United Arab Emirates

Dubai

2 Dec
3 Dec
4 Dec

Introduction and things to do

Is there anybody who haven't heard about Dubai lately? It seems that the little emirate wants to be present in all debate: the tallest building on earth is being built here. The most luxurious hotels have been already built here some years ago. The new residentcial complexes of the palms, and the world, seem even a little bit ridiculous to be true. Its ambition to become a business prime level centre, and the top luxurious tourist destination doesn't seem to have an end.

And before everything just collapses somehow (because it will, isn't it?), we will have to pay a visit, to this Dubai!

That's true that, once again, the price of the flight tickets have dictated Dubai as an stopover, but we must say that, some months ago, we had been fantasizing about the idea of spending some months here, due to a potential work offer for Tiffany. Finally, the thing didn't work well, and we will have to have enough with a little 3 day visit.

Besides de luxury orgy of the new Dubai, in the old part we can still find the arab city on top of which everything has been built, with its souks and its mosques, its wind towers to refresh the houses much before the omnipresent air conditioned was invented, and its lifelong residents, concentrated around the creek, using traditional abras to go from one place to the other, and, for sure, commenting amazed what they are doing to their little town, not long ago a desert seaside settlement of about 40.000 inhabitants.

Accomodation

As you can easily imagine, we will have to look at the super luxury hotels, with the Burj Al Arab and the Madinat Jumeirah area in front of all of them, from a safe distance. The price of these places is even unreproduceable here, and it even hurts a bit to realize how many people is coming here and paying astronomic amounts of money to spend just a night in Dubai. We will stay in the old area, where, due to the commercial history and the new influx of tourists that come lately, there is an almost infinite quantity of hotels. In the pictures all look the same, and in the opinions all look the same bad. We are still doubting between two or three, and probably we will decide soon, so we will update the website by then.

Getting there and away

From Larnaca we will take a flight from Jazeera Airways, the main low cost airline of the Persian Gulf area. This flight departs at 23.45, with destination Kuwait, where we will arrive 3 hours later. At the beginning, the idea of staying a full day in Kuwait looked very attractive, maybe more to say that we have been in Kuwait, which sounds quite exotic for the average tourist, than for anything that we felt specially attracted to from this country. Finally, after checking some prices, and realizing how much it would cost just to travel from the aiport to the city, and considering the lack of obvious attractives, we decided to leave the idea for another time.

Instead of that, we will have a 5 hour transfer, that will maybe allow us to get a new passport stamp, and not much more. At 8 o'clock in the morning, hoping that we had get a bit of sleep in the airport, we will take a new flight from the same airline that will bring us to Dubai, where the airport, they say, has one of the most exhuberant duty free areas in the world.

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