Friday Adventure

This is the entrance to the Gold Souk. I didn’t take any pictures inside. We were too busy trying to get out to stop and take pictures. As we approached, a man came up alongside us. “Sir, excuse sir, watches? good watches? Rolex….” and he had a really long spiel about the wares in a particular shop. After he ran out of watch brands, he started in on “handbags, Louis Viton …” etc. Then when we approached his shop he tried to steer us into it. This scenario played out several times. I stopped to look in a showcase window only once to see the actual wares and the salesman came to the door and beckoned us in. Too aggressive for me. Not how I like to shop. The prices on the rings that we were looking at were way out of our range. Of course, haggling is expected and that is only a starting price, but it would have taken a lot of haggling to get it to what we could afford. We will have to be much richer before going back to the Gold Souk.

We think this may have been the Old Souk. It was not open. It may just be closed all of Friday (holy day) or it may have openned after sunset. We wandered into the Spice Souk, too. They were not open for business, but we could smell the wares. Yum.
Next we walked down the waterfront of Dubai Creek. The boats are tied up 4-5 deep along the edge.
Along the creekside there are piles of goods to be loaded on the boats and shipped to India or other areas in the Persian Gulf.
Notice the sophisticated way the goods are secured to the boat with wooden pallets and various poles. Pretty amazing.
Here’s a shot of Paul, the goods piled along the creekside and the buildings along the street. A bit of a contrast between the piles of tires, boxes, etc. and the high rise hotels with a creek view.
Some of the goods looked more like garbage.
Then we came to a section where there are small boats that take people on tours of the creek (bay/inlet). The hawkers were out trying to encourage us to take a ride. It was a mild evening, only 100F, but we will wait for this until the weather improves.
Above is one of the tour boats. Below is the second section of goods waiting to be loaded onto boats. It seemed to go on forever.
As we were walking along this section I noticed an entire motor and transmission among the goods to be loaded. Maybe this is where it came from? This stripped and abandoned car is a very unusual sight.

Here is one of the painted camels. Notice the falcon motif. The falcon is to the UAE as the eagle is to the USA. There is a little boy standing under the camel, not a fifth leg.
You can probably guess why the we liked this camel.
Here is a building with the lighted holiday greeting “Ramadan Kareem” which is something like It’s Ramadan, be generous! You see this a lot in shopping malls.

We had another adventure on Saturday, but that’s a tale for another day.

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