Destination: DUBAI

Accidentally been posting photos on here...

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 14:38:43 -0400

Follow my other blog instead! That’s where I’m posting photos now. Yaaaay! :)

http://twenty-onetaras.tumblr.com/

Photo

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 17:03:33 -0500

Photo

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 15:08:24 -0500

New blog!

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 13:13:46 -0500

Hey everyone! Thanks for following this blog! But alas, now that my study abroad experience has ended, I won’t be posting on this blog anymore.

HOWEVER, follow my new photo blog! http://twenty-onetaras.tumblr.com/ Thanks! :)

Photo

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 17:29:42 -0400

Maroon 5 in Dubai!

Tue, 10 May 2011 21:03:31 -0400

Maroon 5 in Dubai!:

Since it would take 3 posts to put up the pictures from the Maroon 5 concert Tom was so gracious to take me to, here’s the link to the Facebook album! (click on the title of this post)

Enjoy!

I'm home!

Thu, 05 May 2011 08:54:06 -0400

So I kind of booked it out of Dubai on really short notice and I’m now sitting in my room back home writing this… It didn’t really hit me until about 30 seconds ago that I’m home; I’m so used to using Tumblr at MediaOne Hotel off-campus that being able to use it so easily is weird!

Anyway, I’m aware that I have a lot of stuff that happened in Dubai that I didn’t update you guys on so I’ll be doing that over the next day or so. But for now, here’s a list of thing’s I’m going to miss about Dubai and a sister list of all the things I’m excited I’ll have back here in the U.S.:

Things I’m going to miss about Dubai:

My friends :(
Mango juice. It’s a lot harder to find here…
EVERY restaurant delivering. It’s not as fun when the only thing you can order to your door for dinner is pizza….
Multiculturalism. AUD has over 90 nationalities represented in its student body that is half the size of William and Mary’s. Woah.
Hearing Arabic.
Dressing up. The level that people in Dubai dress up is totally up my alley. I always feel a bit out of place amongst college kids in the U.S. clothing-wise…
(very near) Constant sunshine.
The beach! Yes, I’m tan already :)
Beach volleyball. Hind, Adel, Joseph, Khaled, Rami, Lamees, and the whole gang… I wish I were going to be there every weekend :(
The excitement of being in a city. VA suburbs are a whole different planet at this point…
AUD volleyball. Girls, <3 you always!

Things it’s good to have back:

My friends :)
My family
Wanda! (my car)
Cell phone with unlimited texting. No more buying credit!
Mom/Grandma’s cooking
Manageable temperatures
Wait, it’s green here???
The primary language being one I actually understand. Not as fun but definitely more manageable.
Fast internet. (YouTube videos load instantaneously! Woah, what??)
On that same note, no government internet restrictions. Pandora and Tumblr, HELLO! :D

This semester was absolutely wonderful; I’m sad it’s over. To anyone out there that’s considering going abroad, I’m joining the chorus: DO IT!!!!!

Thanks for sticking around with me,

Lifehouse at the Dubai Jazz Festival! (Part 2)

Sun, 17 Apr 2011 15:12:24 -0400

Lifehouse at the Dubai Jazz Festival! (Part 2)

Lifehouse at the Dubai Jazz Festival (Part 1)

Sun, 17 Apr 2011 13:48:59 -0400

Lifehouse at the Dubai Jazz Festival (Part 1)

Dubai= busy!

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 03:42:54 -0400

Sorry I’ve been slacking; I’ll have lots of photos and updates for you guys soon!!

Nepal photos!

Sat, 02 Apr 2011 15:54:46 -0400

Nepal photos!:

Turns out I have WAY too many photos from Nepal to justify uploading them ten at a time here on Tumblr SOOOO I’m providing you all with the public link to the Facebook album so you can all check them out even if you don’t have a Facebook account. Enjoy! :)

Nepal!

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 05:31:13 -0400

Nepal!:

Ladies and gentlemen, my laziness has reached a whole new level. I now forward you to Nick’s better written, more organized blog for the low-down on our Nepal trip because writing and editing my photos is just going to take too long. Plus, Nick currently has my Lonely Planet book so I can’t really go back over everything from memory and truly do it justice. I’ll post the link to his blog again when he posts part 2.

The “logistical mishap” he’s referring to is my blonde moment of the semester: I somehow managed to book my and Debbie’s flight one day after Nick and Tom’s, even though I was sitting next to Nick talking everything out loud as we booked them. Woops. Debbie and I spent the day at the beach and shopping in Dubai :)

Also, don’t worry, I’ll still post all my pictures from Nepal as soon as I finish editing them, which should be soon! Yay!

Catch-up!

Sun, 13 Mar 2011 06:23:12 -0400

So lots has happened in the past few weeks that I need to catch you guys up on! Bullet format:

Camping! In a desperate need to get out of the city and into the wilderness, I roped Tom, Debbie and Nick into a very shoddily planned foray into the mountains of the UAE. We first made a border run to renew our visas (ended up not being as simple as we expected) and commenced our search in our rented 2WD Yaris (not great for the mountains) for a small mountain town called Huwaylat. The Huwaylat we found was not anywhere close to what our Lonely Planet book led us to expect so after a brief hike down to find some wadis-the Arab word for oases in valleys- and some coffee with a random man who invited us into his garden to sit and chat with him, we ventured out to the eastern coast of the UAE, to a town called Fujaira. We caught their weekly bull fights and found a place to camp for the night:

The next day took us up the northern Omani border onto the Musandan Peninsula (the eastern part of the UAE is sandwiched between these two pieces of Oman). After a long search for the quickly-turning-infamous Golden Tulip Resort for some information on hiking and camping in the region, we got some information from a local trekking guide about this one mountain where we could get a great view of the mountains and that, more importantly, our little Yaris would not have trouble getting up. A one-hour bumpy ride brought us to this gem of a spot around dusk (the photos are from the next morning):

This was the view out of our tent in the morning:
Remember that press passes Tom and I got? Yup, we used them! I’ll post those pictures once I get them edited… Both Lifehouse and Train were great but Train was definitely the better of the two. Pat Monahan has insane stage presence…
A girl from my volleyball team, Hind, and I played in a doubles beach volleyball tournament over our 3-day weekend for the Prophet’s birthday. We placed 4th out of 5 teams of mostly professionals which was pretty good considering our experience level compared to everyone else but we’re going to go back to practice with the small volleyball community that hangs out at that one beach whenever we can to see if we can place better next time. The one photo I took at the tourney:

We (Tom, Nick, Debbie and I) just got back from our Spring Break trip to Nepal for a week so I’ll be sure to post those pics ASAP. To be completely honest, I’m probably going to link to Nick’s better-written blog for the actual narrative of what we did :)

Until then,

Desert Safari!

Sun, 13 Mar 2011 05:31:05 -0400

One of the most stereotypical things about the Middle East is the desert. No, not the whole Middle East is covered in sand but we took a foray out into the middle of the desert 2 weekends ago to go on a safari. I’ll post the photos separately because there are lots!

In typical Dubai style (makes me feel like I’m hanging out with Persians back home! :)), our 12:30 departure time actually turned into a 2:00 departure but once we rolled out in our Lipton Chai Latte-advertising SUVs, we were on our way out to the desert. Our driver, Rami, wasn’t very talkative so we chatted amongst ourselves, particularly about how badly John had to go to the bathroom. Once we got out to the sandy areas, and John had relieved himself on the side of the road before we got there, the drivers let some air out of their tires for true dune-bashing, we took lots of sand dune pictures, and piled back into the cars to skid our way to our desert campsite.

Here’s the concept of dune-bashing: basically, you’re making your car hydroplane but on sand. All the cars are manual so the drivers are constantly shifting gears, making the cars spin out on the sand. Not for the faint-stomached but so much fun! To quote John, “Rami, I want you to drive this car such that it can never be driven again!” Well, that didn’t quite happen but he gave us quite a ride nonetheless!

Once we got far out into the desert, we found in front of us a fully decked-out desert camp with a dance floor (complete with lights), loads of tables, an enormous buffet, dozens of hookahs, and an giant guy in a Lipton Iced Tea costume (they sponsored the event… it was so overtly corporate, I was very surprised). After hopping on some very angry-sounding camels (they’re much higher up than you would think… and you don’t realize it until they sit down and suddenly you feel like you’re falling), we tried sand-boarding to no avail and then returned to the camp to rock out to some great music, eat the delicious buffet, get some henna done, watch a belly dancing performance, and ROCK the dance floor. Our friend Idriss, in reference to our dancing: “Man, ya’ll are a different breed of white people! Ya’ll are insane!”

It was an absolutely wonderful experience and I’m completely in love with the desert. We went camping out there (and in the mountains) a few weekends ago so more love affair stories to come! :)

Until next time,

Photo

Thu, 03 Mar 2011 16:26:14 -0500

Nick's photo that I'm stealing...

Randomly burst into song!

Sand wrestling?? Oh boys...

Camels!

Eep! Camels are kinda scary...

Dance party in the middle of the desert

Belly dancer

Photo

Thu, 03 Mar 2011 09:53:00 -0500

Our van group, ready to go! :)

Pre-departure shenanigans :P

Just how big (and cool) is Google?

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 02:42:05 -0500

Infographic by computer school.org

">Just how big (and cool) is Google?:

Totally unrelated to Dubai but still cool :)

Audio

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 07:34:00 -0500

Oh man, Oman...

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 09:05:31 -0500

In an adventurous quest to pragmatically renew our visas while exploring the Emirates’ culturally rich eastern neighbor, a group of seven of the American study abroad ventured to Oman for a grand total of about 36 hours. Though our trip didn’t nearly do this country justice—and we have accordingly vowed to return—our trip gave us a tantalizing taste of what lay to be discovered there.

We gathered at 4:45 am to board a 6-hour equivalent of a Chinatown bus to Muscat. After our initial horror of realizing we actually boarded the wrong bus (spoiler alert: we got there anyway), most of us began to doze in our slightly-too-small-for-comfort seats. After about three hours, we awakened to the shuffling of everyone leaving the bus for—we realized after several eye rubs and cranky mutterings of “what’s going on?”—our exit visas out of the UAE. OK, no big deal: stand in line at eerie-looking border, don’t take pictures (woops), obtain stamp, reboard bus, fall back asleep… No big deal, right?

Fast forward ten minutes, juuuuust as we were reentering peaceful slumber, more shuffling. This time we lug our bags out with us where they are searched by guards and placed on the ground in a neat line to be checked a second time, we assume, by a bomb/drug dog. Around the bend gallops not the majestic German Sheppard I expect but rather what looks like an awkwardly proportioned black lab puppy. Sideways glances to each other proved no one had very high confidence in this goofy-looking canine with his tongue flapping around and a look of utter joy on his face. Once our bags passed his (meticulous) inspection, we reboarded the bus, looking forward to finally being able to sleep the rest of the trip. Wrong. Five more minutes over very large speed bumps and we were once again herded off the bus, this time to finally receive our Omani visas. THEN we finally got to sleep.

The next approximately 28 hours went something like this:

First impressions of Oman: it looks more or less like what I would imagine Colorado looking like, plus some lush gardens.

Brief haggling with a few cab drivers scored us a ride to the cornice in Mutrah, one of the smaller cities that make up Muscat. (the picture is in the evening but you get the idea)

Side note: I previously had the misconception that Muscat is a large city. It is actually not. Old Muscat itself is actually quite small and what most people consider Muscat is actually a bunch of smaller towns surrounding Old Muscat. All those together make up the big dot that shows up as Muscat on a map of Oman.

Now, with that out of the way, Mutrah makes up the area closest to the water, the premier spot for cruise ships full of European tourists to dock and release their customers onto the cornice and its famous souks. We luckily (we didn’t know just how luckily until the day after) arrived on a Friday when a large portion of Oman’s more-devout-than-Dubai Muslims spent a large portion of their day in prayer. Most places, namely the souks, were closed so we set out in search of a hotel; the one we chose (without seeing the rooms below… Debbie, Jasmine and I were going to squeeze in this horrible room) was going to be too much of a dive for any of us to wake up in the morning without the feeling of being infested with bedbugs.

We spent our afternoon wandering around the souks as they began to open up. It kind of made me feel like I was in a scene from My Fair Lady… (for those of you that don’t get the reference, here you go. Start at 1:48 and go to 3:00 or so, then restart at 3:37)

Immediately afterwards began one of the most rewarding cultural experiences that I think most of us have had since we’ve arrived. Two elderly Omani men motioned for us to join them at their table where they sipped chai and watched passersby and quickly engaged us in conversations about everything from why we shouldn’t go to Yemen (they steal your wallet and shank you) to monotheism, and they treated us all to chai. An absolutely wonderful experience; we won’t forget you, Aziz and Kalfan!

Some more haggling with cab drivers (yes, this is the thing to do in Oman) bought us a ride with another great character on our grand adventure: Aiman, the cab driver. Aiman drove us to the Old Muscat, where we thought there would be some hotels better than the one we had originally chosen. This later proved to be incorrect but a fun sidenote first:

In the U.S. when you want a refund for something, you usually have to go in with guns blazing to convince the seller to give you your money back. Using the same strategy in Oman at our first hotel merely left us (specifically, a very guilty Jasmine and Ryan) with a crushed-looking front desk attendant and consciences that wouldn’t shut up. The hotel gladly refunded our money but the front desk girl sheepishly asked us why we felt the need to say such hurtful (though, she admitted, true) things about the hotel—that it was dirty, small, etc. She said there may be other potential customers around and they would gladly refund our money and there was no need to be so rash. Woops… totally fell into that cultural gap.

So back to Aiman. After our initial search in Old Muscat proved fruitless (and he gave us some tips of where to go the day after), Aiman insisted he knew of a hotel in a neighborhood farther away that would be nicer and fit our budget. When the latter proved grossly false, he continued to drive us around the outskirts of Muscat until we found a place—and even helped Tom haggle the price once we got there! With a promise of calling him tomorrow when we needed a ride, we departed to chill all together watching Million Dollar Baby, a very American college experience that we had yet to experience here, and then shlumped off to bed.

An 8 am call to Aiman got us back in Old Muscat where we went to the Sultan’s Palace:

We then returned to Mutrah for lunch, wandered the souks to find the 1-rial sunglasses Shaun wanted (this time amongst throngs of European tourists), and called Aiman one last time for a ride back to downtown Muscat to catch the bus back to Dubai.

(Bye, Aiman!)

After a conversation with the extremely eloquent and intelligent ticket salesman—his English was almost as good as ours and he probably had a better vocabulary than I do—Tom and I shared a coconut. Yum!! :)

Seven hours later, one and a half of which had us frustrated-ly sitting on the Oman-UAE border whipping out our passports for various uniformed officers for no apparent reason, we made it safely back to Dubai!

Until next time,

At first the picture of the Wren Building was the only hint...

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 09:27:41 -0500

At first the picture of the Wren Building was the only hint telling me that this lovely, yet unsigned, postcard was sent by one of my friends at William and Mary but the salutation gave it away :) Thank you, Gray Wheatley, you’ve totally made Taradactyl’s week!!! :D