An "amazing" city.....

        ....to use Charlotte's favourite word at the moment.  After a month in China, we are finally back home.  We spent the whole time just exploring the enormous city, we only went out of town once and that was only for a day-trip.
              However, en-route we fitted in a weekend in Dubai, and that is truly amazing...

     Darsh had picked out a hotel for us, and, unusually, it was a good one.  He decided to have us a weekend in luxury.  There was a car to meet us at the airport, and an interesting drive to the hotel through what I had thought was an early morning mist, but our driver told us it was the end of the previous nights sand storm.  The main road was 14 lanes wide and apparently had been a 2 lane track a few years ago until the ruler of the next state thought it took him too long to get to Dubai, and so he built a new one!
   The whole city oozes with wealth, it is amazingly clean, organised and growing rapidly. 

          Our hotel room, calm, cool and very comfortable....

         .....the view from our room window.....

      .....our bathroom!!!!! the shower is around the corner and big enough to fit a double bed in...

      ....our treats cupboard.....for drooling and admiring only.  There was a wide range of teas and coffees beautifully arranged in that little drawer under the cup, and then a neat little fridge under that.  Charlotte's packet of favourite biscuits from "Home Bargains" didn't quite make it out of Dubai....
      After a quick snooze we headed out to explore the local area and ended up at the Dubai Yachting club......

    It was warm, very warm, so we just sauntered, sat and admired....

         That evening we hopped on a train to the local mall and had supper in the local food court with the locals, beautifully robed arabs, male and female, floating around in their jewels looking smart and aloof.
We had "Shawarmas" ( how on earth do I spell that?) Spicy chicken pieces wrapped in round flatbreads and served with pickles, garlic moyonnaise, salad and fried potato pices.  "Chicken sandwiches" according to Darsh. Mmmm.  And then, cinnamon "Pretzels"....oh bliss.

       Saturday, we took the Hotel coach to the Dubai Mall, to see the tallest building in the world,

    No photograph is ever going to do it justice, so I'll have a go at downloading the video tomorrow.....