Day 17

Today we leave India for Dubai. Not without one more trip to Sunshine Alley, though. They had a few of the papier mache boxes that we hadn't bought, so we had to snap those up before we left. We also bought a small marble box. This one was a little more interesting than some because it had a knob on top of the lid, and some inlay in the top of the knob which is supposed to be fairly difficult. The trip to the airport was the typical horn-blowing, hair-raising event. I managed to get a shot of the leprosy clinic, but I missed the elephant in the road. I was on the wrong side of the bus. Those are the breaks, I guess. India is interesting because they love to stamp things. We had to have special tags on our carry-on luggage so they could stamp them. They don't do any extra inspections, they just stamp the tags. Then we went through security. We went through a metal detector, but I'm not sure why because they wand everyone that goes through. My sister said they create jobs and people do them whether they make sense or not. If someone has the job to stamp luggage tags, they stamp them for all they're worth. I guess that's a good work ethic. It really wasn't all that much more trouble, it was just kind of silly. It was a four and half hour flight to Dubai, and like most it went by pretty quickly. It's amazing to me. I thought I would be going nuts in the plane, but it's very comfortable and with my laptop plugged in to keep me entertained with these blog entries and going through pictures, the time just flies by.

We arrived at the Dubai airport and came into what appeared to be a cargo terminal. There were quite a few people going through passport control and Customs, though, so we weren't the only passenger plane to come through there. In fact, the line was so long they opened two more lines. Jan, Sam and I were too slow to get into the new lines, though, so we were among the last to be processed. After going through immigration we had to surrender our passports to John Thiede so they could do something with them. They did give us a copy to use for identification for shopping, etc. though. When we exited the terminal we got into four by fours to go into the desert for a falconry demonstration and dinner at a desert camp. It was almost an hour drive out to the desert, and almost as soon as we arrived, a sand storm blew in. We took a couple of pictures with a Bedouin and a camel, and ran back to the car. They started driving us into the desert, and it was fun for the first few minutes, but then it was boring and then we started getting queasy. Sam was particularly suffering. It turned out they were killing time to see if the sand storm would abate, but it didn't. They finally decided that we would just go to the hotel, so we left the desert conservation area (apparently they conserve the desert by driving around on it), and headed back to town. It was a long drive back to town, and then we were stuck in a terrible traffic jam. All told, we were in the car over three hours with very little break. Not a happy start to our visit to Dubai. TCS checked us in and told us we could get dinner in the hotel at the buffet restaurant. We went up to our room and debated getting room service, but the lady who answered said they were too busy and had to call us back. She didn't even take our room number, which we didn't take as a good sign that we were going to get any food, so we just went down to the restaurant. The food was good, but not great, and certainly plentiful. After eating, we went upstairs to wash the sand out of our clothes and our bodies. The tub was very sandy after we finished. Hopefully, tomorrow will be a better day.