Despite the scarcity of water and the fact that most of it comes from desalinization, there are innumerable fountains in Dubai. Every new construction involves some sort of water features – fountains, canals, pools, etc. Some of them are quite massive and some are quite creative and interesting.
Here is one of the massive ones. This is in Dubai Mall.
The diver sculptures are life sized, so that gives you some idea how tall and wide this is. Not only that, but this is one of a pair of fountains.
Below is one of Paul’s favorite fountains. He is a waterbaby and could watch fountains like this for hours given the chance. This is in Festival City mall and is an example of the interesting design type of fountain.
It is a sloped wall and at short intervals water comes down in waves.
The slope is covered with sea shells which is what causes the frothiness of the water and the sound of waves on the beach.
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Fountains
January 10, 2009Campus wildlife
January 9, 2009
These flowers look like gardenias, but I am always disappointed when I smell them, because they are not gardenias. I can’t detect much fragrance from them at all.
The red arrow is pointing to where my office is.
This fountain is a very popular spot with the minas in the afternoon. They love to have their bath in it.
The minas also congregate in the trees near the front gate. The noise of their chatter is astonishing.
This garden area near the front gate is usually full of birds in the afternoon also.
This is a white cheeked bulbul.
Can you find all the birds in the picture above? I see 5 white cheeked bulbuls. What do you see?
This is one of our campus cats. I usually see her near the front gate. She seems friendly and runs up to me, rubs against my legs and meows LOUDLY, but she does not like to be petted. Talk about mixed messages. Having her cheeks rubbed seems to be okay, but she’s not crazy about a simple pet down the back.
Dubai Mall miscellanea
January 9, 2009The Dubai Mall is the biggest and most recent mall. It is at the base of the Burj Dubai (tallest building). Many of the store spaces are still vacant with “store opening soon” signs. I kinda figure if it doesn’t say the name of a specific store, that nothing is opening there “soon.”
When we go into these massive and confusing shopping malls, I am very lucky to have my spacial genius husband to do the navigating. I would have to spend all my time looking at the maps to figure out where to go. Sometimes the maps don’t have the “you are here” indicator, so that increases my fruitless staring at the map time.
There are giant led boards displaying ads or national symbols on the sides of the walkways.
We were especially amused by the Ribs and Rumps restaurant. Doesn’t that sound appetizing?
Here is the one and only Taco Bell in Dubai. Yes, we ate here. The rule is that if we didn’t eat at an American fast food restaurant back home, we won’t eat at it here either. We did our fair share of Taco Bell back home. However, this TB does not have the burrito supreme, but it does have cheesy fries?!?!?!?!? We did not try the fries. There seems to be a rule that you can’t open a restaurant unless it has fries on the menu.
The mall has a giant ice skating ring.
And a large aquarium. We were too tired of foot to go through the aquarium, but it is on our list of things to do. I love the aquariums where you can walk through the tube and see the fish all around. After they had stocked the tanks they were having trouble with the fish eating each other, especially the big sharks eating the smaller sharks. Go figure! I’m not sure how they resolved this. They have regular feeding times (one of the things advertised on the reader boards), so maybe that keeps the predating down.
Kitty fun
January 8, 2009When I arrived at work yesterday one of the campus cats was laying on the mat in front of the door, so I stopped to pet her. Now that the weather is cooler, they actually have fur and are more pleasant to pet. In the 120F summer heat they shed to the point of being almost hairless.
A short time later I was sitting in my office and I heard her meowing. They tend to have very big voices here, so I thought “Wow, I can hear her all the way inside the building.” Then the meowing got louder and I, being brilliant, put two and two together and went looking for her. She had just entered the periodicals room and was roaming around to investigate. So, I talked to her and picked her up telling her we should take a walk outside where she belongs. We headed for the door, but one of my coworkers had called custodial to come and remove the cat, so I tried to hand her off to him, but he had NO idea how to handle a cat and she was soon loose again. I thought that she would now give us a chase, having been handled roughly, but she laid down on the floor and rolled over, so I was able to pick her up and take her for a walk away from the entrance of the library myself.
That was my big excitement for the day.
Christmas trees
January 1, 2009
The Christmas tree at the Dubai Mall (which is still up, by the way) is gi-normous, as these three pictures show.
The color of the lights changed before I got all three pictures taken.
Here you can see the tree at Festival City.
As you can see, you can ride the escalator through the tree. Weeeee!
I’m not sure when the trees will be taken down. Some had “Happy New Year’s!” banners draped on them. Maybe they will add hearts and cupids next. January and February are the “Shopping Festival.” Like they need a shopping event here.
Burj Dubai, fog, traffic patterns
January 1, 2009
Here are a series of pictures of the Burj Dubai (world’s tallest building) as we get closer to it. Our original intention was to go to Festival City – one of the many malls – but if you miss your turn-off, you are up a creek. It is often easier to just change your destination than to try to get back on the path to where you originally wanted to go. So, our destination changed to the Dubai Mall.
These pictures were taken at dusk and, yes, there is a significant amount of pollution, but this was also the evening of our foggy day (see previous entry) and there was still a significant amount of fog hanging around. Warm and foggy, imagine! In fact, we had to run the windshield wipers because it was condensing on the outside of the windshield and making it nearly impossible to see to drive.
The frame of the building has reached its highest point, now they are just filling it out. They haven’t announced exactly how tall it has turned out to be, yet.
Various and typical Dubai sites
January 1, 2009
Driving down Sheikh Zayed Road is like driving down a canyon.
This construction site has 15 cranes. We’ve counted them multiple times. We’ve decided that the philosophy is that they don’t want to have to move them, so they install enough to cover the entire construction site at all times. Considering that a few months ago a crane on Sheik Zayed road fell over, it is probably a good thing that they are not moving them about. (By the way, no one was hurt by the falling crane, which is an amazing thing, since that is a heavily traveled road.
Great advertising. “Big Tasty – It’s big and tasty!” One thing I am very glad of — we have not seen the creepy Burger King in any advertising here (although we don’t have cable, so maybe he is here.) KFC has a questionable looking chicken mascot making the thumbs up sign (with his wing???). He apparently thinks it’s great to be your entre.
The guys in this picture were painting the cross walk stripes with a bucket and a brush in an active intersection. That is typical Dubai!
I think the Picadelly Hairdressing Saloon speaks for itself. There are a lot of saloons here. We find the use of that word amusing. They are always gender specific. No unisex here. You can see into a gents saloon, but the women’s saloons always have opaque windows. It’s hard to wear a veil and get your hair cut at the same time.
Foggy foggy dew
December 31, 2008This is the view out our window this morning. It is a little disconcerting to see this when you are on the 8th floor.
Below you can see the extent of the visibility during our drive to work. Luckily, it is New Year’s Eve and it would seem that several people took a vacation day, so traffic was not as horrible as I had imagined it would be.
Welcome to Hatta, finally
December 25, 2008
Our first stop in Hatta was Hill Park. The main feature and attraction of this park is just that, the hill.
One climbs up the hill…
At the top is this tower providing a marvelous 360 degree view of the area.
Above is the top of the tower, below is the view out the door of the tower.
At intervals up the path there are BBQ areas. These are rectangular walled areas with seating and a roof where families can picnic. You can see one in the bottom center of the picture above.
Above is a new construction of some sort. Possibly a shopping center or office building.
Next stop was the Fort Hotel. This is a posh hotel, but we just stopped in for a late lunch.
Below are bouganvilla. They are common, but usually small and straggly, unless they get a great deal of TLC due to the harsh climate. I took this picture for you, Mimi.
And here is the camel ride. We did not spend the Dhs 20 each to ride the camel. I’m not sure how exciting riding a camel around the parking lot of a hotel would have been. We were still suffering from the effects of our Germany illness, so were not up to this. I think I prefer to do the camel ride in a little bit more authentic setting.
We did not make it to the fort itself, which is the other main attraction in Hatta. As I said, still not feeling 100% well, so called it a day and drove back to Dubai. We’ll do the fort another day.
Continuing on the Road to Hatta
December 23, 2008Some of you may be able to remember the good ol’ days when Uncle Joe and Aunt Flo would come to visit and show the family the slides from their last vacation or, worse yet, the 8mm film made with a hand held camera and a total lack of cinematic technique. It seems to me that this blog is kinda like that, except that you aren’t a captive audience and you shouldn’t be getting motion sickness since I don’t have a 8mm hand held camera. So, here’s the next installation of slides from our long vacation.
Above shows how the sand builds up against the cement dividers in the center of the road.
There were a few little towns or wide spots in the road along the way. These five pictures are of one such wide spot where there was a long line of carpet/pottery shops.
This is typical construction, even in the city, where there is a long cement building with small shops side by side. It is not unusual for shops to be all the same product. This comes out of the souk tradition, where a market area specializes in a particular ware — the gold souk, the spice souk, the textile souk, the electronics souk, etc. This single building arrangement is like a strip mall, but the shops are smaller and the strip is longer.
Above is a tire shop. I have yet to see a tire shop with a big show room to display their wares. They are usually small hole in the wall shops. This one has the luxury of space to actually install the tires.
Above is the “supermarket” and a cafeteria. They seem to like the word cafeteria here and use it a lot. A supermarket is usually a tiny shop about the size of a one car garage. So, the big markets are called “hypermarket.” Also, notice that all the vehicles above are SUV or truck. We are definitely out of the city.
Above are three shops. The two on the sides that have two windows are unusually large. Most shops are like the one in the middle – about the size of one car garage.
So, we still haven’t gotten to Hatta, but hang in there. The next post. I promise!
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