Hello Dubai

Landed in Dubai at 7:30am after a smooth flight but none of us had had much sleep so we were all feeling a bit weary. The 20min walk from our gate to the baggage carousel seemed to take forever but we finally got to passport control, collected our bags and walked straight through customs to a waiting taxi. We arrived at our hotel about 8:30am and decided to have breakfast at the hotel while we waited for the reservations manager to arrive at 9am and see if we could get into our rooms early. As luck would have it we were able to access one of our rooms at 9am so we headed there after breakfast and decided to have a sleep for a few hours before going for a look around Dubai. Our second room was available around 11am which gave us a bit more room to stretch out and I think we could have slept all day but at 12:30pm we decided we should go out for a bit otherwise we wouldn’t sleep tonight.
We had hoped we would be able to use the metro in Dubai like we had in the other cities but our hotel was a 30min walk from the closest metro station so we decided to catch a taxi instead. We headed to the Dubai Mall which is the largest of the 80 malls in Dubai and it was amazing. In the middle of it is an aquarium so if you need a break from shopping you can sit and watch the sea life for a while! As well as the aquarium, there were lots of other atrium areas which had beautiful roof decorations and a huge waterfall in one area as well. All the

shops had sales on but the prices were still expensive so we didn’t do any shopping, just wandered and browsed.
Outside the Dubai Mall near the Burj Khalifa there is a waterway with fountains. Every night from 6pm the fountains go off for about 5min choreographed to music. This happens every 30min until 11pm so about 5:30pm we headed out to this area and found ourselves somewhere to sit to watch this fountain display. No pubs on hand unfortunately so we had to content ourselves with an icecream instead!! But the fountain display was well worth it, it looked amazing and the music playing at the same time really added to it. Then about 5 min after the fountains had finished, there was a light show on the side of the Burj Khalifa which was also done to music. We sat and watched the 6:30pm fountain display as well – we were expecting it to be the same as the 6pm one but no, it was different with different music to go with it!
Seeing as we had spent all afternoon at the Dubai Mall we decided we should find somewhere else to go for dinner so we decided to catch the metro to the beach area and have some dinner there. It took us 20min to walk to the metro and then we found out that metro tickets are not cheap – in fact it works out cheaper for 4 of us to catch a taxi instead! So we traipsed all the way back to the Dubai Mall and had dinner in one of the cafés overlooking the fountains. At least we got to enjoy a few more amazing fountain displays while we were having dinner. By 8:30pm we were all feeling very jaded so caught a taxi back to the hotel and collapsed into bed.