My trip off base to Abu Dhabi
Posted Thursday, March 23, 2006, 1:19 AM, CST by Hank | Never got lost driving down there, it was pretty easy. We started in the morning and got there in about 40 minutes. We went to the Marina Mall first and grabbed some coffee at Starbucks while we waited for the stores in the mall to open...it was mostly all nice clothing stores (boring). . We took some picks of a huge hotel near there that looked like a palace. After that we decided to go to the Purple Diamond Mall because we heard that was where the good gift shops were. Stopped in there and found two decent gift shops. Nothing super impressive, but they did had a cool framed insect display showing a huge centipede, a scorpion and a camel spider. We didn't buy anything at that point and decided to go eat. We had lunch at a buffet restaurant in the Rainbow Resort Hotel nearby. It was supposed to be a huge section of Chinese, and Arabian foods but it was a small, mostly Chinese buffet/salad bar. Tried a few things, (some breaded chicken, lamb shish-kabobs, garlic shrimp and rice and a salad). It was ok, but not all that great. From there we went back to the gift shop, but it was closed...found out it was going to open again later on so we needed to kill some time. We drove around and found a cool place to hang out for a while called the Desert Castle. It was a really fancy three-story restaurant made of brown granite. They had hookahs (like the caterpiller in Alice in Wonderland used) you could smoke at your table (but we didn't get one). I had a cappuccino. From there we went back to the gift shop and bought a bunch of stuff for the wife and kids and my mom. Then we left and ended up getting back at about 7:10PM. I posted the few pictures I took--Saffarini took some with his camera. I'll them post later when I get a chance.
We are going to the gold and electronics shopping area next month. Should be fun. | |