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.