We all arrived at IAH and Tan casually asks, "Hey, would you mind carrying my Zune?" But, of course…then I offered to carry his nice, fancy DSLR in my backpack. Somehow his new neck pillow ends up strapped to my backpack too. I think I'm starting to understand why I was invited…to be Tan's Sherpa! He eventually stole all the good back and carried my backpack, but it made for some laughs. The time flew by and it was suddenly time to board and we even heard "passenger: Moore" over the loud speaker and raced to get on board.
The flight was SO NICE! Emirates is an amazing airline! Some of the fun touches were (1) The video system had 1200 movies, I think and all kinds of other entertainment. (2) The front and bottom of the plane have cameras and you get to watch takeoff and landing and anything in between…even though most of our flight was clouds or the dark of night. (3) We fell asleep under the "stars" on the ceiling of the plane and woke to the lights slowly coming up and birds chirping. The food was pretty good along the way and the staff was great.
Once we landed in Dubai, we were all ready to hit the ground running...as much as you can be after a 14 hour flight. We took the metro to the hotel Novatel in the World Trade Center and found it easily. We met Ali in the lobby and rallied to get out and hit the town. The weather was hot and pretty humid, but about what most of us expected and not too unbearable…especially after the sun went down. Our first stop was to see the amazing dancing fountains at the Dubai Mall. It's like the Bellagio water show x10. That was a recurring theme in Dubai. They have taken lots of the cool things from around the world and do them bigger and better…the benefit of being a relatively young city. We also had a great view to snap the first pics of the Burj Khalifa, the tallest skyscraper in the world. We then went on a search for food. The mall is huge big and opulent. Every shop you can think of was there and there were beautiful art displays and cool touches like interactive maps that let you search your destination and then it shows you the route to that location. After about 4 tries on the interactive board and 100 stops at the information booth we finally found our restaurant. They had a prime space on the patio where we caught the final fountain show of the night to Ave Maria. Dinner consisted of hummus, fatoush salad, kebabs, and more. And every bite was delicious.
After dinner, we headed to the Library Hotel nearby. This place was swank! We took the elevator to the 63rd floor to Bar Neos that has stunning views of the city and the illuminated Burj Khalifa. The lights on the building seemed to pulse to the music in the bar. I have to say, the people watching and outfits were quote entertaining too. We grabbed our drinks and snagged a prime table. We toasted to a great adventure over the next week! I can't wait to share this time with friends old and new!
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