Dubai Overview

Dubai is the largest city in the United Arab Emirates.  It is in the emirate of Dubai.  On our trip, we went to Dubai and Sharjah.

Americans can visit the UAE without a visa.  This is great and saves you some money.  You will all need visas to visit us in Oman, sorry.  An Oman tourist visa costs $50 for a 30 day or around $13 for a 10 day if we can learn how to get one of those.  The 30 day option, at least, is easy online.  You can get them on arrival as US citizens, but I don’t encourage that because “I had a bad experience.” (Name that random movie quote)

Back to Dubai, it is 4-5 hours to drive there for us or a short hour long flight where you get in the air, they serve you a drink and snack then start collecting to head back down before you’ve possibly had time to finish your snack.  Yes, we walked off the plane carrying our trash because we weren’t done when they collected trash.  The flight is that short.

Should I be concerned that this airplane still has ash trays?  Our return plane did not.

We flew on Oman Air.  Their planes are admittedly older.  (see above picture)  But all is safe and all interactions with crew members were extremely present.  Also, I had a row to myself both trips.  Stephen sat with the boys.  hehe!  Pretty excited that they are expanding their service and offer service through some other carriers.  They just opened up flights to Moscow.  Maybe something to do one summer (I’m not a cold weather fan)?

Dubai has a metro service of some sort for getting around town that I haven’t explored.  We rented a car.  Warning to others:  remember what terminal you came into.  We had quite a bit of difficulty figuring out where to return our car.  The signs are basically non-existent.  We were giving up at Terminal 1 to head to a different terminal when we happened upon the Avis car rental.  This was definitely not where we had picked up the car.

The boys at the Burj Khalifa

City view from the riverwalk

Example of some of the decorations inside the Dubai Mall.  These are butterflies made of feathers.

Example of a uniquely shaped building.

This building seemed to have a facade that was somewhat removed from the sides of the building.

JW Marriott or apparently the tallest hotel in the world.  These buildings reminded me of the "king and queen" buildings in Atlanta given the crown-like toppers.

Even with car return issues, I would highly recommend Dubai as a place to visit.  It is grand.  It should be, they have spent a lot of money cultivating that image.  The buildings are more than just skyscrapers.  They are works of art.  They are so unique.  They spend the money to decorate the outside of buildings and the inside.

Do you really need to spend a lot of time here?  That probably depends on whether you are a city or country person.  There is traffic, so that can get annoying.  But there are lots of things to do.  We spent 3 days and 2 nights here.  We went to the aquarium, on a dhow dinner cruise, and to a water park.  We didn’t go to Atlantis, the Burj Arab, or to the top of the Burj Khalifa.  We didn’t go to the Mall of the Emirates to go skiing (Side note:  the billboards around the construction of our upcoming mall mentions skiing.  We'll see.).  We didn’t go ziplining at Xline on the longest urban zipline.  Part of the consideration was what did we want to do this time, the other consideration for Dubai is money.  How much do you want to spend on your experiences?  We picked out a few adventures based on Groupons.  Gotta love Groupon!

View of the Burj Arab (green building) and Atlantis aka The Palm from our plane leaving town.

I will have a series of blog posts highlighting various aspects of our trip to Dubai.  It’s too much for one post.  Stay tuned for more!