Today is Friday. Of course, for us, that means it's the first day of our weekend. It's also the Muslim holy day (the Sunday of the Muslim world) which means lots of people are at home with their families (like Sundays used to be in the West years ago) WHICH MEANS... nice driving conditions. With this in mind, we tend to go for drives on Fridays. That said, we haven't really done anything much since coming back from the US due to the hot summer weather, but today we decided to head to Dubai Mall (the biggest in the world) for a spot of shopping and lunch at our favourite yum-cha restaurant "Ping-Pong Dim-sim". Also, in keeping with the randomness of the day, we decided to document the trip with Instagram pictures. Here are some:
Approaching the Dubai skyline (Burj Khalifa visible towering above the rest of the world)
Almost at the mall. Just one more left turn to go...
The mall, which is usually crammed full of people, was calm and peaceful at 10:30am!!
First thing, a morning coffee at Carribou while we study the mall map and plan our shopping (seriously, the mall is THAT big. You need to plan ahead)
There is one thing that Liz loves to do whenever we go to Dubai Mall, and that is get good quality macarons from Laduree (a super poncy French boutique shop). The first time we went in there, I felt a bit too common to be going in, but we've been a number of times now, and I no longer feel out of place there! haha. So today was no exception; Liz got four coffee flavoured macarons to eat as desert after lunch later on.
In the "souq" section of the mall
Finally, when lunch came around we headed down to the ground floor to have lunch in our new favourite yum-cha place, "Ping Pong Dim-Sim". It so happened that today was "Lazy Friday", which meant that we could pay a set price and order as much as we liked. It was AWESOME with a not just a capital "A", but capital EVERYTHING!! My favourite were the steamed BBQ chicken buns, and Liz's favourite was the prawn toast. We had golden oolong teas to go with. We ordered 12 dishes in total, I think...
After we left Dubai Mall, we headed over to Festival City (another shopping mall) to pop into Ace Hardware quickly. Then it was back on the road home to Al Ain.
The 1.5 hour drive gave Liz a chance to dig in and eat ALL of her macarons!
The closer we got to Al Ain, the more the wind was picking up, and here, that means the sand was blowing everywhere. However, by the time we reached Al Ain, the wind had largely died down, the sun was low int he sky and covered by a cloud. It was really pretty, so Liz snapped this picture:
Today was a great day. I love dim-sim.
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