dubai

Aaaand we are currently in Dubai. It is a miracle. We almost didn't make it. On Thursday afternoon we arrived at the airport to discover our flight to Munich had been cancelled, due to an "incident on the runway." Actually, pretty much every flight out of Heathrow that afternoon was cancelled. We eventually found out that this was the cause: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/7194086.stm

Basically there was a plane crash and so 200 some-odd flights were cancelled. Really scary. Amazingly everyone on the crashed plane was okay. But this left us stuck in the airport in a massive lineup of people waiting to rebook on new flights. We waited for awhile, then suddenly a woman appeared asking if anyone was going to Munich. So we went with her, and it turned out that an earlier flight to Munich hadn't been cancelled, only very delayed, so they bumped us onto that plane. We were extremely lucky - most people stuck at Heathrow didn't get anywhere. Tiffany's Friday flight to Copenhagen got cancelled too - I have no idea if she's gotten there yet.

From the window of our plane, as it drove out to the runway, we could actually see the crashed plane. It was just lying flat on its stomach, with all the emergency slides in place and a million flashing emergency vehicles surrounding it. Very surreal.

Anyway, the rest of the journey after that was smooth. Connected in Munich, and arrived in Dubai Friday morning as planned. Dubai is... wow. A crazy place. Lots of old stuff, Arab culture, etc. mixed with insanely modern stuff, fancy hotels, huge buildings, etc. Today we saw, among other things: the world's soon-to-be tallest building in progress, the Burj-al-Arab (world's only "7 star hotel"), and Ski Dubai, the famous indoor ski hill in a mall. Micah and I did a crazy blitz tour of Dubai because we pretty much had only one day to see everything. It's all just... strange. Things are so lavish and it's like nothing is real. And then the culture is so different - there are no women! Well, there are, but very few. When we walk around outside it is all men. The majority of women that you do see are all tourists. Also new to me - in Muslim culture they pray 5 times a day - they have these very loud public prayers that they broadcast over loudspeakers. The first one is around 5:30am. So this morning I was woken up by this super loud chanting over a loudspeaker outside. Very different. But interesting. One great thing about Dubai: food is soooo cheap. I can get a falafel sandwich for like 75 cents Canadian. Mmmmm.

I am a bit anxious because tomorrow we fly to Bangladesh. I don't feel overly culture-shocked in Dubai because it is so modern, but Bangladesh... here we go. :)