This was a small fishing village? As if.

Today, we opted to step back in time and try to find out about the old Dubai as everything we had seen so far was very new and modern.  Arriving at the Dubai Creek area, we got some idea that this may once have been a small fishing village. We took a Dhow River Cruise down to near the mouth of the creek.

Next stop the Dubai Museum which is housed in an old Fort.  The museum is very well set up and gives a great idea of what Dubai was once like.
We also looked through Sheikh Saeed Al Maktoum's House to see artefacts and historical photographs.

Dubai, the architects dreamworld.

The view from our room first thing in the morning was of the Buji Khalifa reaching 828 metres into the record book as the current tallest building in the world.  It is an impressive sight with the sun reflecting off it's shiny exterior.  Taking off in it's direction, there was a great view over the large pond (rather man-made lake) which lay in front of it.  However, we headed into the large Dubai Mall in search of the "Hop on Hop off" bus as a means of exploring this city.

We took off on the route which headed towards the beach resort part of town. We got a close up view of Burj Al Arab, a seven-star hotel with rooms starting at $5000 per night.  Next stop was The Palm.  This region is a man-made island shaped like a palm that is five km long and five km wide.  On each of the palm fronds are real estate strips with residential homes, each with their own beach.  The centre strip has residential apartments and five star hotels.  At the end is Atlantis The Palm Hotel where we jumped off to see "The Lost Chambers" which was a large aquarium.

Next stop was at the Mall of the Emirates which apart from being another gigantic shopping mall, houses Ski Dubai - an indoor ski resort.  Tempted to take to the slopes, I opted instead to have dinner in a restaurant overlooking the resort.

Games Up

Our last morning in Damascus - how would we spend it?  In the Bazaar, of course!  One of the main handicrafts in Damascus is inlaid wood work.  There are many beautiful jewelry boxes and furniture pieces made from many different types and colours of wood which have been cleverly mastered to fit together.  I had my eye on a board games table which folded out from a slim side board to a card table.  The salesman told us that it would come apart into two pieces which would in total weight 10 kg and one piece would even be small enough for hand luggage on the plane.

Apart from the stones which I had been collecting along the way and the odd souvenir, we knew that between us, we were 10 kg under the total allowed weight.  It seemed do-able!

After bargaining the "best" price it was organised for the packaged table to be delivered to our hotel just in time for our departure to the airport.  This occurred about 15 minutes late and the packages seemed slightly larger than what I recalled hand luggage was supposed to be.

Arriving at the airport, we tried to check in our two suitcases and the two pieces of table (as we were advised that the table pieces would certainly not be allowed as hand luggage).  After some discussion and dubious looks, we were allowed through and took our places on the flight to Abu Dhabi.

A three hour flight and we were in Abu Dhabi and catching the bus to Dubai.  After about an hour, we passed some landmarks which told us that we were nearing the centre of Dubai.