We Wander — Mark & Meghan's World Travels

We arrived in Dubai today, after nearly nine days at sea. After navigating the Suez Canal and avoiding the pirates, we had an unfortunate delay in Oman. We had to make an emergency stop for several hours to disembark an older passenger who had heart complications. We heard later that the woman passed away in a hospital onshore. It was a sombre moment, but we didn’t know the lady in question. The stop in Oman also put us about 7 hours behind schedule, so we arrived in Dubai at 3:00pm today instead of 8:00am.

On arrival, we took one of the free shuttles into the city. We were dropped off at a relatively small mall, and made our way partly on foot and partly in a cab to Dubai Mall, right at the foot of the Burj Dubai. The Burj Dubai is currently the tallest building in the world, and it was very impressive. It dwarfed nearly every other building in the skyline. Unfortunately the observation deck isn’t open to the public yet, so we had to settle for the view from the ground. The Dubai Mall was huge, and we had to smile when we saw the full-size skating rink. After the mall, we headed back to the ship. Luckily we have most of tomorrow to explore more of the city before we set sail again. I think it will be very hard to fit the gigantic expanse of Dubai into the short time we have here, but hopefully we manage to hit on some of the good parts.