Day 3 - Transfer to the Ship and a last Sightseeing of Dubai

After transferring to the ship at noon and making the most important stop of the day - at the grill for lunch (any guesses what Larry had???) - we took the shuttle into town to get a close-up view of the Burj Khalifa. Of course, to get there we had to go through the Dubai Mall, which makes the Eaton Centre look like a discount outlet.


We don’t know if this is by design or accident, but the entrance the shuttle took us to had Cartier on one side, Tiffany on the other and Piaget and Patek Phillipe just up the way. This mall also has the largest indoor gold souk in the world. It is a collection of small independent jewelry shops with their own passageways and courts. Now, we had gone into the mall specifically to find a pair of white shorts for Monica, but decided to take a stroll through the Souk, which as you can see from the picture, is very impressive looking. Monica still needs white shorts, but she does have a nice new pair of (gold and diamond) earrings!!!

The entrance area to the Gold Souk

The mall also houses the largest indoor aquarium in the world. It is three floors high and so big that you can take glass-bottom boat tour on top and go scuba-diving with the sharks below. There are also enclosed walkways where you can go under and through the aquarium, but we didn’t have enough time to check this out.  We do have some video through the glass wall, but it might take longer than the cruise to try to upload it here.

It was quite obvious that we’d found the right exit for the Burj Khalifa since everyone who went out ahead of us stopped and looked up…WAY up. We saw more than a few people lie on the ground in order to tak a picture. Monica didn’t go to quite that extreme to get this one. The Khalifa tower is over 200 floors high and looks, as Larry observed, like a stalagmite (on really powerful steroids!). The Dubai Fountain in front is where they present a water show every night, but the shuttle schedule ended so early that we weren’t able to get to see even the first show at 6:00. We’ll just have to depend on Internet postings to see how it looks.

As to the onboard activities, we found many of the pool guys are here - Clark, Ross, Ruel, Nate, Ritchie and most important Andress at the grill (the wizard of the steak sandwich) - most of whom asked us to send greetings to all of you. A couple of the guys specifically asked about Mr Double-Cheeseburger, so Jeff you are still famous on Crystal!!

We found that George and his friends Dick and Peter are still here and having as much fun as usual. George celebrated his 93rd birthday in February - THE social event of the world cruise. We ran into Captain Glenn Edvardsen early in the evening; he gave us a warm welcome back as did Cruise Director Rick Spath later in the Avenue.