Visiting Burj Khalifa

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.

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.