Everything in Dubai is enormous and involves long distances to walk. I pride myself on walking an hour a day, but I am sitting here tonight with very sore feet. We arrived in Dubai at 4:30am today and walked and walked and walked to get to the baggage collection. Dubai airport is enormous, but it is designed to allow passengers easy access to the country. There were no messy immigration forms to fill in and by the time we arrived at the baggage collection point, our bags were already there. How different from Melbourne where there are masses of people waiting for bags and no bags. Here there were masses of bags going round and round and no people. I think the rest of the people on our flight were still walking. We are staying at Le Meridien. It is not far from the airport, and once again, booking in was painless. There are many staff to cater to your every whim at any time of the day or night. The girl who booked us in gave us a seat and she did all the work. She even asked for our business card so that she could fill in those details that one always has to enter when booking into a hotel. While she did this we just had to sit in the lounge. The hotel has four enormous swimming pools and many restaurants catering for whatever type of food you could possibly want. The choice of food at the buffet breakfast was unbelievable. In addition there was a menu with pages devoted to the health conscious and those watching their weight.
We took a taxi to the Emirates Mall. There are larger and newer malls we were told but this is the one that contains a ski slope. The ski area was set up with toboggans for young children, chair lifts, pine trees with snow on them, and a painted roof to make it look like a grey sky. People can hire skis, ski boots, warm clothes and helmets. Outside there are restaurants set up to look like Austrian and Swiss apres ski venues, complete with pretend open fires. All of this while the outside temperature is 40 degrees plus outside. The mall itself is extremely grand and bigger than anything I have seen in Australia. The floor is marble throughout but I think this is what made my feet sore. When we got hom I succumbed to jet lag but Bill did ten laps in the lap pool. We also have a very long walk from the lobby to our room in the non smoking section of the hotel. There are rows devoted to cigarettes in the large supermarkets, and the restaurants have large smoking sections with non smoking sections hidden away with less comfortable chairs, but we have not found too many people actually smoking. In fact, this evening we sat in the smoking section of a restaurant but nobody there was smoking.
We took a taxi to the Emirates Mall. There are larger and newer malls we were told but this is the one that contains a ski slope. The ski area was set up with toboggans for young children, chair lifts, pine trees with snow on them, and a painted roof to make it look like a grey sky. People can hire skis, ski boots, warm clothes and helmets. Outside there are restaurants set up to look like Austrian and Swiss apres ski venues, complete with pretend open fires. All of this while the outside temperature is 40 degrees plus outside. The mall itself is extremely grand and bigger than anything I have seen in Australia. The floor is marble throughout but I think this is what made my feet sore. When we got hom I succumbed to jet lag but Bill did ten laps in the lap pool. We also have a very long walk from the lobby to our room in the non smoking section of the hotel. There are rows devoted to cigarettes in the large supermarkets, and the restaurants have large smoking sections with non smoking sections hidden away with less comfortable chairs, but we have not found too many people actually smoking. In fact, this evening we sat in the smoking section of a restaurant but nobody there was smoking.
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