Seeing, Skiing and Speaking in Dubai

Well in the morning we head for the airport. The flight to New York is 14 1/2 hours and then another 4 hour flight to good ol’ SLC!

We’ve had way too much fun!  The sun has been perfect every day.  Just a wee bit on the hot side 95-100 but it felt good to me after shoveling our way out of our house at Park City to get here!

Day before yesterday we went to the “top” (the 124th of 200 floors the…highest they let tourists go) of the magnificent Burj Kahlifa, the tallest building in the world.

This is the floors still above us from “the top” (this building is almost 3 times taller than the Empire State buildingz0.

We looked down to see the largest fountain display in the world, patterned after the fountains at the Bilagio except three times bigger (all set to music every half hour)

The biggest aquarium in the world (my pictures are in my IPhone) the biggest bookstore in the world and a lovely big ice rink are the big draws for the Dubai Mall where we are but every mall has it’s own draw.  And the malls really are the BIG draw for Dubai. It’s a material world, patiently waiting for the recession amidst hundreds of unfinished buildings and lots of rubble hidden behind the buildings.  Apparently the poor workers whose livelihood dropped out from under them live on the outskirts in desperate poverty. According to our friends last night some are living with 30 people in one room.  What a world!  

This is the famous hotel we walked into last time we were here. It is a 7 star hotel, and claims to be the most luxurious hotel in the world:

Yesterday we went to Ski Dubai at the Emirates Mall and of course, Dad just HAD to ski!  Instead of the 3000 foot vertical drop at Park City, it was about a 300 foot drop but it was pretty amazing that they’re able to keep that space at 22 degrees year round when it’s 100 degrees outside! 

We think we know exactly where Anita and Tal were sitting when they sent their picture from Dubai (this isn’t it). Fun to follow in their footsteps!

 

There were kids’ birthday parties with sleighs and toboggans as well as some excited skiers who paid $25 for two hours and then picked out boots, coats, mittens etc. in a giant entrance area and went in to have a good time.

When you run out of other fun things to do, you can rent this ball and roll down the hill!

Last night we had a lovely dinner with the board of EO Dubai and met some very interesting people.  Our host is a Sikh and he and his wife personified the peace and tranquility that the Sikhs aspire to.  About a third of the group are Muslim, almost half Indian and the rest German and New Zealanders etc.

Tonight was a fascinating evening with a lively discussion with lots of smart parents!  There were so many bright young mothers who loved getting a copy of A Mother’s Book of Secrets while the dads got Teaching Your Children Joy or Responsibility. 

Here is our gracious host and his beautiful wife who agreed to put us up for five days in a beautiful hotel

so that we could recover from jet lag before our presentation (and now we have to do it all over again). 

And here is the whole interesting group.

Enough fun for now. We leave beautiful Dubai and look forward to heading back to snow, thinking about Bear Lake and a plate full of stuff we left behind! 

Dubai!

Well, here we are! After sitting on that plane for about 14 1/2 hours, we arrived to a totally deserted surreal Emerites terminal. The black wall in the back is a waterfall. 

We were greeted by a lovely young lady who directed us through immigration in about 2 minutes.

 

Again, hardly anything at baggage claim, including our bags which popped in after about half an hour.

Our hotel is spectacular and attached to the famous Dubai Mall which houses 1200 glitzy shops!  Our room is Asian modern and the coffee table was laden with fruit and a box of Middle Eastern candy.

  The fruit was particularly interesting:  Inside each strange package is a delightful little ball of yummy “stuff” that tastes a little like Lychee nuts: 

The view from our room shows the top of the mall because it is actually attached to the mall. The crowds there on Friday and Saturday (their weekend) was something to behold.  It was literally teaming with thousands of women in beautifully decorated black abayas and colorful saris, shopping like there was no tomorrow.  Actually there probably wasn’t…they were headed back to their countries to start their week today (Sunday). 

We have a nice view of the infiniti pool below our room:

And yet another wall of water falling down an enormous stone slab about three stories high:

Our little breakfast buffet is lovely:

 

And the view from that room is amazing.  Everywhere you look there is spectacular architecture but many buildings are still unfinished.  Cranes sit beside them, waiting for the recession to end.  Our driver yesterday said that two years ago there were 5000 people working on one building at a time. Now there are about 300 and some are just totally deserted! 

.

Yesterday we took a boat out to see Dubai Creek, which isn’t very big but gave us a great view of the “old Dubai”, meaning they’ve been there for maybe 10 years

 

Last night we “went to the mall” and realized that there probably isn’t anything you can’t buy there…except books!  We did find ONE bookstore which we’re visiting tonight. 

There is also enormous cluster of theatres!  The tickets were only about $8 but if you wanted to go to have a Platinum experience with just your family, or just a date, you can buy  seats for $40 each and have a home theatre experience with lazy boys and a small “big screen”.  No thanks!

We went to theatre 22!

And saw….drum roll…Iron Man 2, which was definitely the dumbest movie of all time (sorry to ruin it for you boys).  By the end I decided that they were really trying to be dumb so maybe they’ll get an academy award for that! 

Two very funny things made it worth the price of the tickets:

1) Watching guys in full Muslim regalia in line to buy tickets (even though movies are strictly forbidden in Saudi)

2)  Going to the rest room afterward where there were 5 stalls in that gigantic complex with about 30 women waiting and a young girl with a rag in her hand who rushed in to the stall as each “customer” left to wipe off the toilet seat, which was always drenched with water from those crazy water nozzles.  The rag finally got so wet that she had to resort to paper towels!  Only women who have traveled in Asia will know what I mean. I still don’t get it so don’t ask me! Hilarious! 

The mall really is an amazing bastian of capitalism but fun to see. Women really do wear these things under those black abayas!

 

And tell “the kids” that grandfather is thinking of buying a remote control plane or helicopter for the lake this summer…when we get home!

We are literally 5 blocks from the tallest building in the world!  It doesn’t look that tall from here, but apparently it is twice as tall as the Empire State Building!  We’re on our way over there right now so you’ll be seeing the view from there in the next post!

 

We haven’t seen the ski resort yet but that will coming in the next couple of days too!  We have a dinner tomorrow night with our hosts and then our meeting on Tuesday night and we’’ll be on a plane on our way home on Wednesday.

Since church was on Friday in compliance with the Muslim world (Curtis Cannon picked us up and took us to a great little branch. There are also two wards. Amazing!) this is a Mother’s Day I’ll never forget!  Happy Mother’s Day to all back in that Mother’s Day world!

GRAND!

We are on an Emirates flight to Dubai!  After we pulled away from the gate, they required the pilots to pull back in again and remove someone or several people ? from the plane. We have no idea what that was about but since they just caught the Times Square bomber on an Emirates flight two days ago it makes us wonder. No one seemed alarmed but we are, therefore an hour and a half late on our thirteen hour flight which I’m delighted about.  All the more time to catch up on stuff!

I’ve just realized that there are so many grand and random things that have happened that I haven’t included in this blog in the past month that I’d better document it or lose it!

First was the fun we’ve had not only with our #19 grandchild but with our other GRAND children!  While we were in St. George on April 6th I forgot to mention that Ashton had the rare privilege to sing on the stage of the Tuachan Theatre along with his class and almost all the children in the St. George schools. I know you might think that I’m prejudice but with that white hair and those long arms do you not think that Ashton is pretty easy to spot in his class?   He was definitely the star!

 

“Where’s Ashton” is a little harder to figure out in this picture!  What a group!

 

On the way home from meeting Jacobson in NYC my flight just happen to come in 15 minutes before one of our GRANDchildren, Isaac was presented an award for his poem about the beautiful red rocks and hills surrounding their home in a state-wide poetry contest!  The awards were presented by the Utah Poetry Society and I got there in plenty of time to hear his poem read by a professional reader at…luckily….the SL Airport Hilton!

We also had a grand time at dinner with these cute neighbors on Augusta Way who are from Shanghai.

 

We also had a GRAND time at the Westgate Gala this year, which raised lots of money for the Westgate school that does so much good for teens in trouble.  Don’t ask me how Debi Gilmore got the Tabernacle Choir to come and sing at a local high school as volunteers for a great cause but she did! They had both organists, Mac Wilberg and even Lloyd Newell who presented a great message about the importance of service! Bless them!

Shawni and I had a GRAND experience at TOFW in Spokane (sadly our last event with them unless someone else drops out). That auditorium was packed with 2200 wonderful women.  There’s nothing like a room packed full of the power of women to insist that you feel inspired! The speakers, artists and organizers below were so fun to get to know.

 

 

And our GRAND friends Leone and Karen Peterson invited us to a truly wonderful evening that included a lovely dinner and a collection of eclectic music at presented by the students and alumni of the U of U at Gardner Hall.  It included everything selections from an opera in which nuns were getting their heads chopped off during the French revolution with the sound of a real guillotine to an terrific acapella group of seven to a full band playing John Phillip Sousa’s “Stars and stripes forever”! (grainy I know but the other one I took was worse!) 

 

Each time we returned from a trip, there was yet another GRAND snowstorm!

And we couldn’t believe how lucky we were two years ago when we had an Open House for Eli and Julie on their wedding day, May 2nd, with all the doors open and spring in the air. This is what it looked like on May 2nd this year:

 

How lucky are we that we got to go back to our darling GRANDchildren in NYC on our way to Dubai?  It was so fun to see how much that adorable baby had changed in just nine days and how delightful McKay and Lyla were about the world and everything in it!

Grandfather got to meet the little guy for the first time!

and we had a GRAND time playing:

 

 

Here we are on our way home from “How to Train Your Dragon”.  Jacobson took special note, McKay really got it and Lyla LOVED the first hour! 

We even had raclette cheese at Noah and Kristi’s in honor of Tal and Anita’s safe arrival in Switzerland:

The walk to Central Park was a riot!  Lyla thought that it was her stroller with her babies. The thought that McKay was in front never occurred to her!

Of course we couldn’t leave NY without a quick trip to the Cirque de Souleil last night on Roosevelt Island, not far from Noah and Kristi’s house.  Dad was like a kid in a candy store:

The weather was absolutely GRAND as was our “cute enough to eat” Jacobson who changes every day and has gotten his days and night just a bit mixed up from 3-5 a.m. Good luck with that Noah and Kristi! 

Here’s a wave to all of you:

How could we be more blessed?  Can’t think of a better word to describe our month: GRAND!