Like our way over, we aimed to avoid excessive jetlag by breaking up our return journey with a 2 night/3 day stop over in Dubai. It was all good in principle, although in practice, we still had almost a week of interrupted and sleepless nights in Australia. Nevertheless, a longer stopover meant we had more opportunity to explore what Dubai had to offer.
After an early arrival and a catch-up morning nap in the hotel, we took a taxi to Jumeirah Beach, one of the few public beaches in this sea-side city. The taxi ride itself was an experience – not as bad as some countries I’ve been to (I’m looking at you Egypt and China) but still not for the faint-hearted. They drive incredibly fast in the UAE and coupled with what felt like a lack of driver courtesy, you wonder what would happen if a car suddenly pulled out in front of you while you were at speed. In saying that, there were no near misses, and we survived unscathed. Perhaps we just needed to get used to it.
Jumeirah Beach is apparently the most popular of Dubai’s public beaches. We were expecting crowded white sand and plenty of people splashing about. However, as it was blowing a moderate gale, the beach was mostly closed with incredibly choppy surf. Only a couple of people were brave/crazy enough to be in the water.
The only people on the sand were tourists taking selfies. We were even forced to wear jumpers as the wind was biting, bringing the temperature well-below the predicted 21 degrees of the day. We lasted long enough to take a few photos of the Burj al Arab and collect a few shells and then we high-tailed it to the park across the road, where the kids burnt off some energy doing typical kids’ stuff in the playground.
Dubai certainly has a wealth of options to tempt you during a stopover. But as mentioned in Part 1, most of these will put a dent in your wallet, especially with a family of 5. There are many theme parks on offer including Legoland, Motiongate, Wild Wadi Water Park, Bollywood Park and further afield in Abu Dhabi, Ferrari World. We decided that on this stopover we would splurge on one theme park but with entry costs at most being over $100au per person, and many height restrictions on rides, we wanted to choose our park carefully.
Because of the heights of our children, we decided on a family favourite Kidzania – the theme park where kids work for a living. We had visited one before in Tokyo and were keen to see how this UAE one stacked up.
The theme park is a model city with streets full of businesses offering children all manner of jobs to do. There’s a bank, supermarket, hotel, mechanics, hospital, radio station, TV studio, manufacturing plant and that is just scraping the surface. Kids go inside each establishment and staff show them what is required in the job. Parents are strictly forbidden and must wait outside. When they’ve finished their job (usually about 10 minutes later), they get paid in Kidzos. Wages differ depending on the difficulty of the job. With their earnings they can buy food, toys or a drivers’ license and hire a car to drive around a race-track.
Some of the jobs happen on the business’s premises but other require you to move around the town. For example, as a firefighter, the kids don uniforms and a helmet, slide down a firefighters’ slide, run out to a waiting fire engine, drive through the streets to a ‘burning’ building (lots of smoke and pretend flames) and then extinguish it using fixed hoses directed at the fire.
Paramedics do something similar with the ambulance finding a sick adult employee somewhere on the streets that the kids administer first aid to.
As it was not school holidays or a weekend, the place was very quiet. Save for a few school groups who left early afternoon, we really had the place to ourselves and staff were vying for our attention. Because of this, our kids tried their hands at a huge number of jobs, much more than in Tokyo. Some of their favourites were pilot, firefighter, courier, radio DJ and paramedic but they enjoyed everything they tried.
Some people might say Kidzania indoctrinates branding in kids from a young age (most employers are real business like McDonalds, that sponsor Kidzania in return for a spot in the city) but I see the positives – a chance to try a real job, with real employers. I think it adds extra depth to role-playing that children do naturally anyway.
Dubai has all manner of unusual or awe-inspiring buildings. In fact, they are in the process of building a tower taller than the Burj Khalifa, due to open in 2020.
Before leaving on our final day, we headed to Dubai’s newest structure – the Dubai Frame. Only opening at the beginning of 2018, the building is literally a giant picture frame, designed to frame on one side the modern aspects of Dubai and the other, the traditional. Unfortunately, it is notoriously difficult to photograph for this purpose as there is limited space around it to shoot it without a wide-angle lens.
However, the views from the top are worth the effort to get there (it’s not really near a metro) and visiting was a fitting end to our time in Dubai.
Knights' Adventures 