Epic Adventure -- Day 5 -- 03/09/2012 -- Dubai

So today started much like every other day in Dubai, with a nice relaxing lie-in, Jenny and I have yet to set an alarm on this trip! Yet today contained the only real 'must do' on my list of activities in Dubai, an ascent of the Burj Kalifa. Our first port of call was the Dubai Mall located just beside the worlds tallest building. Containing more than 1,200 shops the mall is nothing short of amazing. Immediately upon arriving in the mall you are presented with an enormous indoor aquarium filled with tuna, groupers, sharks, skates and rays. At the far end of the aquarium was a plaque from Guinness World Records not stating (as I anticipated) that it is the largest indoor aquarium, but instead that this is the largest single pane of acrylic glass in the world(!?!?!?) .We planned on occupying ourselves by exploring the mall for a few hours before the time of our pre-booked tickets to visit the Burj Kalifa. Thanks to Jenny's previously mentioned discount book.we had a voucher for a buy-one-get-one-free coffee at a shop called 'second cup' and stopped there for a double espresso and a chai latte. The staff at this coffee shop entertained both Jenny and I by first inadvertently throwing our change at us when it slipped from their hands, and secondly by innocently referring to Jenny as 'sir' when she asked for a napkin (I'm sorry I have a cold) =D



After walking around perusing the food options or our Lunch, we decided on Debonairs pizza, which from my experience living in South Africa is the most delicious pizza in the world! Dan certainly agreed, having a Hawaiian pizza and some of my BBQ chicken pizza that they are pretty tasty. We then killed about half an hour walking around looking at some of the 1200 shops in the mall. At 13:45 we gave our tickets to the guard at the entrance to the Burj Khalifa. They scan your bags as you go through, and then you walk down a really long corridor that connects the mall of the Emirates to the Burj Khalifa, that is filled with interesting information and photographs from the design through to the construction of the worlds tallest building.

We then entered a very space age type lift, all glossy black mirrors, the doors close and the mirrors turn into tv screens that entertain you for the ridiculously short 30 second ride it takes to move you over 400m into the  air. When the doors opened I actually asked Dan if that was it, as it was such an unremarkable journey, it doesn't even feel as though the lift was moving!

Strange to think this is only 454 / 828 meters up the building,
the photo of the fountain that followsis taken from the bridge
you can see in the bottom left.

Walking out onto the observation deck was fascinating as well as terrifying(that was just me though) as the wooden floor boards all creek and move, really not something you want to feel at a bajillion feet up in the air, I wouldn't let Dan come too close to me as I felt like I was going to fall off! (Yes Jess, you would have hated it!) It was really amazing to be so high up, the world below us looked comically small, and thankfully the haze  of the dessert heat wasn't too bad at 2:00pm so we got a good view of everything. I even threw a coin off the side, as Dan was too chicken to try =D The observation deck is obviously surrounded by glass that is around 10 foot high, but they have these slits in the glass that you can push your hand through, with no barrier to the drop below. We walked around the 124th floor for about half an hour, taking lots of photos and marvelling at the fact that as high up as we seemed we were only 55% of the way up the building (I can only imagine what the view is like from the very top!) When we got in the lift to travel back to ground level I it was rather funny to see that the lift had only 2 buttons, ground and 124. 

After our journey to the third highest observation deck in the world we decided to sit and have some early dinner/late lunch at the rainforest cafe. Jenny and I also had a good laugh when a man from the restaurant  came and took our photo, obviously trying to sell us the print, and returned 5 minutes later wanting AED 175 for the photo (or just over £30)! Needless to say we declined and carried on enjoying our meal. Afterwards Jenny noticed that there was a Tiffanys store opposite the entrance to the mall and convinced me we should go in and have a gander at the items so expensive I wondered if the shop ever actually made a sale. The woman we spoke too was very nice, despite the fact that she recognised that we had nowhere near enough money to purchase anything in the shop, and even took several pieces of jewellery out of the displays for Jenny to look at. These items included a £200,000 pair of earrings, a £400,000 ring and a £700,000 necklace. We nipped outside for a minute to find a Ferrari 458 parked in the valet in front of the mall and I realised maybe these shops DO sell some shockingly high priced items occasionally.

As it neared 18:00 we wandered down to the water fountains that lie in the shadow of the Burj Kalifa and waited for the dancing fountains to spring to life. In the evenings, once every 20-30 minutes the fountains dance to music in much the same way as the fountains at the Bellagio in Las Vegas (although because this is Dubai the fountain is, of course, bigger). We sat and watched 2 performances of the fountains with about 1,000 people gathered round the water before departing down-town Dubai just after sunset. The first of the displays was just as the sun was setting and was to Arabic music which was very short, so we were glad that we stuck around to see a second show, which was just after the sun had set so we could clearly see the light show that is part of the water fountain, and it was to a 3 minute classical piece, which was just beautiful, and something everyone should try to experience if travelling to Dubai.