Wednesday, December 21, 2016

November 7th: Goodbye Nealleys, Hello Hotel

Mark and I finished packing up after breakfast the next morning, said goodbye to Megan and their dog, Rupert, and hopped in the car so Marcus could give us a ride to our next stop. Our time with them may have been over, but we still had a little more time in Dubai!

When we were planning the trip, Marcus had suggested spending at least a couple nights in a five-star hotel since there were so many great ones to choose from. We decided to spend our last two night at The Palace Downtown. Marcus dropped us off, we said goodbye, and Mark and I made our way to reception to check in. It took them a few minutes to find our reservation, but who would really complain about having to stand around a gorgeous lobby for an extra ten minutes? The guy who checked us in said that he needed to make it up to us, though, so he upgraded us for free. I didn't know what to expect, but apparently that meant... 

...we now had this view from our balcony.

Works for me!   :)

We also now had a little mini kitchen area, a giant living/dining room area, a balcony with chairs and a little table, and a giant bedroom and bathroom suite. It was crazy. We hung out in the room for a little while, marveled at how ridiculously nice everything was, then eventually left to do a little exploring.

This view was only a couple minute walk from our room. I had to take a panorama with my phone to fit the entire Burj Khalifa in the picture!

The Dubai Mall was only a short walk from the hotel, so we made our way through a bunch of fancy souks and eventually found the mall. It was impressive.

There was even an aquarium. We wandered through a bunch of fancy designer stores; pretty much any big name designer you could think of had a giant store.

This fountain was pretty crazy. The mall was like a giant maze and had multiple levels; every time we thought we had just about seen everything we'd find a section we had missed.

We decided to take a break from wandering for some tea and scones. This place was awesome; their tea menu was pages and pages of single-spaced type. It took almost ten minutes to pick our teas because there were so many options! We wound up getting a few packs to bring home, too.

After tea, we went back to wandering. At one point we found a dinosaur.

We also found the Fendi pop-up store, which was pretty neat because I always see pictures of these on Instagram. It was neat to actually see one in person!

After lots of hemming and hawing, I wound up treating myself to a tiny bag from Dolce & Gabbana. Happy early Birthday to me!   :)

After shopping til we actually almost dropped, we stopped in the room to drop off our bags and take a break. We didn't stay too long, though...there were other things to see!

Things like the fountain and light shows at the Burj Khalifa, as seen from Fai, the neat hotel bar.

After grabbing a drink at Fai, we grabbed some curry for dinner at Thiptara. It was delicious, and even better, we had a pretty sweet view.  :)

I actually liked the light show on the front of the building better than the fountains! It was set to some kind of creepy instrumental music and was really cool to watch. We stuffed our bellies with dinner, then made our way back to the room.

Turns out our balcony view was even better at night! I hadn't realized during the day that we could see the Burj Khalifa from the balcony, and we could see part of the fountains, too.

I watched the light show again before heading to bed. Our next day would be our last full day in Dubai!

No comments:

Post a Comment