A day on the boat

Forget about horseback riding (at least for a while until it gets cooler) - mama's found herself a new sport! Wake Boarding! Got up and out of the water on the first try - yeehaa!! What a feeling and so much fun! Why did it take me so long to try it? Well, I know what's going on my Christmas list this year :) Hunter was in such a crabby mood in the morning and had one of his bad teenage attitude moments but man, you could not wipe that grin off his face when he was being pulled in the wake. Smiles from ear to ear on that boy!We spent most of Saturday on Aric's boss's boat and had a real blast. Got to see the Dubai skyline from a whole different perspective and got a close-up of the Burj Al Arab (the "Sail") as well as the new hotel Atlantis, on the Palm Jumeirah. The city is so spread out along the coast and we were only in front of the Jumeirah and Marina areas but that in itself was impressive.

For all you fact & figures and history buffs out there, the Burj Al Arab is an icon. It stands at 1053 feet tall, on its own artificial island, and was designed to resemble the sail of an Arabian vessel called a dhow. Currently it is the tallest building used exclusive as a hotel. The idea was to create a building that would become a symbol for Dubai just like Sydney has its Opera House and Paris has the Eiffel Tower. Many locals believe - and rumor has it - that the architect and designer pulled a fast one on the establishment by making it look like a giant Christian cross. Conspiracy theory or not, from the water side (a side never shown in official pictures or postcards of the building) it really does resemble a cross. In fact the tall mast is not a functional piece. It's not a tele-communication pole. It was part of the design. The architect later said in an interview that he was successfully able to implement the construction of a Christian cross in Dubai!

To make it even more juicy, the Burj Al Arab symbol was removed from license plates without any explanation in the year 2004. Other stories tell that apparently any cars registered in Dubai, that have one of the older license plates which have an image of the Burj Al Arab on them, aren’t allowed to drive into Saudi Arabia. Truth or myth?? Makes for a good blog!

Holy cow, I've been so engrossed in writing, the eggs I'm boiling for lunch have overcooked and blown up...that only took 48 minutes, if you are interested in the physics of exploding eggs! Not a pretty sight in the kitchen at the moment. Man, I could have set the hotel on fire.

Speaking of hotel fire, the latest news on Atlantis, the renowned new hotel on the tip of the Palm Jumeirah, is that it will still open on the 24th of September, after it was just hit by a fire which destroyed most of the lobby dome. You can see on the picture, cranes and workers are restoring the roof of it. That is one impressive hotel, with a dolphin hospital and dolphin pool as well as a mega water slide that shoots you down a clear tube, through a shark tank. Yes, everything is so over the top here, what will they think of next? They already have one of the tallest buildings in the world, the Burj Dubai and it dwarfs the already tall skyscraber next to it.

Well I can tell you what's next...Dubailand....45,900 acres (that's the size of Dubai city itself) of Arabian-themed and Egyptian Pharaoh-themed parks, Dinosaur World, an indoor snow-covered ski slope (even bigger than the one we have now), a large glass-dome-enclosed artificial rain forest, the largest zoo in the Middle East and the Mall of Arabia, billed as the "biggest shopping mall in the world." Ready to come and visit us yet?
By the way - we live on the 36th floor of the building you see on the 3rd picture (below the one with the guys on the boat) - in the pinkish and blue one.