So I had an awesome birthday yesterday. After class, the girls took me to the old gold souk. We wanted to ride the ferry across Dubai Creek to get to the souk, but, unfortunately, we left during rush hour so we went straight to the souk instead. (that was not a fun ride, the cab drive jerked us around a lot with sudden stops and it took an hour to get there). The gold souk was amazing; it had everything you could possible want in gold. A lot of the pieces looked like art, for example several of the shops had shirts made of gold. Unfortunately it was really hot and humid last night, so we left early and went to the Wafi mall. Wafi is an up-scale mall decorated in an ancient Egyptian style. I had Italian food (pumpkin ravioli.....it was really good) and the creepy waiters sung happy birthday to me. Some of the girls had shisha (hookah, but everyone calls it shisha here) and dessert and then we returned. All that took 8 hours because we had to take cabs everywhere. I'm fairly sure that "rush hour" here lasts from 4:30 to 8:30pm--it stinks.

I am hoping that one of the girls will put up her picture of all of us on Facebook so that I can point out who the girls are. My picture of us came out blurry :( It was a relaxing night and I had so much fun with them. (P.S. the study abroad guys called to make plans with me, but I was already taken for the night :) -- Apparently, one of them, who I haven't met yet, is from Michigan and knows people from Miami.) Anyway, I hope you had a nice memorial day and I'll try to put up more pictures soon.

to expand upon food and other things...

Since I still haven't don't anything exciting (but I will on Monday) and in answer to some posted comments:

I have not seen the tallest building in the world yet, which is still not finished. I haven't been to the main downtown part of the city really. There are a ton of things to do here so that's not surprising. I do see the Burj Al Arab almost every day because the main roads pass by it so often. A suite's starting price in the Burj is $25,000!

Food is actually really cheap here. A dinner could cost anywhere from 30 AED (dirhams) to 120 AED, which translates to about $8.25 to $33. It can get more expensive, but I try to avoid those places. Like I said before, you can have practically anything you want here. For example, in the past week I have eaten moroccan, indian, lebanese, iranian, and american food. It kind of wreaks havoc on your stomach, but it's so good.

The major supermarkets are Geant and Carrefour (French Walmarts, basically), and they are also fairly cheap. Any fruit from the states will cost about the same as it does in the U.S. Anything that is locally grown (meaning from the Middle East) is cheaper. The supermarkets are located in the malls mostly and so far I have been to two malls-Ibn Battuta and Mall of the Emirates. Ski Dubai is located in Mall of the Emirates. The pictures above are of Mall of the Emirates and they are of just one side of the mall; it is much bigger. The big silver thing in the background is the top of the slopes in Ski Dubai. I am hoping that I will be able to take a picture of the inside, but I am not sure security will let me. The other person with me in the picture is Nidhi, a fellow Miamian, whose parents live in Dubai.

Tomorrow is my birthday! and I will hopefully have exciting pictures and activities to share with you.

(*I hope this is enough detail for those of you who asked for more ;) )

Moroccan dining

Unfortunately, I don't have anything exciting to report, but I do have some food comments to make =) The food is amazing; anything from basically any country is here. The only thing I haven't tried is food native to the Gulf region, but I am not sure exactly what that is. Lebanese food is big here, so when we go to restaurants I actually know what some stuff means. Last night we went to souk madinat jumeirah, which is this -posh place with traditional shops and tons of restaurants. It even has a man-made creek that you can take boat rides on (almost everything here is man-made, half the beaches didn't exist until they drained the land to make more room). Anyway, I ate at a Moroccan place, which was amazing, and the waiter brought live entertainment to us as were eating.

Side note* I ordered merguez, which is a type of sausage, and the only way I knew that small piece of information was because a certain French professor took points off of my presentation last fall because I pronounced the work incorrectly. You must remember this is Janine writing, and of course I'm going to include something about school ;)

I went on a desert safari on Friday, which was amazing. We rode the dunes in 4x4s (thankfully our driver went easy on us and didn’t do some of the crazy things the other drivers did i.e. drive down really steep dunes). I even went sand surfing, which is where you slide down the dunes on a snowboard. Unfortunately, there aren’t any good pictures of me because I did it at night :(

We were planning to spend the night in the desert, but it didn't quite work out that way. We were they only eight people who wanted to; everyone else left. Okay, let me clarify, after driving on the dunes, they take us to a camp site where there is food, bellydancing, henna, etc. There were a lot of people, but they all left after the food and entertainment was done. We decided that we would stay the night despite being the only ones. Unforutnately, they turned the lights off at 11pm , so we could not play cards or anything really. We hung out outside the campsite on this hill until about 3am when we finally asked the drivers to take us back. But we didn't go back to the university we went to McDonald's. There is more to this, but I don't want to make this post too long. Suffice it to say that we got in at 4:30am after eating at McD's and stopping at the boys' place.

First Week in Dubai

Dubai is ridiculously awesome. You know how they always say that the city is so wealthy and people throw away money because they have so much more to replace it? It's true! Dubai is hard to describe--it's new, it's fast-paced, it's expanding, and there are tons of expatriates here.

(pic above is of the AUD campus)