People kept telling us that two and a half weeks was way too long a vacation for the UAE. They said there wasn't enough to do and see to fill that much time. They were right...and that is why it was absolutely perfect for us! We loved every second of our stay in Abu Dhabi. We had arranged our stay before we started our travels through the amazing website, trustedhousesitters.com. It's like the housesitting equivalent to match.com. We developed a profile with info and references about ourselves and applied to house sitting ads in various countries around the world. We were very fortunate that Fleur and her husband, Peter, selected us to watch over their beautiful home and two adorable cats, George and Connie for our entire stay.
The house sitting job was really the only way we could afford to spend our Christmas and New Years in such an expensive country. Our stay offered us a much needed reprieve from the stress and exhaustion that was setting in after being on the road, sea and air for the last four months. Don't get me wrong--the experiences have been unforgettable, and we are not ready to be back to reality--but we welcomed the opportunity to unpack our bags, make home cooked meals, watch Christmas movies and snuggle up with a pair of cute kitties. In between snuggling up at "home", we lounged on the private beach within the apartment complex and worked out in the gym to get ourselves back into shape!
The relaxation over Christmas was so enjoyable, and even though it was tough being away from family and friends over the holiday, it was a great time to catch up with them over Skype and FaceTime. Once Christmas wrapped up, we moved into planning mode and started planning the second half of our travels. Before we started traveling, we spent months and months detailing out our itinerary for the first four months of the trip. Once we started traveling, we only had time to plan out the details of the next couple days at a time, so the second half of our trip was a dark shadow besides what countries we were intending to visit. We dedicated a much-needed full week, about 10-12 hours a day, while in UAE to making more specific plans.
We explored the recently open Yaz Island near the condo. The island hosts Ferrari World and an F1 race track as well as a large mall...yet another of hundreds of malls in the country. I honestly have no idea how they can have so many malls. There is no way that there are enough people living in the country to fund that many malls.
A major highlight of our stay was the trip we took to Dubai on New Year's Eve to watch the world famous fireworks display at the Burj Khalifa. We arrived far too early to ensure a great seat on the lawn in the park just across the man-made lake at the foot of the impressive building. We probably could have arrived about 8 hours later and gotten the same exact seat, but we enjoyed a day lounging in the park, people watching and relaxing. The fireworks and LED light show was one of the most spectacular shows I have ever seen. The show surrounded us with fireworks exploding off high rise roof tops on all sides, so all you could do was spin around in circles with your head tilted up to the sky to take it all in.
Once the display drew to a close, everyone started to pack up their things and head home. The attention to detail that made for a smoothly run event for hundreds of thousands of guests throughout the city quickly crumbled as soon as the show was over. It was as if they had spent all year developing a plan for smooth, safe and flawless crowd control and then they got bored and decided to make the departure a free-for-all. We, along with the majority of the rest of the city, headed to the nearest train station to catch a ride out of the city to our car. They had shut down the Burj Khalifa station for crowd control and shipped all the people that would have been divided between two stations to one single station. Once we arrived at the open station, we got in a massive line to get in through the doors. The line was wedged between the wall of the station and the cement barriers along the side of an eight-lane highway. As we waited, we soon began to realize we were not moving forward and the crowd was getting more and more dense as more people pushed in from behind. The station had locked the doors on this side of the building for some reason. The area was getting so packed that we started climbing over the cement barriers and crossing the eight-lane highway that was bumper to bumper traffic going both ways. We could see that people were taking the sky bridge back over the highway and into the station, so that is where we started towards. The entire stairwell going up to the sky bridge was jammed up with people trying to squeeze onto the escalators and we just kept getting jostled around, swaying with the pulsating crowd. I felt a hand on my butt while in the crowd and didn't think much about it at first...it was so tight in there, I figured someone had just been pushed into me. Then a more deliberate grab. I turned around in shock and there were about five guys right behind me because the crowd was about a 10:1 ratio of guys to girls. Since I wasn't sure who to punch, I quickly asked Blair to go behind me to block these guys from my butt. As soon as I was in front of Blair and we started up the stairs, a creepy guy in his fifties lunged his hand around Blair and started reaching up my dress between my legs. At this, Blair grabbed the creep's wrist with one hand and took him by the neck with the other hand and spat a threat at him; "If you touch her again, I will kill you", then pushed him back into the crowd behind him. With a mixture of terror and guilt dawning on his face, the guy quickly retreated into the cover of the crowd.
Feeling shaken and violated by the crowd we were in, we continued up and over the sky walk where the crowd was bottle necked even further to go down a single escalator into the train station. I never really understood how a crowd could get so big and so unruly that a stampede or crush situation could leave people dead, until that night. We were on the verge of the crowd turning to hysteria as everyone was getting pushed tighter and tighter while looking for an escape. Blair and I started discussing escape plans to get to a corner or behind a support column that would protect us from the throbbing of the mass as a portion of the crowd was pressed into an illuminated billboard until the lights inside shattered. Luckily, we made it onto the descending escalator before any big incident happened, and landed into a nearly empty train station. I was so stunned by the station's course of action--a complete lack of foresight that could have ended just as badly as Shanghai did that very same night when a number of people were killed in a crushing incident while trying to leave the fireworks show on the Bund.
By the last week of our stay, we were getting really stir crazy and ready to get out of the house and explore Abu Dhabi and Dubai. We spent a day touring around downtown Abu Dhabi where we explored the Emirates Palace Hotel and the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque. The mosque was so stunning and dripping with wealth and beauty--from the German Swarovski crystal chandeliers (one being the 2nd largest chandelier in the world), to the columns inlaid in precious stones, to the single piece of Iranian wool rug that measures 60,570 sq ft and 35 tons.
We attempted to visit the camel races about 45 minutes outside of Abu Dhabi in the middle of the desert, but they were not hosting any races that week, so we ended up watching them practice for a bit and then making our way back through fog so thick you could not see the front of your car. Miles and miles of desert in every direction and we couldn't see any of it--a very unsettling feeling.
As our stay was winding to a close, we had the opportunity to do an evening desert safari thanks to a sweet Christmas gift from the Mulders! We were taken on a CRAZY 4x4 dune ride, enjoyed a nice meal at a desert oasis, watched belly dancing, got henna tattoos and all the other cliche things you might do on a desert safari. It was a fun night in a beautiful setting and we met an American teacher that was teaching in Abu Dhabi and her friend who was visiting UAE. We ended up going out with them and some of their friends the following night, which was a really nice treat. We just wish we had met them earlier so we weren't complete loners the whole time we were in UAE!
On our last day, we finally got to meet Fleur and Peter and thank them for selecting us to watch over their home and adorable George and Connie. It seemed strange to have been living in someone else's home that you had never even met. It's a concept that isn't as common in the US, but this mutual social contract based largely on trust and a sense of responsibility is kind of a beautiful thing. It seems so archaic and pure--it's not very often these days that you can experience something like that.
After saying our 'hellos' and then our 'goodbyes', we made our way back to Dubai for one more day of siteseeing before heading to Tanzania. We spent some time 'At The Top' skydeck of the Burj Khalifa, explored the garish Palm Atlantis resort on The Palm Jumeirah manmade island and enjoyed dinner around Dubai Marina. It had been a great experience from start to finish, but we were recharged and ready to get moving again. With plans finally in order, we were really excited to start the second half of our journey around the world!
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