2-6 November 2008

School has been taking a lot of my time this week. I have two presentation due in the next couple of days and both have been very research intensive. This has, unfortunately, been taking my attention away from the election, but I am glad to see that Obama won. I heard from my friends back home that the celebrations in DC were very intense, and I am upset that I missed them. I am also upset that I wasn't able to vote since I never got my absentee ballot. Not that it mattered, but it would have been nice to be able to cast my own opinion.

I was very surprised to see how interested everyone here is in the American election. People would come up to the exchange students and ask when the results would be announced, who we were voting for, who we thought would win, etc. Two of my friends are very pro-McCain and wore vote for McCain T-shirts on election day. Needless to say, they spent most of the day debating with everyone else. Pretty no one here wanted McCain to win. They are all seemingly tired of the Republican party.

On Wednesday night, Kevin, Jeremy, Bader, Kendal, and I went to a place called Madinat Jumeirah to celebrate the electoral process (Kevin is pro-McCain and did not want to celebrate the Obama win). This place is beautiful. It is right in the shadow of the Burj al-Arab, and we got some great pictures of the Burj. Madinat Jumeirah is a high-end mall mixed with some souq-type stores, some really nice restaurants, and a beautiful resort. A canal creeps in and around the place, so it is like being on a waterfront. The souq area in the building was really nice but incredibly overpriced. They had a lot of beautiful statues made out of silver and different types of stones that I of course wanted to buy, but they were usually 100-900 dirhams overpriced, so I didn't get anything.

Today, Kendal and I are leaving for Abu Dhabi for the weekend. We are staying with her roomate whose aunt lives in Abu Dhabi. There is no such thing as a cheap hotel in that city, though we tried really hard to find one. The cheapest room we could find was $300/night for one room that could hold only two people. None of us could afford that, so it was really nice of Kendal's roomate to offer us a place to stay. There apparently isn't too much to see in Abu Dhabi, but we are only planning on being there during the day on Friday. On Saturday, we are planning to leave early in the morning to head back to Dubai and go to the Atlantis Resort for the day. They have a bunch of water slides, a beautiful beach, some sort of shark feature, and dolphins. It should be a good weekend. I will right more when I get back from this weekend.

-Lindsay

Burj al-Arab:



Madinat Jumeirah Resort and Restaurants: