Dubai - Day 4
I woke up a tad early at 8am as I had an uneasy feeling due to the food we had last night. I was tempted to throw up but managed to keep it in. The kids and Deepika were still asleep until 10am. I wanted to wake everyone up.
After waking up we ordered some coffee to the room. We sat down and decided to buy the tickets for the Burj Khalifa. So we bought a combo ticket, we got tickets for the Dubai frame and the 124th floor of the Burj Khalifa. These 2 tickets cost us AED 840 (£185) The price for the Dubai frame was AED 50 and the Burj Khalifa was AED 180 per head.
We also bought the combo tickets for the Ferrari World and Warner Brothers theme parks. Although I was not too keen to go to the theme parks, the kids insisted so we bought the extremely pricey tickets for AED 1600 (£385).
After purchasing the tickets we go ready for our full day of Dubai site seeing.
We first went to the Dubai Frame. It was a sort drive away from the hotel and there was not much a queue to visit the place. So after waiting for about 25 mins we were inside the frame.
The frame was a 150m tall structure. It was right in the middle of the old Dubai and new Dubai. The views were stunning and the pictures were even better. The most exciting part was to walk on the glass floor where you could see the floor. It was an awesome experience.
We then left to have our late lunch. We went back to Bur Dubai where Manu wanted to dine last night. The place was called Biryanis & Biryanis. We ordered a whole range of food including curry and rotis and we all ate a very satisfying meal. After having food we decided to drive to the gold souk.
We The traffic was heavy and it took us over an hour to reach there. Even after reaching there it was a struggle to find a parking. To our luck a car pulled out and I cut in to park the car. We parked the car right next to the Gate 1 of the gold souk. We had driven round the gold souk, so as soon as we got off the car we walked straight into the market.
The market was amazing. It is impossible not to be temped to buy some gold after the visual display overload of golden displays coming from 360 degrees around you in that place. Gold was everywhere and the designs of some of the ornaments was truly intricate and detailed.
We wanted to buy some gold chains for the girls. We went to the reputed gold shops like Malabar and Kalyan jewellers, but the making changes (35%) these stores changed put me off from buying anything. But then Manu arrived and he took us to a shop / area where there was no making charges.
We really loved the place and ended up buying not 2 but 3 identical necklaces. The rates we got was also very good and they were 22 carat gold. We all were very pleased with our purchase. We then said good buy to Manu, although we wanted to take him out for dinner, we did not have time as we had our Burj Khalifa booked for 10pm.
We drove to the Cinema car park at the Dubai Mall. It took us only 25 mins to reach the mall. It was late in the night and there was not much traffic. On reaching the place. We went to climb the tower straight away. To our surprise there was a 2 hour queue to reach the top. It was utterly frustrating as we were tired and we had to stand in the queue for over 2 hours.
We eventually reached the top. The elevator up was supposed to be thrilling, but it was all darked out we did not feel anything. When we reached the top we quickly took some pictures and we noticed that people had already started queueing for the lift to go down.
The Burj Kahlifa was a massive disappointment. The views from there were as any other tower, but the hype around it was utter rubbish and the queue was atrociously mismanaged. Would not recommend this to anyone.
By the time we got down from there, most of the food joints in the mall had closed. So we were left with no other option but to have McD. The kids had their burgers, we both decided to have the food we had packed away from our lunch earlier.
We drove back to the hotel, ordered some coffee and enjoyed our left over food.
