Today we caught the free shuttle bus to The Emirates Mall, there weren't any spaces left on the bus so we had to sit on some rickety fold out seats in between a German family who loved to talk! Just off the bus we spoke to a guy from our hotel, who we have come across a couple of times in the past 2 days; it turns out he is from New Zealand so he gave us some great tips on the best time of year to visit. The Emirates Mall was 3 storeys and about 450 different shops, plus restaurants, a cinema, an arcade, an indoor skiing slope and penguins! The first thing we saw when we travelled up the escalator was The Armani Cafe (is a normal cafe not good enough?).
After a quick browse round the mall we started to walk towards the Burj Al Arab, a distance that only looked a mile or so, but turned out to be 3 or 4! It took us an hour to walk to the building, luckily it was fairly overcast a lot of the time, and hey, we are going to end up with great thighs if we continue our year this way.
We then caught a taxi and had some brunch at a French cafe in the Marina, before heading to the beach for a couple of hours.
This evening we have been to the Ibn Battuta Mall (a little closer to our hotel) for some dinner and a look around. The Mall was cleverly separated into 5 sections: China, Persia, Tunisia, Egypt and India. The different areas were beautifully set out as if you were in the country it was named after, decorated to duplicate a street experience. My favourite was India because they had an enormous elephant statue on display, it was stunning.
Tomorrow we plan to visit The Dubai Mall and the dancing fountains, we fly from Dubai to Bangkok at 11:30pm.