A day in Dubai
We arrived into Dubai yesterday morning at 2am! The flight over was very smooth and was over very quickly. As we blogged earlier, the in-flight entertainment (no I don’t mean Brett’s 7 glasses of champagne!) was wonderful.
When we arrived at the airport, there was someone to meet us from the hotel who arranged a car to take us downtown. As it turns out, our hotel - Le Meridian Grosvenor House isn’t exactly downtown, it’s in the hotel district next to Dubai Marina. The hotel is way over the top for service and comfort. We have a “private butler” service, the bed is huge, we have a pillow menu (!?!), food is awesome and erm, lot’s more.
Yesterday we slept in until 11am and then headed over to the sister hotel - Le Meridian Beach Resort to soak up some sunshine and beach action :-).
The pool by the hotel was very nice with a swim up bar - very nice. It didn’t take long for the boys to brave the water and swim up to get a couple of nice cold beers in.
Later in the evening, we headed downtown to “old Dubai” to explore the local souks. A souk is typically the commercial quarter of an arabic city and is oftern used to describe the market area. There are multiple souks located in the Deira area of Dubai. We checked out the gold souk first which resembled more a collection of gold shops lining a covered street.
I was expecting more of a market scene. Unfortunately for us, the main attraction (the local spice souk) was closed due to holidays. We did however find a couple of Iranian spice shops open and stopped in to get some tea and a few gifts.
Today we’re planning on trying a few water activities (perhaps wind surfing) and will hopefully meet up with Lynn’s friends Paula and Juergen.
N.