Shabbat in Dubai

Had we planned a bit less last minute, we probably would have tried to join the local Jewish community for Shabbat.  As it was, my dad put me in touch with a friend who has connections in the community, but when we contacted them we discovered that we were staying a 3 hour walk from Shabbat services and meals, so we nixed that idea (changing hotels seemed too complicated).  There is also a catering company that can deliver to the hotel, but I had difficulty with their website and, again, because it was so last minute, didn't have enough time to ask them for help, so we skipped that as well.

Pre-Shabbat planning

Pre-Shabbat Hannukiah Lighting!

In the end, we ate a nice dinner at our hotel (I don't remember if I mentioned, but we stayed at the Sheraton Mall of the Emirates).  It wasn't exactly a typical Shabbat dinner, but it was definitely delicious.  We sat out on the balcony (5th floor) and enjoyed amazing grilled sea bass, yellow lentil and barley soup, and something they called a "Turkish pizza" that based on my limited experience in Turkey was closer to a regular white pizza just in the shape of Turkish (as, again in my very limited experience in Turkey, I found that I didn't like their "pizza", I actually liked this a lot more - although I'm not eating tons of dairy these days so Meir had more of that).  I found all the food delicious (Meir thought it was good, I was really blown away).

We got to bed early, being exhausted from the previous night's lack of sleep.

The next morning we got up late and had a late breakfast at the hotel (due to corona everything was served, there was no buffet - even the buffet items you had to go ask the staff to get for you).  Being a hotel breakfast snob from all the ones I've tried in Israel with work (for those who don't know, I plan tours to Israel, so we go check out hotels so we'll know what we're selling our clients and often they give us breakfast when we go), this breakfast was fine, but nothing special.

Since our hotel was connected to the Mall of the Emirates (and that's about all that was in the area), we ventured into the mall just to look around.  Wow were they Christmas ready! The decorations were beautiful! There was a mix of stores from American brands we recognized to more international, more fancy and casual, and anything you'd find in an American mall (clothes, shoes, banks, a grocery store, home stores, make-up, etc.) 

The big attraction in the mall is there's indoor skiing! We wanted to go into the winter area just to look around, but turns out they won't even let you into the freezing room with snow when you're pregnant :/ it was fun watching people throw snow balls at each other though from outside.

There was also a GIANT arcade that was basically a carnival with go-carts, bouncy houses, arcade games and carnival games.  The prize machines (like the one with the aliens and the claw from Toy Story... I'm not sure what you call them) they only had every other one open, we assume to keep people socially distanced.

When we had enough we went back to the hotel.  I thought it would be fun to go up to the pools on the roof (24th floor) to swim and watch the sunset.  It got a bit chilly as the sun went down and we realized that it was likely going to be too foggy (we assume it was an issue of pollution, but often looking out from our hotel toward the Burj Khalifa area it looked super foggy around there), so we just went back to our room.

When Shabbat ended, we checked and found our negative COVID results! (again, no real surprise) and we were ready to get out!  We had decided this would be a nice time to go to the Miracle Garden, a garden with sculptures covered by flowers (I don't know if anyone other than myself watched The Big Flower Fight on Netflix, but I imagined a whole garden like that).  Meir found a bus that would take us and off we went!

First thing, we needed a metro/public transportation card.  To get to the metro we had to go back through the mall and then across a bridge.  There were machines but when we got up to it we realized we had no idea what to choose, so we went back and got the cards at the ticket counter.  This was all near the metro though, and we needed the bus so we had to go back over the bridge and outside, and then we weren't quite sure where the buses were.  Turns out we were just in back of the bus station, which is why we didn't notice it but we found it with some help and off we went... or so we thought.  First, we got stuck in crazy traffic, and then, even once we got onto the highway, our driver was just soooo slow.  We weren't sure if it was just our driver or if there were laws about how fast a bus could go in Dubai (turns out it was the former, as we learned after taking more buses) and our driver took a slightly different route than we expected but we made it! (on our bus ride back to the hotel we found out we needed to "check out" of the bus - as in tap our cards again on the way off the bus, which we didn't do our first ride since we'd never heard of that)

The first impression walking in is amazing.  There were also lots of places to stop and sit (disadvantage of traveling pregnant, I needed lots of breaks).  While the sculptures from the Netflix show are better than what they had here, it was awesome to see the sculptures in person and fun to see what they had and definitely a fun photo opp.  I was STARVING and there were plenty of stands, but a lot were meat, which we don't eat non-kosher, or dairy, which I try to avoid, so I ended up getting a falafel wrap which, though it took an oddly long time to make, was really yummy (it wasn't much different than we're used to, except that there was something pickled, I think radishes, in the wrap).  The guy also threw in fries since he felt bad for taking so long to make it.  The prices also weren't so bad considering that we were in a theme park of sorts.

A sukkah on Hannukah??

I would definitely recommend the Miracle Garden as a great evening activity.  The weather was perfect (during the day it would have been very hot) and it wasn't very crowded (apparently it tends to be during the day).