When you think about Dubai the first that come to your mind are reaching the sky buildings, 10 lanes highways or human-built islands, isn’t it? But there is another face of the city – remembering its history and old times. Old in this case means 18th century. It’s not Rome or Stambul but historical area of Deira and Bur Dubai separated by Dubai Creek is worth visiting. It gives a chance to feel old Dubai atmosphere.

First settlement on this land is dated on 10th century but until 18th century it hasn’t gained any importance. It was just a port on the Iran-Oman route. At the turn of 18th and 19th century when Persian ports introduced customs duties, Dubai lowered them. That brought it wide interest and soon made it one of important commercial ports.

At the end of 18th century Al Fahidi fort was built. It’s probably the oldest historic site in Dubai today. It had many functions throughout the years but was built as a defensive fortress. It’s a square construction with three towers built of coral rock. Right now it is the home of Dubai Museum presenting traditional Emirati life. Oustide the building there is an old-type wooden boat exhibited. It’s called the dhow.[photosetgrid layout=”31″]

  [/photosetgrid]Right across the street there is a Grand Mosque, a true copy of built in 1900 original mosque. This main Dubai temple is characterised by 70-meter minaret, the highiest in Dubai and 54 smaller and bigger domes. Available for tourist only from the outside. We already mentioned it here.

Characteristic for the commercial port is presence of the market. In this old part of Dubai we find couple of them. First is Bur Dubai Souk, also called Old Souk. It is located close to the Creek, right next to the port. Its entrance it just by white tower in the port. It gained most popularity among merchants thanks to such location.[photosetgrid layout=”2″]

[/photosetgrid]The market originated in the middle of 20th century. It’s a roofed group of stalls with basicly everything. It used to be known as a textile souq. Today it offers everything form clothes to food, handicraft to all kinds of souvenirs. And it’s a perfect place to make new friends of course.

To get to another souk we had to cross the Creek as it is loacted in Deira district. Deira and Bur Dubai are connected by runing regularily traditional boats. Each wooden abra takes up to 20 people each time. During whole day they transport back and fort thousands of locals and tourists. The cost is 1 dirham.[photosetgrid layout=”43″][/photosetgrid]

Across the street from the Deira abra port there is Spice Souk. It used to be famous for the it’s wide selection of spieces. Today just like the souk in Bur Dubai it offers full range of other goods as well as species. It’s still interesting to take a walk its narrow and full of life streets and feel the atmosphere of the souk, bargain a little for some gifts and buy some saffron or cardamom.

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Few steps further on the right hand side invites Dubai City of Gold. 20% of world gold transactions are done in Dubai. The Golden Souk is just a part of this amount but indeed it is full of glittering goods. All the jewellery that we can only imagine is there: rings, bracelets, earings, watches and so on. Shop windows shine full of gold, silver and precious stones.[photosetgrid layout=”3″]

 [/photosetgrid]Another thing that needs to be seen on this side of the Creek is port full of big wooden boats waiting for loading or unloading. Colorful, wooden, old fashioned looking ships are really currently in use. We couldn’t believe what routes they operate on – they cover the distance from Dubai to India or Pakistan! It’s not just sailing somewhere close, to some neighboring port, it’s a huge distance, hundreds of kilometers. And it’s a standard way to deliver all the goods from clothes to vacuum cleaners or big fridges! All the merchandise is right in front of boats so it’s easy to see what they just have brought or what they will now be loaded with.

There are so many ships that they ocuppy whole coast and almost reach the abra station so coming by abra there is no option to miss them.

And as a contrast of the traditional and new we will finish with famous air-conditioned bus stops in Bur Dubai. They are present all over the city but here are a kind of reminder that Dubai is first of all a modern, progresive and innovative city.

US have baseball, Europe has footbal, Canada – hockey, Pakistan – cricket and UEA have camel racing. Although they supprt football or basketball like the rest of the world, they also keep alive their local traditions of camel racing or falconry.

This tradition of camel races dates back to the times when Bedouins used those animals mostly as means of transport and from time to time arranged races to amuse themselves. Later on the races were organised only to celebrate some important events. Re-popularisation of the races started in the 60. of 19th century and since then they have grown to the level of national sports in all Arabic peninsula countries.There are many controversies connected with this sport. The first one, obvious, is possible animals abuse. The other one, gaining much more attention, reffers to human abuse. Camel owners were accused of employing little chidren, illigaly brought  for example from India. It was important that the jockey was of light weight what let the camel run faster, therefore children of little age were engaged (4, 5 years), often malnourished. There were reported some deaths of little children kicked by camels or even killed by their rivals. Thankfuly in this field human rights organisations have won the battle and human jockeys were replaced by little robots. So now the jockey does not have to be petite any more because he doesn’t mount a camel but a pickup going parallel to the track! They remotedly control their camels from the cars. Along the camel track there goes a street which allows the jockeys drive right next to their animals throughout the whole race.

We visited the largest race track around – Dubai Camel Racing Track. It covers huge area and has several tracks, each with stands for spectators. Schedule of the races is very hard to be found and even if one finds something on the Internet it might not be up to date.
Right next to the tracks area there are many camel stables located and during the day there are processions marching back and forth to the tracks to train the animals. Human trainers take the camels to the tracks and mount them 3-kilo robots or train them without anything.

We also visited those stables to show Ola the camels up close. The animals seemed to be more interested in her than she was in them!

Usually we avoid such attractions as circuses and others using animals for peoples entertainment but this time we made an exception. We just hope the animals there are well taken care of as the best of them are worth thousands or even millions of dollars.

So the time has come. Afraid of heights mom and dad decided to take their daughter to the tallest building in the world – Burj Khalifa. It’s 829 meters high building opened in 2010. It was built within 5 years and is a part of the biggest conception which covers also 3 hectars of parks, 9 hotels, 19 residential buildings, the Dubai Mall (the biggest mall in the world in terms of tota area) and 12-hectare artificial lake.

The lake is equipped in the fountain which shoots water for 150 metres up, it’s as high as 50-storey building! Every afternoon and evening the fountain gives its show dancing to different types of music. Five circles of different sizes and two arcs perform the program which each time gathers crowds of people by the lake. The show is accompanied by 6600 lights, which beam is allegedly seen from over 30 km.

The building broke the number of world records: the number of floors – it has 163 of them, the highiest outdoor observation deck – here it is at 555 meters, world’s highest occupied floor – 584.5 m, elevator with the longest distance and many others. It houses residential apartments, hotel, corporate suits, fitness centers, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, restaurants and observation decks.
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Burj Khalifa was visited by almost 1,87 milion people in 2013. 50% of them were foreign tourists (with the highiest number of Germans).

The building is perfet in every way. So is the procedure of visiting it, there is no long waiting in the queue lines. First step is to buy the ticket, necesarily online, because on site you will only find the information that the tickets are sold out.

Tickets prices are from 125 to 500 AED, depending on the time and floor visited. They are sold for certain time but full choice of tickets is avaliable only a month in advance.

At the begining of our visit we had to leave all the stroller in the cloakroom and we faced the necessity of carying Ola for the next hour or two. The line to the elevators looked long but it took us no more than 10 minutes to get to the elevator. The elevator itself is interesting. It already starts the show and builds the atmosphere. We don’t know how fast it is but it took us to 125th level way faster than we expected. And the view from the top is breathtaking. All the builidngs that seemed high from the ground now we see from above. First we saw the artificial lake, The Dubai Mall, that big intersection where we almost got lost, and by the good weather we would probably have see The World Islands.

The observation deck is not on the last floor. There are couple floors above. Specificly 38! From the terrace  the very top of the building is barely visible.

The line to the exit was longer than the one downstairs but went even faster and in few minutes we were on the ground level. Of course through the gift shop. The experience was really amazing, view from the top is awesome. We saw the limits of the city and experienced the results of humans breaking their limits in pursuit to higher, further and better.

There is one more interesting thing – window cleaning. The building has 120 000 square meters of glass to be washed. To cope with that surface they designed and built an automatic system hidden in buildings facade. However the very top of the building is still cleaned by people traditionally secured by the ropes. The key fact is that using all the systems for cleaning it will take 3 to 4 months to clean all the facade!

The construction did not go without controversies  – mostly refering to working and housing condition of low-paid workers from Eastern and Southern India. Apparently this is the common in this area way to build their own success – using low-paid imigrants. However it seems that such rich region of the world at least salaries for employees should not be a problem.

1. The mosque opening our rank is definitely the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi. It is the largest mosque in the Emirates (8th in the world) and it really is impressive. When we saw it for the first time from the road we said at the same time „Look at that!”. Indeed it’s huge. 40 000 people can pray there at one time! And at the same time it is an architectural masterpiece.
   [photosetgrid layout=”5″] [/photosetgrid]Opened in 2007 combines different rich Islamic styles from around the world. It is all covered with white Macedonian marble on the oustde, which beautifully contrasts with always blue sky of Abu Dhabi. Imagine only that there are 82 domes in whole construction. Some bigger, some smaller and the biggest one right above main prayer hall. There are 4 mianerts on every corner of the courtyard, each over 100 meters high. The courtyard measures 17 000 square meters and is all coated with mosaic of different color marbles.Main prayers hall is covered with a hand-made carpet of 5700 square meters which production took 2 years. 1200 people took part in this process. We had a chance to feel its softness because of course inside the mosque we went barefoot. What is important – tourists are not allowed to sit on it. All the mosque’s interior is decorated in soft colors, all the decorations are kept in the same tones. Domes from the inside are decorated with Morrocan artwork, right under them there are golden verses from the Holy Quran. In the foyers and main hall prayers will find seven huge chandeliers hangig right above their heads. Materials used to their manufacturing are Svarovsky’s crystals and gilded stainless steel and brass. The biggest one weighs around 12 tones! Useful advice: before visting the mosque make sure that it’s not friday morining because it’s the time eclusively for prayers and they don’t open until 4:30 pm. Other days they are open from 9 am until 10 pm. Free guided tours are available and take up to one hour. Visiting the mosque requires from tourists respecting basic muslim rules of modest clothes. Wrongly dressed? By the entrance they offer free of charge traditional arabic clothes for men and women. Mosque’s interior is of course air-conditioned.
2. Jumeirah mosque – located by Jumeirah road, Dubai. Another big and interesting temple. Of course it’s way smaller and not as impressive as the Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi but still wort attention. It is said to be the most photographed mosque in Dubai. Opened in 1975 is prepared to receive around 1200 believers. It has two minarets and although built of modern materials, in its apperance it refers to the style of Fatimid dynasty ruling north Africa in 10-12th centuries. [photosetgrid layout=”5″]
   
   [/photosetgrid]It’s one of the 3 mosques in Emirates that let non-muslims inside – it takes part in the Sheikh Mohammed’s, its founder, „Open doors. Open minds” program. Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday in the mornings there are tours available at 10:00. Some sources say that children until 5 are not allowed inside but we didn’t have a chance to check since we arrived there only in the evening.
3. Iranian mosque in Dubai – this is a fabulous mosque, completely different than the other mosques in Dubai. It’s built in persian style, covered with green-blue mosaic with floral motifs. Now it’s decorated with UAE flagues which in our opinion a little spoil the view of the facade.

   [photosetgrid layout=”43″][/photosetgrid]Internet is full of different information about this mosque  but we cannot help feeling that they refer to some other mosque. That includes the directions as well. The one that you see on above pictures is located in Bur Dubai right in the back of Bur Dubai souq.

4. Grand Mosque in Dubai – it’s located in Bur Dubai area just next to the oldest building in Dubai – Al Fahidi fort (1787). The mosque was originally built in 1900 but the building we are seeing today is just a copy of original one which was demolished. It has only one minaret but it is 70-meters high. Roof is covered with 54 different sizes domes what is barely visible from the street. Building is rather simple, with not too many decorations. Only right above the main entrance there is some brown ornament on white background. It has the capacity of more than 1000 people. Non-muslims are not allowed to visit.

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