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| The End! |
We learned a little bit on our tour this morning of Abu
Dhabi. Although, some of the “factoids”
have not been validated, so don’t hold us to them. Abu Dhabi (AD), is actually an island, which
means “place of the gazelles”, because on this island in the salt water, they
found gazelles, which normally are found in fresh water areas (of the
desert). The Emirate AD is comprised of
over 200 islands. Apparently, most
souvenir shops sell Dubai trinkets, even in Abu Dhabi.
United Arab Emirates was founded only 46 years ago, in 1971,
on December 2nd. Also, November 30th is “Martyr's Day”, so they have a 5 day weekend coming up. There were no hospitals or
even schools until sometime in the 60s.
It wasn’t until the 70s that they had electricity. Even today, they only have some 250 km of
highways. So, in the last 50 years, they
have come a VERY long way. And it sort
of seems like that, since they are on a never ending quest for “-est”—largest,
tallest, this-est, that-est. They have a
thirst for all things that go into the Guinness Book of World Records. Perhaps that explains why, already having the
tallest building in the world, they are building one significantly taller? They have the world’s highest sky bridge
(between two buildings), and it is over 600 feet up. And frankly, they have two of the world’s
fastest growing airlines, but we won’t go there.
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| The Grand Mosque |
Our first stop on the tour was the Grand Mosque. It is the third biggest mosque in the world,
following the one in Mecca and Medina (both in Saudi Arabia). This mosque is built out of pure white
marble from Greece, and huge pillars of polished white marble with
semi-precious stones inset. It has the
biggest chandelier in the world, with over 40 million Swarovski crystals, and
plated in 24 carat gold (although she said repeatedly “galvanized in gold”,
which I thought was odd). Then it has
the biggest knotted carpet in the world, like 15,000 sq ft or something. It was certainly beautiful. We had read bits on line about how bad the
security guards were. I did not get any
sense of that, but Theresa said every time she walked past one of their
stations, she was eyed up and down to ensure her dress was compliant.
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| The Front. |
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| One of the "halls" |
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| The outside (overflow) prayer area...if they exceed the 25,000 capacity inside. |
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| Semi-precious stones inset into white marble. |
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| To me, this looks like an "artist's rendering"..but it's real! |
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| Flowers to represent paradise. |
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| The biggest chandelier in the world. |
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The gold in the back represents "flowing honey" in Paradise.
The wooden pulpit is for the Imam to read the holy text. |
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| The main prayer hall from one side. |
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| One of several self opening glass doors. |
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| Since "National Day" was coming up, they had military displays preparing. |
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| A traditional tent for meetings and civic duties. |
After the mosque, we visited a cultural heritage center,
which had the domestic houses from around the country. Built with everything from camel hair to
straw, and even a version using rocks (for the areas that had mountains), it
was easy to imagine how simply they lived.
We had a couple of photo stops and then back to the
dock. We did some shopping in the cruise
terminal, but did not buy much. Coming
back to the ship, we got some lunch and took a nap. We woke up just in time for the last two
afternoon trivia. For the general
knowledge…it was not our finest hour.
But then came the music trivia.
Oh how badly we usually do on those, but…this was 80s Rock!! I was rockin’ it!!! Got the 10 in a row!! But two teams got all 15, so our score of 12
wasn’t impressive.
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| The slowest mower in the world!! |
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| A bigger version of "Atlantis Resort". |
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| What the Royal palace might look like if we were allowed to photograph it! |
We packed in just about an hour, then had our final dinner
and dessert. It was a very nice closing
of the cruise.
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