was not something I had an abundance of. Shame, I wanted to experience having to sit in the women's section at the front of the bus. Yup, the men packed to bursting in the back and the ladies sitting cooly in the front. Aye aye aye. Anyway, I immediately devised a cunning plan to get an escape taxi at the nearest hotel - it's a throwback from being in Cuba (as soon as you arrive somewhere, organise your escape as soon as possible).
So this mall was packed, and like everything else in Dubai, it was monstrously big and unnecessary. Thursday night is the beginning of the weekend in the Middle East and so, with nothing else to do except eat and shop, the place was packed with gangs of teenage boys in robes, small groups of be-robed girls and thousands of families. I guess they have to go there to buy new clothes to go shopping for new clothes in. No wonder there are not so many fat people in Dubai: they end up walking miles and miles around malls. And buffets.
I didn't go skiiing in the desert but lots of the others did for the sheer novelty of, well, skiing in the desert.
Chris said it felt very strange to be sitting under a heater in a cafe inside a giant freezer that was chilled to -4 while it was 40 degrees outside. Imagine the kind of energy bill it takes to keep a freezer that big, er, well, freezing? I can't shop in malls like that, and the only thing I bought was a small fluffy camel. Well, when in Dubai, do as the tourists do, right?
Then we went to meet Ana's friend who lives in the city, at a very, very, very posh hotel, "the Address Hotel". What a bunch of shite that was. It was full of rich expats, rich arabs and "airhos" as the local expats refer to the massive amount of trolly dollies holed up in Dubai on layovers. Laura was starving and ordered a 15 euro salad and then almost fell off her stool backwards when she received this:
I refuse to be ripped off and so I stubbornly, and quietly, starved for a while until I could take it no more and ravenously wolfed down the spicy free nuts that had been left on the table.
The terrace of the hotel where we were sitting was directly facing the construction site that is that of the world's tallest building, the Burj Dubai, another of Dubai's obscene projects.
The construction was still going on in the dark under massive floodlights. Ana's friend told us that the newspapers never record the true temperatures because the poor construction workers are not allowed to work if it's over 40 degrees. So, it never gets over 40 degrees in Dubai. Even if it's 50 degrees, it's never officially over 40 degrees.
On Friday, when I had walked out of the hotel it felt hotter to me than any day so far. The sunscreen had melted off my face in literally three minutes and I had to walk so slowly that it took me 10 minutes to walk the 200 meters to the others' hotel. At the end of the street there's a huge digital clock with a temperature gauge on it and on that day, it simply wasn't there. I thought I was delerious with heat exhaustion because I simply couldn't find the f ing clock. I thought I was going mad, and vowed never to drink again, such was the effect of that damn tequila on my short term memory. But then I realised that, as soon as the temperature hits 40, that clock goes off. And yep, later in the evening when the temperature cooled slightly, there was the clock again, blinking in at a cool 34 degrees. Bastards. Utter bastards.
Anyway, to continue, we ended up drinking too much tequila, or rather I did, because for some reason I ended up drinking all Ana's shots too because she, somehow, very cleverly, offloaded them on to me, and going to some horrible hard house club where I realised I must be getting old because all I could do for the first fifteen minutes was to exclaim "My god, is it REALLY loud in here, or is it just me?", until my eardrums got numb and all I could say after that was "What? I CAN'T HEAR YOU."
Anyway, I generally hate all nightclubs unless they contain unwashed hippies, cheap booze and are free to get in, and so this one, which cost 50 Dirams even AFTER we had bargained that it was already 2 am and we were three lovely ladies, was particularly awful. It was full of what I guess were Dubai expats, investment b(w)ankers, airhos and footballers bouncing around pissed out of their heads and just being generally obnoxious. We took the piss for a while and then even that got boring so we left . Apparently this club was in "old town", which made me laugh and shout very loudly "What an oxymoron!"
Location Update: I'm now back in Amsterdam wondering how 30 degrees managed to disappear over six and a half hours.
On Friday, our first real day off in six days, we lounged by the pool and then went to the souk in the evening, which was by the museum. Yes, the museum. there's one museum in Dubai. It's kind of funny to get into a taxi and say "Take us to THE museum, please." Apparently, the white-robed-powers-that-be have decided that they are sick of Dubai being considered culture-less and have vowed to build the biggest museum in the world. After perusing the souks and watching Laura expertly haggling over the 45 cashmere scarves she wanted to buy for what seemed like hours, we met Chris , Fergal and Alix and had dinner at Dubai's oldest commercial building - built in 1935!
Knackeredness rapidly overtook and we went back to the hotel pretty early.
Our last day, Saturday, was spent, rather unwisely, at the Jumeirah public beach.
I say unwisely because we went to the wrong public beach where there was no shade, no changing facilities (which, when you bear in mind that being in any state of undress is illegal, is kind of crap, especially when you did not have the foresight to put your bikini on underneath your clothes.) and hoardes of men gagging for any kind of glimpse of white flesh that they could lay their worn-out eyeballs on.
We grilled dangerously in the lovely breezy air for a while and then decided to go the Atlantis Hotel - a brand new huge water-themed hotel built on the far edge of one of the palms. I'd heard they had an aquarium and was desperate to have a look at some funky underwater beasts.
Let's just say that the Atlantis Hotel was horrendous. Well, they wouldn't let us in to the actual hotel as we were non residents and so we had to wander around the shopping mall, which housed nothing but shops full of designer brands (Baby Dior!!!"). We went into the aquarium which cost us a 100 Dirhams each and disappointed me so much that I actually complained to the manager afterwards - there were not even signs on the tanks telling you what each fish was, there were huge fish in tiny tanks and some of the animals had gaping and bleeding wounds.
The manager told me that the owners wanted it to "be fun and not like a museum or a zoo." I was hoping for a refund but it was not forthcoming, so I will get my revenge by telling everyone I know that the aquarium, and the rest of the Atlantis Hotel complex, is CRAP.
After our disappointment, the only thing to do was drown our sorrows in yummy persian food as far away from the _subliminal message_ CRAP_/subliminal message_ Atlantis as possible. A few un-persian cocktails and some amazing food later, I was packing, or rather hastily shoving, stuff into every empty crevice in my bag and ready to get up two hours later to get my flight home. And there my journey ended and I am happily freezing myself to bits in Amsterdam. If I never go back to Dubai again, it will be too soon :).
