36 hours in Dooobai!

(for those who have read the Italian version... this is a slightly different post... to expand on the experience ;)

I jump off the car and hand the keys over; it’s valet parking here. I still need to get used to these ways. These boys have parked all sorts of cars, no matter how expensive. You can see them: Lamborghini, Ferrari, Porsche, Aston Martin and the entire sort lined outside in the VIP area; our beloved Land Cruiser Prado is really just another car. I shrug off the hesitation and walk away with my parking receipt. We are off to Pierchic, one of the fancy restaurants in Dubai, where we have come to spend the weekend.

It’s going to be another of those plush meals we treat ourselves to every time we come to the Vegas of the Middle East.

We enter the hotel, glitz and blitz blinds us a bit in the big atrium still covered with Xmas decorations (don’t they know that it’s all over?) we follow the instructions, we walk through the corridor on the left, then the lift, then another corridor, then outside into a cart. Yes a cart is waiting for us outside so that they can whisk us to the restaurant through the huge grounds of the hotel.
It’s amazing. We go through lit up palm tree gardens, villas and bridges and over canals (everywhere everybody mimics our Venice..). Then we reach the beach side (the driver informs us that the beach of this hotel is 1.2 km long… I see). We turn left at the biggest pool in the Middle East (of course biggest and tallest are all to be found here!) and onto the boards of the pier; the cart driver leaves us half way through and we walk the rest. Our restaurant is at the end of the pier, the tables softly lit and blue lights illuminating the sea underneath, a funky bar changes colour every few seconds; there is a nice candle lit atmosphere and that level of detail that designates luxury.

Al fresco dining, which in the evenings at this time of the year is more "fresco" than I actually like. Good luck they have the good sense of spreading a few gas heaters around and yes  sorry, we are contributing to the global warming that is bringing such colder and colder winters up there in the UK).  But hey, it's just perfect!

Places like these inebriate you to the point that you temporarily forget what you are paying for the privilege of taking advantage of them.

It may not come as a surprise Pierchic is a fish restaurant and when the food comes is enhances all the senses. Time Out was right again. We loved it, so we may go back; as when we visit Dubai we never leave without having had at least one extravagant meal.

So you gather we’ve just come back from a weekend in Dubai. That’s what we Muscat dwellers do every now and then for a change. This time we did a bit of the tourist thing as opposed to just concentrating on the shopping.

We HAD to visit the recently opened Burj Dubai (or Burj Khalifa as it’s been recently renamed); the tallest skyscraper in the world. Apart from the annoying and understandable queues (it only opened 5 days ago) it was amazing. From the top you can see the unfinished World project with sand dotted around the turquoise sea (maybe that wasn’t in the plan..) and you can even make out The Palm in the distance.

At night the building stands tall like a huge Christmas tree while an incredible display of lights and flashes goes off illuminating the contours of the structure (exactly like a giant Christmas tree). Of course S. couldn’t spare a thought on whether the building is actually safe; a thought that cannot fail to insinuate one's mind once you’ve learned a thing or two by living in this corner of the world.

The Burj Dubai is next to one of Dubai’s biggest mall (maybe the biggest?), The Dubai Mall. A mall of epic proportions with a staggering +1200 shops that has earned me a painful backache trotting around who knows how many miles for hours! Ah the pains of shopping! ;)

Inside you can find an Olympic Size Ice Rink, the Dubai Aquarium and Underwater zoo (?!) which can also be “visited” in full scuba diving gear and cinemas while an outdoor promenade provides additional cafés and restaurants to the ones inside, some watery features with an amazing fountain that goes off like a cannon!

As you can imagine with all that Dubai has to offer we were not bored for one second, we took lots of pictures, slimmed our bank accounts and pleased a few senses. At the end of the weekend, on our 4-hours drive back home we were very happy and yet refreshed to know that we were coming back to the sanctuary of our home in beautiful Muscat.