It’s a first for me to be traveling out of the country during a special holiday. While Christmas is a day that I feel is a must to spend with the family, traveling out of the country during New Year’s felt more lenient.
Dubai has always been a country that fascinated me from the documentaries and powerpoint presentations that my professors would share with our class back in college days. It’s pretty much a given that it would be used as an example for great feats in architecture, such as the famous Burj Al Arab, known for its iconic sailboat silhouette and luxurious interiors, and the Burj Khalifa, currently the tallest skyscraper in the entire world. Being someone with an architecture background, it is without a doubt that being blessed with the opportunity to visit this country excited me to such great extents.
I did not really know what to expect, since I’m more used to traveling to countries within Southeast Asia. So, traveling towards the West where the culture would be sure to be much much more different was something that made me a feel a bit anxious, yet excited.
I’ve heard of how greatly conservative of a country Dubai was, so I did a ton of research prior to arriving at Dubai. I had to make sure that I’d be wearing the proper attire at the proper places (modesty is a must!), and that I would understand how to react towards certain cultural mannerisms.
On the day of our flight, I unfortunately caught a slight fever due to a cold, but was still able to safely travel. It just became more exhausting since it was a nine-hour flight, plus the discomfort of staying still on a solitary chair throughout that whole flight. Our flight was scheduled in the late evening, so I spent half of the time sleeping, the other half feeling impatient from staying in one position. (lol) Once arriving at Dubai, we mostly spent the night settling in and resting.
The next day, my mom decided to let me sleep in and rest, so that I could spend the rest of the trip with good health. (Better to rest now, than to feel like crap for the rest of the trip!) In line with that, I did not get to document the first day’s itinerary. Luckily, I had my two wonderful sisters with me, who volunteered to document whatever went down that day! I’ll be sharing with you their snapshots and descriptions of what they did according to how they shared stories of their experiences with me. 🙂
Before anything, I’d like to share that we did not have a specific itinerary for the entire trip. Our whole nine-day trip was a bit of a spontaneous planning, mainly because our family friend’s friend lived in Dubai, and they were the ones who toured us around and suggested places for us to go to.
Anyway, this is how Day One mostly went down..
We booked our hotel pretty late prior to our flight to Dubai. Because of that, we had to resort to spending much more than what we intended for hotel budget. For the first three days, we stayed at the JW Marriot Hotel at Deira (northern area), which the area not too far from the airport. Although we originally planned to stay near the Dubai Marina area (towards the south), we had to adjust our itinerary by moving activities that can be done near Deira during the first few days.
The Gold Souk is situated within the vicinity of Deira, so my family headed there to do some shopping and sight-seeing. The Gold Souk is more of an old market style where you can find a lot of spices and jewelry, especially gold.
To get there, my family rode an abra, which is a common mode of transportation on water in the UAE. To be more specific, it’s an average-sized motorized boat wherein you sit on an elevated platform.
A lot of seagulls were at the port
Riding the abra was actually something I really wanted to experience, but I knew it was more important to recover for the rest of the trip’s activities rather than tiring myself out on the first day. Hopefully, I’ll be able to experience riding it if given the chance to visit Dubai again!
At the Gold Souk, you will be able to find a lot of stalls selling gold, spices, etc. They didn’t get to take much photos of the stores, but here’s an example of a gold product! 🙂
At the evening, I was pretty much rested up, so my family came back to the hotel to pick me up so I could join them for the New Year’s Eve fireworks. We went to the office building of our family friend’s friend so that we could have a good view of Burj Khalifa at the distance.
On the way there, we were shocked to see a building on fire, only to find out the the high-end hotel, The Address, was actually the building on fire. The Address is only a few hundred meters away from the Burj Khalifa, so it came of shocking news that this kind of unfortunate would happen on New Year’s Eve itself. We were actually wondering if the Burj Khalifa management would still push through with the fireworks show; news about The Address spread quickly as it also started appearing on CNN, etc.
I couldn’t comprehend if it was a happy or sad thing to see that the Burj Khalifa had pushed through with the fireworks light show, since it was very distracting to see a burning building very close to it. The smoke from the building also strongly masked the view of the Burj Khalifa itself. At any rate, here is a photo to show just how strong the fire was (it reached more than ten floors) and how thick the smoke was:
You can clearly see the smoke coming from the building towards the right of Burj Khalifa, and Burj Khalifa being the one surrounded by rings of green fireworks.
At a distance, we only prayed for the best on the horror of the fire that was happening at the address.. This New Year’s Eve gave me a lot of mixed feelings..