So our one whole day in Dubai is Friday, which is like Sunday in the US – but that’s ok… just means most stuff doesn’t open til the afternoon AND the only people that are about are tourists – so the city is a little more quiet than during the week… I’ll leave the jewelry girl and barter boy for Stephen to tell – but the requirements of the noon day prayer was surprising. The store had to close or the vendor was going to be fined 10,000 Dirhma. Anyway, we were up at’em early (like Stephen said in the last blog) but it was not an entirely smooth getting going – we went off to convert American dollars into Dubai dirhma, and thankfully the place was open early on Friday (not late though… we tried to go back later and they were no longer open). Then we were trying to get to the souks (open air markets), and we walked in the general direction that we thought we wanted to go, but we ran into a Hindu temple – which was not where we were trying to get to, so we completed a loop around the mosque that was the primary structure in the neighborhood and back tracked toward the hotel room… At this point I realized that I had not put on sun screen and the sun was HOT! So we stopped by the room so that I could keep from becoming a lobster just walking around the streets!
So, thankfully, protected from the sun, we set out toward the water taxies again (abra)… Seems like walking to the water front shouldn’t be that challenging, but all the very small alleyways – and dead ends and sudden turns, it is surprising how hard it is to get where you want to go… We found the creek and the walked along it until we came to some polymer (sand filled) jersey barriers with 8 food plywood barricade along the creekwalk with a 1 person pass through area. I was a little hesitant to believe that the gap in the plywood was an invitation to pass, but apparently it was just a way to keep motor vehicles from the walk… It passed in front of the very large mosque – which had several grass lawn areas. I can’t imagine how much trouble it is to get grass to grow here… There are many flower beds with tropical foliage, or petunias, aloe – and irrigation tubes, the only flower bed that had foliage growing over the irrigation tubing was full of MINT – it is a weed even in the middle east… Back to the creek walk – we found a souk on the side of the creek that we are on, but it was mostly closed, so we got on the abra and went across the street to the diera area of Dubai – where the Gold Souk and Spice Souk are located… The Spice souk had shops on both sides of a narrow alley with bags full of spices, flowers, nuts. The alley was barely 5 feet wide and there were spices in the alley spilling out of the shops along with the vendors… It was rather crazy, so we continued on to attempt to find the Gold Souk. There was a large sign that said – “Dubai, The Gold City”, but it was on the other side of the street, so we wandered around the spice souk a bit longer… Then after we had circled all the way around the spice souk and arrived back at where we started – we revisited the map and discovered we had gone the wrong direction… and that sign, “Dubai, The Gold City” was the entrance to the gold souk…. The gold Souk was huge – about 20 feet wide 100 yards long, with benches and men selling water in the middle and jewelry stores down both sides. There are side alleys which have some jewelry stores and also copy watches and copy hand bags – the workers of those stores stand in the middle area and work to get tourists to visit their shops with promises of these copies of Louis Vutton bags or whatever – they kept trying to get my attention and I would look to Stephen to tell them, “No, thank you” We did visit one jewelry store – and like I said, I’ll leave that story for Stephen…. As noon arrived and it was time for mid-day prayers, we made our way back across the creek on the abra and went back to the hotel (that serves Starbucks in the afternoon) for an iced coffee.
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