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I like Emirates Mall, it’s very similar to the shopping centre’s back home and generally is a nice place to relax. My brother doesn’t share my passion for buying stuff though, and when we hang out at the mall he spends most of his time upstairs in ‘Magic Planet’.

Magic Planet is kinda like what Tops was in the Myer Centre, except being in Dubai of course it’s about 20 times bigger and a great deal cheaper. It’s so big infact it even has it’s own version of The Claw!

I can’t begin to describe how odd it looks seeing muslium women holding on to their Burqa’s as it begins its spin cycle. The Claw ride is one of many here, and when I saw a fully functional Robot ride I dropped my bag (and nearly my passport) to jump on it as quickly as I could. Luckily my father was around to film it, here’s Luke and I…

Tons of fun, it did kinda hurt though being banged around on that thing and I wouldn’t recommend anyone to jump on one after they’ve had lunch.
Magic Planet is very well priced, the Robocoaster ride costs 15Dhr which is around $5AUD per person and brand new video games are around $1.25AUD a shot.

Speaking of video games though my brother and I were a little disapointed. Not from the choice of games, but that they’ve had their difficulty levels turned to noob mode. Coming from Australia, most of our games are imports from Japan and are set to super quick ninja butt-kicking azian mode. The games here, well it’s very common to see kids playing a game and handing it over to some on-lookers because they’ve played for so long on the one credit they’ve had enough.

Fun place though, and I’d recommend any parent to dump their kids here whilst you can browse the squillion shops down below!

Today we visted the Dubai desert conservation reserve to check out the Dunes.

It’s vast and seemlingly endless out there. The sand is very fine and has a slight red tinge to it, apparantly there are seven colours of sand out here.
Our guide drove us out to a camel farm to have a look at some of the baby camels which were pretty cute, and still very tall for two weeks old!
After checking out the babies it was time to have a bit of a ride on the adults.  I’ve never ridden on a camel before and didn’t realise they were so tall.  My parents camel let everyone know how much it loathed to get up, moaning and groaning as soon as its master told it to stand.  I didn’t get a good video of my parents with it, but here’s one of some americans who jumped on after us on my parents camel.

After our camel trip it was time to get to down and dirty with sand skiing!  Sure I’ve never quite used a board like this before and there were over 20 people whatching but that didn’t stop me being the first to have a go.

I did ok until I levelled out and tried to slow down.  I don’t think you can really turn the board at all, you just have to ride it out and hope no one is in front of you.

Highlights of the day for me included this Norwegian guy who spun out of control and flipped his way to the bottom.  Nothing like a face full of sand to make you feel alive.

So… it’s winter and the ambient temperature of Dubai is 25C and we’re in the desert… Time for Skiing!
No, not sand skiing, that’s tomorrow. Ski Dubai is located on top of the Mall of Emirates and is a huge 22,500-square metre indoor ski zone. I haven’t had much experience with snow, but apparantly this place has excellent snow.

Being noobs we did the ‘discovery’ course which teaches the basics of skiing. I think I did pretty well and learnt a lot on how to ‘recover’ from falling over in the snow with ski’s on… mainly because my brother decided it was a great idea to push me over much to the amusement for the rest of the training group.

Just as well Dubai has some spare oil, as Ski Dubai uses 3,500 barrels of oil every day by powering generators to maintain the low temperature of -1…-2 degrees Celsius consistently.

Finally I’ve arrived in Dubai and so far I haven’t lost my passport or broken any bones… although my legs are shot and my neck feels twisted from the cattleclass flight from Hong Kong. Still, now it’s time to explore!

The handsome man on the giant billboard is Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the Shiek of Dubai. To be honest I’m not quite sure what that means and what he can and can’t do, but I have driven past his son’s weekend house which looks like it’s worth a few billion dollars alone.
This place screams affluence, with big open roads and new fresh buildings everywhere. I can’t remember who it was, but a queensland policitian once said you could messure a city’s growth by how many cranes you could see. Let’s just say that I’ve lost count how many cranes there are in Dubai. I’m trying to get a good shot of the buildings under construction here but I don’t have a wide enough lense.

Still - not everyone has an income of a Shiek, but that doesn’t mean you can’t live like one here. Petrol is hellishly cheap, prices of general goods seem to be reasonable and new opportunties are vast and wide with all this development. A little birdy told me that Dubai has around about 10 years worth of Oil left before it declines so the wise Shiek is building an economy that doesn’t rely on oil alone. I’m not sure if it will be successful, but I do think Dubai will be an even more exciting place to visit in a few years time.

Shenzhen is one of Brisbane’s sister cities, and is located just outside the border of Hong Kong and is a part of mainland China.

I’ve been to Tijuana before and thought the hustling there was interesting.  Nothing however, could prepare me for the ferocity and tenacity of a Chinese sales person chasing for a dollar.
I think I need to learn what ‘No thank you’ in Mandarin is, because I’m sure ‘No’ in English must roughly translate to ‘please follow me and continue to harass me’ in Chinese.  The worst case we had was a bunch of Teenagers who I’m sure were eyeing off our bags who were trying to get us to go to certain stores and buy this and that.
After walking 5 levels and continually saying ‘please go away’ we ended up sort of standing in a circle and waited for a while until they cleared.

It’s ok though, Shenzhen police are on the case and give fair warning.

Indeed, I will keep myself well avoid of theitves.

It’s odd spending Christmas overseas. Sure I’m with my immediate family and yes there are carols; I guess being overseas for my first Christmas is a little strange. Still, it is kinda cool when there are sights like this to be seen.

Only problem is, we werent the only people who had this idea. The line-up to see this tree alone was at least 2 million long, and that’s not lincluding the

The MTR is an awesome transport system. Coming back from NY,NY in 2004 I kept telling people how cool the subway is until some stuck up lady, I can’t remember who, said the Paris Metro system or even the MTR were much better systems.
I haven’t been to Paris so I can’t tell you anything about the Metro, but I’m sure it would be full of chain-smoking, manic-depressive, effete snobs. I know this because I’ve been to a Louis Vuitton store before and it was a horrible experience.

I could go and on about simple the system, super clean and fast. Instead I’ll just talk about the Octopus card. If this is the future of smart payments then I welcome it. It’s a Smartcard with an embedded chip that stores credits which you can use to pay your way on the MTR and Buses. It also allows you to buy a coke or even a Slurpee from 7-11, try doing that with your Train ticket.

Only problem with the MTR is that everyone else in Hong Kong loves it, so getting a seat is a rare thing even. Even when a 8 cabin train leaves every 2 minutes it’s packed. Personal space is for the weak.

Merry Christmas to all!