Dubai!

Dubai (like Iceland) ended up on our trip as a layover city where we sort of thought... why not stick around for a few days?!  We weren't sure how long we would stay... and then we learned about their indoor ski area and we quickly settled on two days.

We arrived late at night and quickly crashed.  After some long sleep we headed to the Mall of the Emirates the next day.

After wandering around and having lunch we headed to Ski Dubai.  They've done a good job creating two runs that are actually reasonably difficult (blue square perhaps).  The snow is good because they control the temperature (which means it's cooold) and they pumped Christmas music while we were there.  It was very ironic that we felt the most Christmas Spirit in Dubai of all places.

 Dubai is working hard at catering to tourists so we ended up exploring the Mall more and stumbled into bowling and Chili's (the restaurant).  After 3 months on the road, a little Mid-Western afternoon was in order.  And don't worry friends, we haven't lost our touch both bowling over 120.

The following day we signed up for a city tour where we learned about Dubai.  Essentially the city is 40 years old and followed the discovery of oil in the region.  We now understand why oil is such a big deal, it's clear that it creates enooormous wealth.  Dubai is actually running out of oil so they are rapidly investing in things (the world tallest building, fancy hotels, indoor ski areas) to attract more dollars.  They're turning their massive wealth into... more massive wealth and we just hope the bottom doesn't fall out from underneath them... 

Anyway!  Here we are next to the world's tallest building the Burj Khalifa.

And later on our tour we checked out the "only 7 star" hotel in the world.  While this is mostly a marketing hype, the building is really cool.  Did we stay there?  Negative.

We're really glad we stopped in Dubai.  The culture and place is pretty surreal!  Also, we learned that it's technically Asia so we knocked another continent off!  Next stop, South America!