Dubai day # 6, 7, 8

Ok, so here's the scoop on what we've been up to lately. Friday morning over here was church at 9, so we drug ourselves out of bed and got ready and went to that. They hold church at a villa about 15 minutes away, and it was actually such an interesting ward. It's made up mostly of americans, and filipinos. For sunday school, they have a separate class for ysa, and there was about 25 people there. And they were all filipinos. In the class there was an interesting discussion about marriage, and marrying non-members. Over here, there's a ton of female filipinos, who are working to send money home to their families, but there's no one for them to marry, so it's a real problem as to what they should do. Anyways, it was a very interesting discussion at church about what they should do, and obviously there is no easy answer for them. After church, we had dinner and took a nice little nap, and then we got ready to have a fire in the desert with the ysa. The stewarts oversee ysa activities over here, so they planned for us to all go out together about 45 minutes outside of the city, and do a little fireside. We acted out the story of shadrach, meshach, and abednego with the fire as our prop - it was pretty funny - but i don't think anyone else understood what was going on. We kind of became friends with this guy from utah who is over here working for some company, he's 28, and probably leads the loneliest life ever as the only single white mormon in all of dubai. he was pretty excited to see us. saturday morning we got up at 7:30 to go see camel races, only to discover once we got out to the track that there were no races that morning, i think we might try again later this week to go. we all looked disgusting because no one had showered from the night before, so we came back home and got ready and then headed to karama which is this sketchy little market that is all knock off crap. I bought some scarves there, and at the one store, the guys that worked there had a field day when we all came in and bought stuff. it was getting borderline ridiculous. i have a video of it that i might share with you. one almost proposed to me, but then after i discovered he was only interested because he thought i was half-arab. but i milked it for all i could and saved a lot of money on what i bought by bargaining him down. it was also sweet in karama because all of these stores have little secret upstairs rooms where they house all their knockoff stuff they can't sell in the open. we got invited to go up more than once, and it was so sketchy with what they were trying to sell us. so that got pretty old, pretty fast. when we got home from karama we were pretty tired and looking for something to do that didn't require walking or thinking, so we drove 5 minutes to this district called satwa and got pedicures done for $10. the beauty parlor we went to was semi-ridiculous but oh well, we were going for the cheap labour. we also went and found this man from iraq who makes bread with cheese inside in this little oven, right on the street. one thing, that i've really liked about dubai is the interaction that we've had with the locals. mom, i'm being completely honest when i say that 100% of the time on this trip i've felt safe walking around. i'm pretty sure whyte ave is a lot scarier. after pedicures we went home and put on jeans to head downtown and check out the marina. the marina here has these sweet yachts so we walked around for a bit and then went and got ice cream and checked out a few more buildings. i can't get over how sweet the architecture is over here. all of the buildings have some sort of quirky thing about them to make them distinct. this really is the las vegas of the middle east. this morning, being sunday, is the first day of the week, and is our version of monday. so we got up this morning, and booked our desert safari for tuesday, and then went to the atlantis aqua-adventure water park. it puts west ed to shame. it's all outdoors, and was one of the coolest things we've done. almost all of the rides are done in tubes, and some of the rides shoot you up instead of down, and to get to most of the rides, you just sit in your tube and get on a conveyor belt, and it takes you to the top. pretty sweet. i also got a pretty good tan today, so all in all it was an exhausting day. on our way home from the water park, we stopped and got some food, and as per usual got a million stares, as 4 white girls went for dinner at a little cafe. i think we're quite the novelty over here because the only tourists are really only europeans. since we've been here, i haven't actually seen any americans. then tonight we came home and got ready, and by 9 we were ready for a night out on the town, and we were in the car heading to the royal mirage hotel to go walk around, and then we all realized that we didn't actually want to do it, and even if we did have it planned for the night, if we didn't want to do it, we shouldn't force ourselves to. so we turned around and went back home, and have been enjoying a nice evening of doing nothing and taking a break. tomorrow we're heading to a cultural breakfast of some sort, and then more shopping i think. and i'm saying once again - that if requests aren't made for me to buy something, than it probably won't be bought. i'm not buying junk just to buy it. so if you want a shirt or other crap, let me know, but if not, i take no responsibility. i'll try and post tomorrow about our day. i can't believe we only have 5 days til we have to go back to freezing edmonton. boo. hope everything is well at home! love bonnie.