Dubai, UAE
Illika, Hilary, Tahra and I started off the day with shopping at the dirham store, which is the UAE version of the dollar store. This was especially amazing when you consider that the conversion rate 3.6 dirhams to a dollar, so everything was even cheaper than we thought.
For lunch, we met up with Link, a friend of ours from Cornell who also lives in the Emirates. After the delicious north Indian food, we headed to the Dubai museum, which displayed some history from Dubai's not so distant past.
Link and Illika in the courtyard of the museum
Hilary with an old abra
The walkways in the souks were open-air, but shaded
The textile souk
From there, we walked to the textile souk (market that sold all kinds of clothing and cloth). After making a couple purchases, we took an abra across the "creek" (which was really a river, and far too large to be called a creek). These little boats are the preferred cheap transportation of workers going from one side of Dubai to the other.
An abra full of locals
Illika, Hilary, Tahra, and Link on the abra
One of many shops in the gold souk
Another of Dubai's superlatives-- world's heaviest ring
On the opposite shore, we window shopped at the very extensive gold souk. Once again, the shopkeepers were very aggressive about making sales.
Indian sweets shop
To cap off our day's experience, we stopped in an Indian sweets shop and ate some pani pourri, a sort of street food that explodes in your mouth. The fun part about this street food is the little race between the cook and the eater-- you try to eat as fast as they can make them. The high pressure caused Hilary to (very gracefully) spill one all down her front.
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