Our second day in Dubai was really jam packed with #ALLTHETHINGS! If you missed Day One, read that first!
DAY TWO
Day two was filled with running around trying to see as much of the city as possible during our only full day in Dubai! We started off the morning by going to Jumeirah Beach which is DEFINITELY worth staying near if you go to visit! I picked up a couple of seashells before we headed over to the Jumeirah Beach Residence area and the marina. The marina is super nice with yachts dotting the water in between skyscrapers that’ll make you stare at them forever in awe. The architecture in Dubai is no joke!
We then drove to Palm Jumeirah which is an entirely man-made island and filled with villas that are more expensive than I can probably imagine. We got to Atlantis, walked around there a bit on the ocean side and then took the monorail for a round trip a little above. Definitely think you could skip the monorail and if you want to see the actual shape of the island itself, you’ll have to helicopter. But it was cool to drive around the island, see the palms and the super nice hotels dotting the entire area and super blue water in between. After the Palm, we went to Madinat Jumeirah which was probably one of my favorite places around Dubai and walked through the citadel, the restaurants and watched the dhow boats that run through the creek that flows through the entire place. The entire thing is also on a man-made island that’s next to Burj Al Arab, the sailboat looking building you probably recognize. Apparently, almost half of Dubai is actually on top of man-made land which is crazy!! Something random that I loved is that they burn an incense of sort called Agarwood in a lot of the areas around the city that smells super nice. For lunch, we stopped at another Turkish place called O’Donner at La Mer which was great!
After our pit stop to fuel up, we drove to the other end of the city, stopping by the Burj Al Arab Jumeirah which was a great beach to see the famous Gold Souk. The Gold Souk seemed like a mini alley straight out of India, except all the storefronts were filled with HUGE necklaces made of gold! You can find all sorts of merchants here selling both authentic gold (they’ll provide a certificate of proof), gold plated jewelry and even knock offs (of which sellers have to tell you the truth about or else they’ll get in trouble with the government). We wandered around for a little bit but definitely didn’t end up buying anything haha. After that we made a quick trip out to the Spice Souk where my mom DID pick up a sampling packet of spices 🙂
Our evening was spent at the Burj Khalifa so we essentially saved the best for last! We got tickets to go up to the 124th and 125th floors right before sunset so we could watch the city go from golden hour to lighting up in the dark at night! Unfortunately we got a rather hazy day so we weren’t able to see the Palm Jumeirah from up top, but it was still crazy cool to be that high up above the city and literally ON TOP of the world! My dad and mom did this additional VR game where you climb up the Burj and parachute down and it was funny to see them playing! We walked up to the 125th floor to take in the views and spent probably an hour just wandering around taking in the panoramic views & sitting next to the glass peering down at the city!
We had dinner at a cute little restaurant at the foot of the Burj called Bread & Spice and caught 3 different fountain shows that were INCREDIBLE!! I definitely recommend eating along the area by the fountains for some of the best views of the show! We ended our day with a trip out to Global Village where there was a section for a ton of countries and was market style! Not sure entirely how WELL each country is represented after perusing through the America’s but it was fun getting to see the gate that had been built for each country for sure!
The next day we grabbed breakfast and flew out to India! Hope this recap of Dubai was somewhat fun to read and even slightly helpful for anyone that’s dreaming of visiting! Here’s some fun pictures I shot on my iPhone and edited in Adobe Lightroom!
If you enjoyed this post, you should binge read other travel posts!
