dubai day #3,4,5

so here's the update from the last few days. the last time i did a real post, we went to the mall of emirates shopping, which was great, i got a few shirts, and then we went to global village. it's made up of a million shops and each area is divided by the country that those people are from. we went to yemen, india, iraq, pakistan, and africa. we never should have gone to africa though, it cost us a bloody fortune, since we had wanted to get our pictures taken with these guys dressed up in african gear, only to discover afterwards that they wanted to charge us money. they made us pay 10 dh which is only like $3 but still, it was stupid. i did buy a painting for a 100 dh from the iraq booth, it's a desert scene and i think it's pretty sweet. then the next day we got up early and drove to fujairah which is about 2 hours away. we stopped on the way there to see some historic mosque called Al Hali (or something like that), anyways, we had a tour guide from pakistan and he was hilarious, and forced us to take pictures...at one point he told me that i "was very bad" at being in pictures, because i couldn't just keep my mouth shut and smile. he then started to say "just teeth and lips" to me....it was priceless. that night we stayed at an apartment of the friends of the stewarts who was out of town, so it worked out really well for us. i ended up going to sleep at about 7pm, i'm way out of whack over here with my time difference, and still haven't totally adjusted. then this morning we woke up early and went snorkeling. the original place that we were going to go to was going to cost us about 150 dh to take a boat out to some island and go snorkeling, but their boat was broken, so we drove another 20 minutes up the road to another hotel, which ended up being way nicer, and was 25 dh less. they gave us all the gear we needed and a tour guide and took us out in a boat to these 3 islands. it was probably one of the coolest things i've done on this trip, since there was tons of fish, and how many people can say they've been snorkeling in the indian ocean. definitely a highlight for only $30. we drove back to dubai this afternoon, and then headed over to the palm, because the stewarts have friends in their ward who live on it, and invited us over. if you don't know about the palm, definitely look it up on the internet. it's this man made island thingy in the shape of a palm tree, and there's these huge mansions on it. the people who invited us over, there dad oversees the Dubai nasdaq. pretty sweet. they told us that we were more than welcome to come use their beach next week, so we might take them up on that offer. and now we're home for the night. church over here is on a friday, so we're going to that tomorrow morning, and then all the ysa is going to meet up and we're going to have a fire in the desert tomorrow night. i still can't get over how good the food is here. we get hummous, and fatoush with every meal, and everything else that i've had to eat has been really really good. that's all that is new here. i can't believe we only have a week left. time is flying by. i'll keep you updated as per usual. love bonnie.