So "this morning" we met in the lobby at 9am to go for our first of two days of organized activities. We had about 10 choices when we registered for the conference, so we opted to go to Yas Marina Circuit for racing Go-Karts. Yas Marina is located in Abu Dhabi, about an hour away from Dubai.
Along the way I spoke with our guide, Erica, who is originally from Mexico. Her husband is a Captain with Emirates airline and she has two children in high school. Most of the people here are ex-pats. There are approx 2.5M people in Dubai and there are only 950,000 Emirati in all of the UAE, which has 7 Emirates, Dubai and Abu Dhabi being two of them. Here only the Emirati get their schooling for free, high school is the equivalent of about $20,000 Cad per year per child. Emirates Airlines pays for 80% of the school fees, so she said they are a good employer - also, like the hotels, they provide room and board in a community complex for the employees. Even our limo driver the other day, he earns about $1500 a month salary plus tips he receives and is provided an apartment or shared room as part of his employment. Some interesting driving facts we learned from him:
- seat belts are mandatory. If you get caught without a seatbelt it is a 3,000 dirham fine ($900 approx) and you lose your vehicle license for 1 month (or you can pay an additional 3,000 dirham to get the car back after 2 days).
- if you get caught running a red light it's a 2,000 dirham fine plus a 3,000 dirham fine for something else and then if you lose the car for a month and it's 3,000 dirham if you want the car back in 2 days.
- you get a certain number of driving points every year and they renew the following year. If you run out of points you can't drive anymore until your points renew (unless you buy someone else's points!)
Some other interesting facts we learned along the way...in Dubai there is a Free Zone, where you can start a business and have an office or location without having to have an Emirati sponsor. If you are operating outside of that free zone (like have a secondary location, etc) then the business would have to be sponsored by an Emirati citizen and give up or "share" 51% of their profits to that sponsor. For instance, the Cultural Advisor who we spoke with a few days ago said he was a businessman and had started 40 different companies. I now suspect he sponsored 40 different companies and is receiving 51% of the profits of each as the Emirati sponsor while doing very little himself!
When oil was discovered in Dubai the Sheikh invested a lot of money into infrastructure, free health care (I think for everyone) and made education free for the Emirati people so that they could be educated. Everyone loves the current Sheikh, Sheikh Mohammad, and his father, who they call the Father of Dubai and who many we met referred to as a visionary man as he was the one to have the vision to bring tourism and build up Dubai and as mentioned created the sponsor 'scheme'. Essentially between father and son, they built Dubai from a desert wasteland into what it is now in only 25 years.
Being Sheikh passes down from father to the oldest son, and if there are no sons to the oldest daughter. However, their are exceptions, the next in line to be Sheikh of Dubai is the second born son of Sheikh Mohammad. The first born son is the Crown Prince, but he is not business minded or forward thinking and so he has been bypassed in favour of the second son, who will be his fathers predecessor. Sheikh Mohammad has two wives, and two children by the second wife, who is not Emirati but is a Princess from Jordan. I asked if all children are seen as equal, even though his second wife is not Emirati, and they are, because their father is Emirati. A woman who would want to marry a foreigner (not Emirati) would be disowned, stripped of any wealth (any businesses she has sponsored) and therefore it does not happen. And also, every woman wears the Hijabi who is Emirati, it is not mandatory but it is mandatory.
Anyway, we arrived at the racing circuit and the first thing we did was a pit challenge. We had to change a race tire and see how quickly we could do it as a team of 3, one to unscrew the bolt and re screw it, one to remove the old tire and one to replace the new tire. A pit crew can do this in 2.2 seconds, our best was 5.4 sec.
After the pit challenge we went to an obstacle course that was set up in a wide open parking lot with cones. There were two courses set up as mirror images of one another and two Toyota Celicas and we did the course racing against one another. The cars were set up with a straight away and then a hard turn (left or right depending on what side of the course you were on), then you turned and came down another straight away and did an oval loop around some cones and then another hard turn and straight onto an area that was soaked in water, brake and drift (donuts) around a cone set up and then race to stop between four cones...and if you knocked over a single cone you were disqualified. It was so much fun. We each got two turns driving and each turn we did the course six times racing.
After the racing we were taken to another area to do the Go-Karting, we karted for 10 minutes and then we were SO hot that we didn't do the next 10 minute set. Jay won, he did the fastest time around the track.
Maurice (pronounced Morris) was second and Tony was third.
The guys got right into it, pretending to spray champagne.
After this we had a quick lunch and drove back to the hotel. We had about 2 hours before we had to be ready to leave to go to dinner at a Bedouin camp for dinner. If you wanted to do some dune bashing in 4x4s on the way we had to be in the lobby for 4pm (if you took the bus, 5pm). I left the pool area because I for sure wanted to take the SUV, Jay was going to take the bus but at the last minute joined me in the lobby to go in the truck.
It was about an hour to the desert and after 50 minutes I asked the driver if there was somewhere to use a washroom before we got there. He said he would ask the Lead Car as we were in a convoy of 6 SUVs, but the lead car said there was nowhere to stop as the only public washroom had a lineup they could see from the highway. So I asked how long we would be driving in the dunes before we arrived at the camp and he said about another hour. I would definitely need a washroom and I let him know. He said "when we arrive at our meeting spot there is a bush". I said "I'm good with a bush". So 15 minutes later we arrive at a meeting spot so that the drivers can deflate their tires, making them float more on the sand and I get out and start to trek over the dune to the bush that I can see the top of. As I get there I look back and the other 20 people are out of their SUVs and taking some photos and a group of six are walking towards my bush. So I have to cup my hands around my mouth and shout "I'm going to the bathroom..." The group of six get wide eyes and immediately vear off course and the rest of the group laughs. I quickly went from being the girl who volunteered to wear the Hijab to the girl who peed in the desert. All class.
The off roading was pretty tame, but a lot of fun!
This is the angle we were on sliding down a dune at one point. I have some good video, but it's hard to capture in a photo (and Jay had the camera, so didn't get a great shot).
We saw a few Arabian Orx, I'll add a photo later (on my ipad I only transferred a few to the iCloud to be able to finish up the blog on the airplane). And I got a few other nice desert photos out the back window.
Falcons are a big part of the Emirati history as they all were bedouins and relied on falcons to hunt for meat in the desert. If you had a falcon it was a symbol of wealth because you could provide meat for your family. Now falcons are protected, but because they were decimating a small bird population they are no longer allowed to hunt in Dubai if they are not wild birds and they cost anywhere from $8,000 to $750,000 USD to purchase for competition.
After sunset we took the SUVs down to the camp set up for dinner.
They had fire dancers, a belly dancer, two women doing henna tattoos and two women doing palm readings. The palm reader I went to said I will have a long, healthy life, that I will have grandchildren...then she leaned close to me and asked me if I had been with a married man. I said no, she looked again and asked if I was sure...yes, pretty sure...she looked again and asked 'even one time?"...um, no. And then she said - well, maybe he didn't tell you. So bizarre. She said I like to travel, that my husbands business is going well and that money was good, that he loves me very much but loved someone before me and said my business had been slow but was picking up and would be good for the rest of the year. Interesting and somewhat creepy.
I had a henna tattoo done on my hand and my foot.
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