the update, part 4

friday we drove to the east coast of the UAE with serge. passed through the market of masafi before heading out to fujairah proper. i have to say, we didn't see much to visit there - the corniche was oddly vacant - no cafes, no parks, nothing. so we continued up the coast through khor fakkhan (now THAT'S a nice town) and ended up having lunch at le meridien al aqqa beach resort in dibba (fujairah). 

would have only been nicer had people not been smoking. i just can't handle the cigarette smoke. but that's what you get when you sit outside - we were right on the beach. julian and i each had the winning dishes of the day because we had hammour, which is a local fish related to grouper, i believe. tasty.

from al aqqa we traveled up the coast a bit further until we got to the JAL resort where we had coffee/tea and julian played at the kiddie pool. nice to show mom where we've gone so she can actually see the places i have written about in the blog.

but friday also started my heinous bout of headaches that unfortunately crippled our adventures for the remainder of mom's trip. 

saturday the 4th we headed to dubai with good intentions. i had wanted to see the gold souk and the textile souk. only in my headachy state of wooziness (should i really have been driving, um, probably not) i neglected to check the guidebooks about that section of dubai. 

the section is basically called deira and it's completely different from the rest of dubai. small streets, people EVERYWHERE, shops on top of one another, no real high rises (or not a lot anyway). traffic was crawling and i had no idea where i was going. i ended up miraculously finding the abra station (that's the water taxi) marked "gold souk", but had no idea where it could have been within the labyrinth of streets. an indicated sign (like they have for everything else) would have been nice, but no dice.

even if we had seen where to go, the problem was parking - there was none. frustrated, i headed down the road running down the creek to get to the maktoum bridge to cross over to the other side to bur dubai. if i weren't in such a bad mood from the traffic, the headache, the no parking, i would have better enjoyed the scenery. boats unloading their merchandise, water taxis, water life...

anyhoo, round the other side we headed up the creek to get to the bastakiya village, which is a heritage site on the creek. there you can see how people used to live in dubai before the mega mall concept hit and it looked really really interesting. only SURPRISE! there were three parking lots for this "attraction". each parking lot housed 20 cars, if that. guess who rode around several times and found nothing? that would be us.

so before i ran over a pedestrian in rage, we turned around and headed to a mall where at least we knew we could park, pee and eat. i guess we'll save those visits for the next time my mom comes. AND i'll be smarter and just go directly to a hotel to park and then take a taxi. 

we ended up at the deira city centre, which was horrendously crowded. so much so, that it was really a struggle not to freak out. we did the bare minimum and then headed home. so much for that trip. i spent the rest of the day and night on the couch on the verge of vomiting from my headache.