At home and abroad

So now that I’ve seen the ski slope inside Dubai’s Mall of the Emirates, what I want to know is: why doesn’t someone build one in Las Vegas? Having just spent our two final Arabian days (and nights) in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, I can confirm that those two are in a fierce Weird Sights competition with Nevada’s citadel of sin. I think Vegas needs a mall-based winter wonderland to stay in the game.

Architectural landmarks in the Emirates range from the ostentatious…

…to the attention-grabbing…

…to the religious…

We gasped at this bizarre scene when we drove the main freeway from Al Ain to Abu Dhabi city early Friday afternoon:

Our automotive pleasure evaporated when we returned to Dubai’s oh-so-smoggy skies (think Beijing. Or LA in the early 1960s). But we needed a car to visit attractions such as the 4-year-old Dubai Miracle Garden.

When one of the guys from Mumbai at the front gate murmurs, “It’s TOO HOT!” you know it’s toasty. But the flowers hadn’t wilted in the world’s biggest flower garden — irrigated with 200,000 gallons of recycled wastewater every day

With all the driving, our fuel gauge soon showed us to be near empty. We spent a harrowing hour following bad directions from our GPS and cursing the city’s poorly designed road system before finding our way to a petrol station.

I was happy to get rid of our little rental car. Now I’m writing this aboard our Sunday morning flight from Dubai to Entebbe, Uganda. I’ll try to post it from there, as soon as possible, but Steve recalls that the Internet was pretty bad when we were there 4 years ago. I think it can’t be much worse than the limited online access we’ve been experiencing for the past two weeks.