We're here!

WE'RE HERE!  WE'RE HERE!

After 9,114 miles and 31 hours of traveling from Denver to Dubai, we're finally here!  

Here's a recap of our first sleepy days...

 

Believe it or not, it was really challenging to get all of our things crammed into these bags.  When you're used to having everything you own with you, it's hard to decide what to take and what to leave, and since this is only my second year out of Texas, I wanted to take things that reminded me of home like bulky photo albums and my favorite books...probably not the smartest choices.  I think we each packed and repacked our bags four times, and we still had to rearrange some things in the airport to get them under the 50 lb limit. Gah, moving across the world is stressful! :)

        Somewhere in the Middle East,        
          we're guessing Iraq or Iran.  EEK!         

Despite it being the longest flight I've ever been on, it actually wasn't that bad.  My two favorite things about the flight: Casey and I got our very own row with extra leg room, no stinky neighbors and no one behind us to kick our seats, and there was free TV.  I finally got to watch the movie I've been waiting to see for months.

Here's a hint...

 

  (totally stole that from Pinterest)

I also watched a few episodes of Glee and How I Met Your Mother and
The Five Year Engagement, which was cute.

Casey and I didn't figure out where we were staying until the day before we left.  Casey's brother has a friend who very generously offered to let us stay with him from August 27th until we get our housing allowance (which should be a week or two after that), but he's in Canada until then so we had to find something until he gets home.  After looking around Kayak and Trip Advisor, we chose the Ramada Jumeirah, and it is SO nice!  Who knew a Ramada could be so luxurious?!  For only $80 a night, it has the nicest staff, a real gym (not one of those dinky hotel gyms), a rooftop pool, spas for men and women, delicious restaurants, and, most importantly to us, a super comfy bed.

We even have our very own bidet!

   Casey's pumped!  

It's pretty much the best place for us to get used to the new time schedule, which, for us, means sleeping a lot.  We keep setting our alarms for noon, but somehow we're not getting up until 4:00 or 5:00... eh, we'll catch up eventually, right?          

Between naps, we've eaten at a couple of the restaurants in our hotel.
The first one had iPad menus...

 

Casey ordering sushi

After two days of literally sleeping all day, we finally ventured out of the hotel the third day.  Exploring the Dubai Mall was pretty much all we could do because we didn't leave until around 10 pm - things stay open incredibly late here!  The mall is freaking enormous and literally has every store you could ever imagine, and then 100 more.  I'm extra pumped about Sephora because that means I can easily get my favorite lotion and makeup.  The mall is completely amazing and beautiful and blew all of our expectations out of the water.  We didn't want to be loser tourists, so we only took a few photos with Casey's phone.

This is a mall, people!  A mall!

It's SO beautiful!

 Best part of my day!  Pinkberry in Dubai!
And Casey thought his frozen yogurt days were over...

When we finally left at 1:00 in the morning (!), we followed the taxi signs down, down stairs to this amazing set up.  It's the most efficient line of taxis I've ever seen.  They just kept going on and on and on and on.  They had people directing taxis and others directing people, and we were in our very own taxi in less than 60 seconds!  Brilliant!

Welp, that's it so far.  I know this isn't the most exciting post ever, but hopefully we'll join the rest of society this weekend and experience Dubai during the daylight so we have something interesting to show you.