Dubai

30 NOV - 02 DEC

Dubai was a little different than Bahrain , only a little. One big difference is there was no base in Dubai . There is only a little area on the pier called “the Sand Box”. Basically it was a spot with a pizza place, a Burger King, Popeye’s, Baskin Robins, a coffee shop and a couple of electronic stores that sold over priced, off-brand crap and boot leg DVD’s. It also had a stage for a band or DJ they brought out at night and a place to charge laptops and get on the internet. They aren’t the best but here’s a couple pictures of the sand box.



All of my time the first day was spent here. We got off the ship late morning or early afternoon sometime and I went over to get something to eat and get on the laptop for a little bit. The food was not that great unfortunately. They tried to make it like home, but the chicken had too much and different spices and the BK was plain. It was still better than the ships food though. Then I went into the trailer to get on the net and delete all my useless yahoo e-mails and text with Jamie some. The computer of course had some updates to get, too. Even though I was plugged into the net there it was slow! The estimated time for the updates on a 56k modem was a couple minutes & they were taking over an hour. So I went back to the ship and relaxed for a little while and napped. I didn’t have anything else to do so I went back and tried to get more updates, I was stubborn and wanted to finish so I think I was over there pretty late.

Then next day I got up at about 9 to shower and get ready to go on a bus tour. We ended up waiting for a guy that was wasted the night before and didn’t even end up going. So me and the other two guys took off at about noon. We had to take a bus from the ship to get to the mall where the tour left from. That was about 45 minutes from Jebel Ali where the ship was to Dubai where everything else was. We walked in and it was a huge mall like in the states really. Even the food court had the same places. I had probably some of the best Papa Johns I ever had before we went back to the ship later in the night. Here’s a pic of the outside of the mall.


The big metal tube going down is the inside ski resort that’s part of the mall. I’ve heard about it but it wasn’t built when I was here in 1999, most of the stuff wasn’t. It was pretty cool though. The tickets are about $100 though, it’s not that impressive! This is the view from the inside, as good a view I could get with the camera at least.



The rest of the mall was a mix of American Stores and local stores. They did have a huge toy store with some crazy toys. I know we have a couple Alligators for Dawson back home and I almost got him one but after I got a closer look I decided against it.

I know I don’t get many of me in here so here is a couple from the same toy store for you.


I would have loved to get the big Koala for Dawson if I could.

After eating at Chili's at the mall we headed out to the bus tour. It was a double decker bus with 23 stops along the city and you can get off and on as much as you want for 24 hours as many times as you want. They run about every 20 minutes. We didn’t know the last one started at 5 so we didn’t have as much time as we would have liked but we got to see most of it with a stop at another mall and Planet Hollywood for some souvenirs.

Just some random pictures of the city.



The mall where Planet Hollywood is.



And finally the worlds only 7 star hotel, we got lucky with the timing of the sunset here.


There were a few other things but I don’t want to over do it on the pictures, those are the highlights though.

We made it back to the mall we started at and took a look around some more and had dinner. Even after that I don’t think we saw everything in the mall. They love shopping there. I guess they even have holidays devoted just to shopping.

We got on the bus back to the ship from there and after settling in I took the laptop back over to the sand box to try and upload the pictures I took to photobucket since I have some pretty small limits for my ship e-mail. I think I got almost half of the pictures uploaded before I had to leave.

The next day I had duty so nothing to much to talk about. It was a very busy day and night since everyone was trying to drink all the beer in the sand box before we left. I didn’t get to sleep until sometime the next night. I think I was up for somewhere between 30-40 hours. I did get about 10 hours of sleep since we didn’t have to work until after noon the next day. I don’t think I’ve had that much sleep since before Dawson was born.

These things always end up longer than what I think they’re going to be. I hope they don’t bore you guys too much. Hopefully it won’t be as long between them for the rest of the deployment now. Speaking of that we are officially more than half way done now! There are times it seems like it’s taking forever but I think over all it seems to be going by pretty fast. Hopefully that keeps up.

Here’s one last picture before I go just for fun.