Heute mal 'nen ruhigen

October 13th 2016

Early morning — yesterday

Jan wakes up without outside interference today, meanwhile a discussion about Van Gogh is taking place in the kitchen.
The "good morning" from our host appears to have a slight ironic undertone. Might be because it's technically already the afternoon and we are still sitting on our beds sleepily. Anyway, we don't care — today's mantra is Heute mal 'nen ruhigen - we're having a chill day today. So, after our traditional breakfast in the nearby mall, we head straight to the beach.
It takes us almost an hour with the metro and Dubai's only streetcar — past the Nassima Royal and other hotels.
As everywhere else in the city, the skyline here is huge — on our way to the coast skyscrapers line the streets to either side and we feel a bit like in Inception.

The water at Jumeirah Beach is as turquoise as it is warm — so much for cooling down, but at least you can just stay in the water indefinitely. Most of the beach infrastructure is provided by German companies, the towels here proudly read "Pure Freude am Wasser" (~ the pure joy of water) and even the toilets advertise "German Engineering". For lunch we have a supermarket-shopped freestyle buffet that does feel reasonably authentic.

The sunset is pretty, and after it gets dark it's almost even a bit chilly — or maybe we are just getting used to the heat.
Chilly might be a slight exaggeration — we put on a T-Shirt...

Into the desert

Around afternoon (so just after breakfast) we are picked up in front of a McDonald's by some Arab guy showing us a photo of ourselves on his phone — yeah, that's us.
The radio in our only slightly sketchy van blasts Arabic Fusion (80% Arabic, 20% Dubstep), apart from us there is a small group of Filipinos behind us and two people we assume are visiting from India.
At the edge of the desert we change into some Jeeps and drive (in anything but a straight line, we never stray more than 1km from the highway) to the camp. Through dunes, above dunes, down dunes — we are well shaken through, waves of sand splash up to either side of the Jeep, and Jan (almost) gets sick.
Once we arrive at the camp, the quad driving advertised in the brochure turns out to be rather unspectacular — a few quads going in circles on a small plane — bumper cars in the desert, minus the bumping.

After looking around for a bit, I decide to try riding an old snowboard down one of the dunes. Jan's comment as he starts filming me: "Dude, you're gonna bite sand so hard." I didn't, though.

After the sun sets, the evening entertainment begins — a mediocre belly dance performance is by far surpassed by an apparently traditional Arabic dance consisting mainly of the dancer spinning in circles for the entire act. Like, ten minutes or something. While the dancer rotates, he forms different shapes and figures with fabric-covered rings and the flying dress lights up — a worthwhile performance, either way.

Afterwards there's dinner and a fire show — pretty cool, too. And finally the Jeeps take us back to the van and on to the metro. It's just sad to see that the traces of human (and most likely especially tourists) consumption don't stop short of the desert: Even here we come across discarded shoes, empty cans, and the ever present plastic waste.

Dorm Life

One nice thing about this way of travelling is that we come in contact with a whole load of different people. Here are a few snippets:

Two young travellers ring on the door, from what I overhear they are taken to be French. Three minutes later they turn out to be Germans. From Nuremberg. Travelling the world for eight months. Why are you doing that? "Don't wanna go to uni" I see, I see...
We also learn that our Asian room-mate is from Hong Kong and will soon move on to Africa to be back home in December.
The fact that the Italian guy here is Italian is not much of a secret, as he consistently and exclusively speaks Italian with everyone. We weren't able to uncover any more details so far.
The Russian man I already mentioned shows us some photos from the viewing platform at the Burj Khalifa.
The friendly man at the supermarket keeping our backpacks for us while we shop collects coins and bills from all over the world. He has a 5 Cent piece and a 5 Euro note already and inspects our leftover German money with great interest.
This morning we also meet someone from Singapore at the bus stop returning home after a long trip through Europe.
On our way back from the desert camp we get to talk to Juanie (pronounced Wanie — or something like that), a young Filipina who wants to work abroad for a few years and supports President Duterte's drug policy (#funfact) — well, opinions differ. We ask her question #119 from our book: What would you like to spend more time on? Her answer, "travelling", is all too relatable.