According to my friend Murt, people in Dubai try to avoid being out during the day due to the sun and the heat. It makes sense considering the weather easily breaks 100 degrees for half of the year, although the weather today is quite comfortable. At around 72 degrees it is a beautiful day. I woke up at 11:30am but everyone else was still asleep so I hung out and worked on my blog entry for the flight to Dubai while I waited for everyone else to wake up. Finally around 1:30pm everyone was awake, although it took Mel and Irena a long time to get ready so we did not leave the house until 3:30pm.

We drove north west to head to "The Beach" which is a shopping mall located on the beach. We were all hungry so we sat down to eat at a restaurant called Catch 22. I thought that given the name and the location that perhaps it was a seafood restaurant, but they just served an unorganized assortment of western foods, all of which were pretty good. The highlight was probably the avocado, tomato, burrata salad. After we ate, they brought the check out clipped to a baseball mitt, so maybe we were the ones doing the catching all along.

After we ate (lunch? dinner?) we walked briefly along the boardwalk and headed up to a rooftop bar to get some good views of the beach as the sunset, then headed back to Murt's car. On the way back, we stopped at Cone Street, a local ice cream chain. I had "caramelized bisquit" flavor, which was really just the Biscoff cookie flavor, and it was very good.

We returned to Murt's and went swimming in his community's pool, conveniently located right across the street from his house. We were the only ones in the pool. After an hour of swimming we went back to change and re-evaluate our evening plans. We had originally planned to go to a mall called Global Village, which has themed shopping from a couple dozen different countries, but since it was already 9pm and they close at midnight, we elected to instead eat a snack and go to a karaoke bar. We ordered McDonalds delivery to try out the unique Emirati offerings. The highlight was the McArabia Chicken, which is a pita wrap with two chicken patties, lettuce, tomato, and a creamy garlic sauce.

At 12:30am we took a taxi to a karaoke bar, and after an hour of singing we took a taxi back. It was 4am by the time I finally fell asleep.