Quick trip to Dubai

We left Thursday for a long weekend in Dubai.  Eli and I have decided that before the kids and I leave each year for the summer, we will try to spend a few days together, and this year we went to the Atlantis.  It's a pretty spectacular place, in a pretty cheesy way, but oh my god did we have a good time.  The Atlantis has a waterpark in the resort and we spent chunks of each of our full days there.  Tommy is now tall enough to ride the slides without weight restrictions (some are so vertical that he would fly off of them if we went, but try to explain that to him), and the resort is structured for people to go in pairs on double tubes.  So Eli and I swapped going with him.  Before the trip, I wondered if he would be scared of the slides but he just LOVED them.  He told me more than once that it was the best day of his life, each day.  And in return I told him he is the bravest seven-year old I could imagine, which is of course, his aim in life.

I was anxious about the border between the UAE and Oman, because so many people had told us how confusing it was, but I finally just sat down with one of my fellow type-a moms who explained it all to me, and we made it through with no problems at all.  The drive over was very long (six and a half hours?) but the ride back was much shorter and easier (four and a half hours).  The kids were great, but we let them watch movies on the ipad.

The pictures below are of the resort...But none of the waterslides as we didn't take the camera there.

There are 65,000 fish in this tank.

There's an aquarium there, too -- see those huge grouper below??

These pretty pink fish that I had never seen before are hermaphrodites.  A male swims around with 10-15 females (his harem) and when the male dies, one of the females becomes a male.

Here is an interesting story that happened on our trip:  one morning at breakfast, we were chatting and I somehow started explaining to Tommy the eighties fad of rabbits foot key chains.  Does anybody else remember those?  Anyway, he looked at me as I was talking with a look of disgust and said, "that is savage, mom."  And I started telling him I was sure they weren't real rabbits feet (?) and he just looked at me and said, "why would anybody want those? What was good about them?" And I told him they were soft.  But it was a weird conversation because he was just so right and I had no such awareness when they were around.

We checked out on Sunday morning and then went to Ikea and Ace Hardware.  At Ikea, we checked the kids into the play space and took off for an hour and a half.  It was pretty fun and we got a bunch of stuff we needed and plenty that we did not need.  But you know the best part of Ikea Dubai?? The shawarma.  We decided to stuff some lunch into the kids before leaving, and the store has proper shawarma, for so cheap.  (Interesting fact:  the gas station across our roundabout also has very good shawarma, which I know thanks to my friend Antonia as I am not one myself to sample gas station food.)  I don't think it's about the shawarma (as you can get nice shawarma at the gas station), but there is a rumor that Ikea is going to open in Muscat and expats can have very long conversations about this topic.